by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Entrepreneurship, Markets, Success Stories, Technology
Jack Yun Ma
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : That he speaks impeccable English despite being a Chinese comes from the fact that Jack Yun Ma, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, graduated from Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute with a major in English and later became a teacher, imparting lessons in the same language.
Strange are the ways in which tech honchos function: News about a change of guard came via his interview on Friday with The New York Times — at a time when US-China trade war is at its zenith — and not from Alibaba itself.
As Ma turns 54 on Monday — the day when he will reportedly make his retirement official which also happens to be Teachers’ Day in China — he is leaving behind a legacy which will not be easy for his successor to carry forward.
When it came to India, Ma, who also serves on the board of Japanese corporation SoftBank Group, always had big plans.
Although not directly present in the online marketplace, Alibaba’s diversified portfolio in India include top-of-the-line investments in digital payments platform Paytm, in Cloud computing via Alibaba Cloud, in the digital media space via UCWeb and several innovation initiatives that makes the country an attractive destination for the $420 billion conglomerate.
As the Indian e-commerce space flourishes — with Walmart’s acquisition of Flipkart and Amazon pouring in millions of dollars — recent media reports indicated that Ma has plans to invest into Reliance Retail Ltd which, if true, will see Alibaba have physical presence and a bigger retail clout in India.
The opportunities are immense for the current $35 billion Indian e-commerce sector which would be worth over $100 billion by 2022 — with a growth of around 25 per cent from the current level — a joint PwC-Nasscom report said on Friday.
In collaboration with Alibaba, Paytm has also launched its AI Cloud computing platform for developers, start-ups and enterprises in India. Alibaba Cloud, the Cloud-computing arm of Alibaba Group, provides computing services to businesses of all sizes globally.
According to the company, Paytm AI Cloud processes and stores their consumers’ data locally in servers located in India — a demand from the government that has resulted in its rival WhatsApp and Apple deferring their digital payments services in the country.
Not just the private sector, Alibaba is also increasing its footprint in the government sector.
On September 3, the Andhra Pradesh Economic Development Board (APEDB) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Alibaba Cloud to adopt cloud computing frameworks within the government model.
The MoU envisages leveraging Alibaba’s Cloud and Smart City technologies for sustainable farming, integrated traffic management, smart city management, small and medium enterprises and skill development programmes.
India is a “very important” market for Alibaba in its global strategy, its Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang told IANS last year. “Globalisation is one of our key strategies for Alibaba. As part of this strategy, India is a very important topic. India is a very important market for us to look at,” Zhang said.
Ma — who will remain on Alibaba’s board of directors and continue to mentor the company’s management after retirement — met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 and discussed ways to empower small businesses in the country.
They never met again and Ma too didn’t reveal much about his India plans, but his company has been making inroads into a country that provides massive opportunity owing to a growing Internet and smartphone user base amid an increasing digital drive across enterprises.
With a net worth of more than $40 billion, Ma is the founder of Zhejiang-based Jack Ma Foundation which will help realise his new dream of philanthropy in education.
A devotee of Chinese martial art form Tai Chi, Ma started Alibaba in 1999 from his modest apartment in Hangzhou, the capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, with 17 other people (remember that Jeff Bezos started Amazon from a garage in Seattle).
Like Bill and Melinda Gates, who are often seen in India on various charity tours, we may also see Ma more in the country to fulfill his philanthropy goals, but his days at the helm have already helped Alibaba realise the potential the India market has beyond China.
His instructions must be clear to his successor — focus on India that is not yet saturated like China and growing by leaps and bounds across the technology domains in which Alibaba has expertise.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Business Summit, Events, Large Enterprise, Markets, Online Marketing, Technology
By Bhavana Akella,
Bengaluru : Late last year, business reporters from across the world were invited to Shanghai — China’s largest city — to witness the people of the most populous country in the world shop relentlessly for 24 hours.
The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, one of the world’s largest retailers, has been celebrating the country’s ability to buy in abundance through its shopping fests since 2009.
Through its 11.11 shopping festival, held on November 11 each year on Singles’ Day (an official national festival in China where young people celebrate the fact that they are single), the company has turned the country’s purchases into a spectacle for the world.
