Magazines Archives - 2009 December

Alibaba to take on India JV, as Taiwan welcomes Tao1shop.tw portal
Story 14 - Ecommerce

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is looking to conclude a joint venture in India
within a year, to provide B2B e-commerce services that cater to small- and mediumsized
enterprises (SMEs) in the country.

In an interview with the media, David Wei, CEO and executive director for Alibaba.com, the company’s main online portal, said the joint venture will help Indian businesses to trade “domestically and export to China”, apart from helping exporters from India sell their products to the rest of the world.

“To facilitate trade, we will help the joint venture build an online payment function,” Wei added.

He noted that more than 40,000 Indian SMEs are joining the portal every month, with its Indian membership having doubled from 500,000 in May 2008, to more than a million members by the end of May this year.

“India now accounts for 11% of all registered users on Alibaba. com’s international marketplace,” Wei Global payments provider Visa Inc has unveiled the Visa IntelliLink Spend Management, a new information tool to provide reporting and expense management solutions to card issuers, as it looks to replace its existing Visa information and source management tools with a single scaleable platform.

Together with its UK-based partner, Spendvision, the solution can be integrated with Visa’s B2B payment products, said the company.

“Effective expense management requires flexible, intuitive, on-demand access to information to support a stronger understanding of spend patterns, increased control over spending and greater insights
that help companies save time and money,” added, commending their partnership with
the group’s current local partner, Infomedia 18.

However, he pointed out that infrastructure is the biggest problem they have encountered in the
country. “The broadband penetration in India is very low compared to the US and China,” he said. Yet, the Alibaba chief maintained that in less than three years, India will be the “largest country
outside China” in terms of its user-base.

Meanwhile, the group’s C2C subsidiary, Taobao. com, has announced the launch of its portal,
Tao1shop.tw, in Taiwan in September this year, a market that is estimated to be worth
RMB60 billion (US$8 billion) this year, said Taiwan’s Market Intelligence and Consulting Institute.
Together with local e-payment provider eDynamics, the new website is poised to do away with currency
exchange problems that customers encounter when shopping on the group’s
parent portal, Taobao.com.

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