(Yicai) Sept. 27 -- Alibaba Group Holding’s international e-commerce platform AliExpress and its courier unit Cainiao Smart Logistics Network have launched a five-day global delivery service in five overseas markets.

Consumers in the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and South Korea can now select ‘five-day delivery’ to get orders from China within five working days, the two companies said yesterday. The service will be rolled out to other markets in the future.

Beijing News said it is the industry’s first large-scale cross-border e-commerce express service. 

Internal tests showed that the first five overseas markets have great potential for cross-border e-commerce development, according to Yi Yun, general manager of AliExpress' logistics supply chain.

Five-day express shipments were piloted in South Korea over the past six months, with orders from the country at least doubling from a year earlier, AliExpress data showed.

Founded in 2013, Cainiao is the world's largest cross-border e-commerce courier, according to the listing prospectus it filed with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange yesterday. Its initial public offering could raise at least USD1 billion, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

AliExpress, China's biggest cross-border online marketplace, is the top e-commerce site in Russia and Spain, its website showed.

Editor: Martin Kadiev