With humongous monitors that kept a count of the country’s spending each microsecond, the fest-day sales last November had clocked in at about $25.4 billion (over Rs 1.5 trillion), making it the largest shopping extravaganza ever held in the world.
Sales events like Black Friday (day following Thanksgiving Day in the US, usually in November) and Cyber Monday (Monday after Thanksgiving Day where websites push online shopping) had existed much before Alibaba introduced its flagship shopping event. But the advent of Internet on mobile phones has effectively allowed the Alibaba Group to convert people into consumers who shopped religiously — not just when given discounts, but also to establish brand loyalty.
The very same mobile phone has managed to turn Indians into diligent shoppers as well, awakening the buyer in many smartphone-owning citizens. Even those who rarely visit shopping malls are now made aware of the best time to buy a television or a mobile phone, thanks to the mobile applications of shopping portals.
The online shopping festivals, particularly, have succeeded in turning non-believers in digital purchasing into believers who are eager to grab the deals on offer.
“Shopping festivals are not just about offering consumers products at great prices, but are platforms for brands to explore newer and more innovative ways of engaging with people. It is to showcase how technology presents an opportunity for consumer engagement,” Alibaba Group Chief Marketing Officer Chris Tung told IANS in an email.
With increasing Internet penetration in China (over 53 per cent of the total 1.37 billion population), visits to shopping malls have been digitised for the convenience of millennials, the drivers of online shopping, who admit to impulsive shopping online — a trend that mirrors in India as well.
India’s leading e-tailer Flipkart and the local arm of American e-commerce major Amazon, along with other digital platforms, have managed to get Indians — not just from metros, but also from smaller towns — to go on an online shopping spree largely through their shopping festivals.
The average Indian shopper, who was known to put his/her money on a product — that too a brand he or she has known for long — only after making a store visit, was suddenly seen waiting for Big Billion Day (Flipkart’s online sales event) or Amazon’s Great Indian Festival to purchase a mobile phone.
In 2016, about 69 million of India’s 1.25 billion population had shopped online and the number was expected to cross the 100-million mark in 2017, according to a Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) study.
“When we launched in India four years ago, e-commerce was mostly an urban phenomenon limited to occasional shopping in few categories — led by discounts. The real opportunity to let anyone, anywhere in India buy online was unaddressed. We were driven to create a company that transforms how India buys and sells,” an Amazon India spokesperson told IANS.
From kitchen knives, plastic containers, televisions, refrigerators to smart phones and even gold and diamond jewellery, Indians have now turned themselves into devoted digital consumers who boldly shop for their daily needs, luxuries and fancies online.
The use of technology could soon further revolutionise our shopping experience, following the footsteps of the country pioneering in the e-commerce space — China.
The Alibaba Group is now working extensively to diminish the barriers between online and offline shopping experiences.
The company has brought in “new retail”, which is equipping brick and mortar stores with technological mediums, allowing buyers to scan product barcodes for information about them, pay for them digitally, and even have them delivered at home.
“We want to digitise the offline world because we believe that integrating online and offline shopping experiences presents the best experience for consumers.
“And once they experience how much simpler the process becomes, they are more compliant to adopting technology into the shopping experience,” Tung asserted.
By bringing the online and offline worlds closer, the company is demonstrating how it can eliminate the apprehension over technology and online shopping that exists among the older generations, a common aspect even in India.
With the trust online platforms have managed to gain among Indians, the future of digital shopping in our country certainly seems to be a strong one — with the sect of believers in digital consumption only set to increase.
(Bhavana Akella can be contacted at bhavana.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Business, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Large Enterprise, Marketing Basics, Markets, Networking, Technology
Beijing : Chinese e-tailer Alibaba’s cloud computing arm on Wednesday said its new data centre in Mumbai would offer services to Indian enterprises from January.
“We will deliver cloud computing services to small and medium size Indian businesses from our new data centre, opening in Mumbai in January, 2018,” said the company in a statement here.
