Alibaba and Infomedia announce Strategic Partnership in India
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World’s leading B2B e-commerce portal Alibaba.com from the China based Alibaba Group and Infomedia India Limited, India’s largest Yellow Pages and special interest publishing company from the Network 18 group, on Tuesday announced a multi-year strategic partnership aimed at addressing the small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) market in India.
In 1999, former English schoolteacher Jack Ma launched Alibaba.com from an apartment in Hangzhou, China. Alibaba.com has since grown into three online marketplaces serving the B2B (alibaba.com), B2C (china.alibaba.com) and C2C (taobao.com) marketplaces. Essentially, Alibaba.com serves as an e-commerce aggregator, bringing together buyers and sellers.
Uniquely, Alibaba.com allows buyers and sellers to contact each other directly (a big no – no for it’s competitor eBay), and the sites are largely free of charge. Revenue primarily comes from charging for premium content/positioning and from a secured payment service like PayPal.
During the 2007/08 fiscal year (April-March), India’s merchandise exports grew from US$126bn to US$155bn. That figure was short of the target of US$160bn, but it was achieved against a backdrop of several difficulties for exporters. For example, the rupee has appreciated by over 12% against the US dollar during the past year, on the back of strong economic growth and a weakening dollar. Exporters also face other problems, such as economic slowdowns in their major export markets, high interest rates and rising input costs.
This seems to be the perfect time for Alibaba to reach out to India’s 8 Million odd SME’s – 3 million of who are engaged in B2B trade out of which 1 Million have an export policy in place.
David Wei, Chief Executive Officer, Alibaba.com, said, ”With its huge growth potential, India is a very important and strategic market for Alibaba.com and is a top priority for our global expansion plans.” “We believe this alliance media will help us become the dominant online B2B marketplace in India by the end of 2008”, he said. Prakash Iyer, Managing Director, Infomedia, said, “The Infomedia-Alibaba partnership will bring value to Indian SMEs by giving them a larger, multi-media business platform encompassing domestic and global trade services.”
Approximately 80, 000 members have signed up for Alibaba’s India specific channel since January 2008. Alibaba has 27 million registered users across 200 countries. It’s competition in India comes from TradeIndia.com and Indiamart.com
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