Bridging the Last Mile in Global B2B Trade: Integrating E-Commerce Logistics Innovation into the Asset-Light Model for Vietnamese SME Supply Chain Integration

This paper develops and evaluates an integrated framework that transposes the operational logic of ecommerce last-mile delivery onto asset-light business-to-business (B2B) international trade in an emergingmarket setting. Last-mile delivery research has established that the final leg of order fulfillment issimultaneously the most expensive component of a logistics chain - commonly cited at 40 to over 50 percentof total shipping cost - and the primary determinant of customer experience, driving firms toward routeoptimization, micro-fulfillment networks, flexible partner ecosystems and sustainability-linked fleetstrategies. This literature has developed almost exclusively around business-to-consumer (B2C) parceldelivery within a single domestic market. A natural objection therefore arises: does last-mile theory applyat all to a multi-country, asset-light trading intermediary that never touches a parcel or a doorstep? Thispaper answers that objection directly. It shows, first, through a structured comparison of B2C and B2B lastmile logistics, that the two contexts share a common structural problem - centrally aggregated goods flowsmust be broken down, routed, and delivered to a fragmented set of endpoints under cost and time pressure- while differing in endpoint type, order scale, transport mode and failure-risk profile. Second, it shows thatinternational trade itself decomposes into a standardized, highly efficient ocean-freight middle mile flankedby two land-based, fragmented, and costly segments - an export-side first mile (aggregating dispersed farmsand cooperatives to port) and an import-side last mile (distributing consolidated cargo from a foreign portto fragmented domestic buyers) - so that a multi-country trading intermediary in fact manages a chain offirst-mile and last-mile problems repeated at each national endpoint. Using LAEXIM, a proposedVietnamese asset-light trading start-up spanning fertilizers, industrial chemicals, agricultural exports andpremium wine distribution, as the applied case, the paper builds a detailed operational mapping - outsourcedregional cross-docking hubs, AI-enabled lead-time and customs-risk management, freight- and inspectionpartner scorecarding and real-time client-facing shipment visibility - through which LAEXIM canorchestrate last-mile-quality outcomes at each national endpoint without owning a single truck, warehouseor vessel. It then re-derives LAEXIM's operating and financial model under this integrated framework,showing that disciplined application of last-mile-style optimization can plausibly compress logistics costfrom the model's original 6 to 8 percent of revenue target toward the lower end of that band, while shiftingLAEXIM's commercial positioning from port-to-port Incoterms (FOB/CIF) toward door-to-door deliveredterms (DAP/DDP) as a source of differentiation. The paper contributes to the literature by extending lastmile delivery theory beyond single-country B2C parcel logistics to multi-country B2B trade intermediationand by giving the resource-based view of asset-light trading firms a concrete, operationally testablelogistics-capability component.