Alibaba eyes major role in SME trading

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Hangzhou, China: The Alibaba group, of which alibaba.com is the flagship company, wants to be the world's largest comprehensive trading platform for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

It is working on a transformation from ‘meet at Alibaba’ to ‘work at Alibaba’. “Now, millions of people meet at alibaba.com. We want them to work at Alibaba.com and take their entire transactions to the final point after the meeting,” Jack Ma, the company’s founder, chairman and CEO, said.

He had said at a press meet recently that by 2020 alibaba.com will have 10 million SME customers working at its trading platform. This, he added, will create 100 million new jobs and there will be at least one billion customers buying at Alibaba.

Jack, along with 17 others, started alibaba.com from an apartment in Hangzhou in 1999. Today, orders worth $220 million a day are placed at its online counters by over 42 million registered users in 240 countries.

Alibaba has offices in 50 cities.

The Alibaba Group also has a retail platform for Chinese customers known as Taobao, a payment counter alipay.com and also provides of software and internet solutions for SMEs through alisoft.com. It also owns China Yahoo.

David Wei, CEO and director, said that for the time being, the group would offer services of alibaba.com in India. “Maybe we will think of extending other services later,” he said.

Taobao.com, which was launched in 2003, is the largest internet website in China with 78% of the online consumer market. Its gross merchandise volume at $ 11.8 billion equalled about 1.4% of China’s total retail trade in the first half of 2009, company sources said.

Alipay.com is the leading third-party online payment platform in China. With more than 50% of the market share and 200 million registered users, Alipay facilitates about four million online payments worth up to $100 million daily.