As a key market in the company’s cloud’s globalisation strategy, India offers business opportunity for rapid economic growth and scope for enterprises to expand beyond the country.
“Our vision to empower enterprises to go global is extended to our Indian clients with cloud products, including computing, storage and big data processing capabilities,” noted the statement.
The data centre will also enable Indian businesses to run their applications on the company’s cloud platform.
The data centre’s service offerings include computing, database, storage and content delivery, networking, analytics and big data.
Alibaba Cloud has tied up with Global Cloud Xchange (GCX), a subsidiary of Reliance Communications, that enables direct access to Alibaba Cloud Express Connect through GCX’s Cloud X Fusion service.
The company had earlier also announced a partnership with Tata Communications to provide direct access to Alibaba Cloud Express Connect through Tata Communications’ IZOTM Private Connect Service.
Alibaba Cloud has 33 zones in 16 economic centres worldwide, with coverage extending across China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia, West Asia, Europe, India and the US.
“The data centre will enable us to work with more Indian enterprises, which are innovative and operate in growth sectors,” said Alibaba Vice-President Simon Hu in the statement on the occasion.
The company also looks forward to empowering the enterprises through cloud computing and data technologies.
“As we build the cloud network globally, India is another important piece that is firmly in place.
“This continues our commitment to India, helping it to develop trade opportunities with other markets in the region and beyond,” added Hu.
Alibaba Cloud would have a local team of consultants to provide service planning, implementation and after-sales support, helping Indian companies move to the cloud.
“This will extend what Alibaba Cloud is already doing to service thousands of customers from India globally,” the company said.
Set up in 2009, Alibaba Cloud is among the largest providers of public cloud services in China and one of the largest Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers in the world.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise
Beijing, (IANS) Nestle and Alibaba on Sunday announced plans to upgrade their partnership.
The world’s largest food retailer will launch its biggest e-commerce campaign ever with its diverse products, spanning 30 brands from coffee to baby formula, being sold on Alibaba’s expansive e-commerce platforms such as Tmall, Xinhua reported.
“Our partnership with Alibaba is all about the consumer. What is so exciting about China as a market is not only its size or population, but that Chinese consumers are a step ahead of consumers in other markets in the digital way they consume,” Wan Ling Martello, executive vice president with Nestle overseeing the Asian, Oceanian and African markets, said in a conference marking the company’s 150-year anniversary.
China is the right place to start Nestle’s next 150-year growth story as Chinese consumers have a more developed understanding and are quicker to adopt new consumption technologies than their global peers and have great passion for innovation, she added.
China’s consumption pattern and manner have evolved fast and consumption is becoming increasingly digital with more young consumers choosing to shop online, said Zhang Yong, Alibaba CEO.
The volume of online purchases surged by more than 12 times from January 2011 to April 2016 in China, while per capita consumption grew by 27 percent, according to a joint report released by Alibaba’s financial services platform Ant Financial and a private economics research institute.
Nestle strengthened its global capabilities in e-commerce by signing a strategic cooperation partnership with Alibaba in late 2015 to increase its online sales and build its brands. In 2015, half of Nestle’s sales in China were online.
by admin | May 25, 2021 | C S R, Corporate
Beijing : (IANS) Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce company, is building apartments to sell to its employees at a discount of about 40 percent, the media reported on Monday.
These 380 apartments, ranging from 87-118 sq.metres, are located in Hangzhou, where the company is headquartered. Construction is expected to be completed by 2018, the People’s Daily reported.
Eligible employees will draw lots for the chance to buy the houses. In order to be eligible, they must have worked at the company for at least three years and be in P8 (expert) or M3 (senior manager) positions or lower.
These apartments will be sold for about 10,000 yuan ($1,548) per sq.metre, whereas other properties in the area are priced between 17,000-20,000 yuan per sq.metre.
Alibaba is not the first Chinese company to contribute to staff housing. Evergrande Group provides free apartments to its newly recruited staff.
Hengda Group also provides apartments for its employees to live in free of charge, and gives employees discounts after a certain number of years if they decide to purchase their company housing.
Huawei also guarantees affordable housing for its staff near the Shenzhen factory and headquarters.
