Heard of Alibaba? You might not have – but it’s an absolute titan, and China‘s biggest Internet company. It’s an internet shopping portal/eBay style auction site which handled $US149 billion in transactions in the December quarter alone. And now they’re opening an office in Australia. Which they announced last week.
As the Australian Financial Review reports, this announcement barely registered in the media here, even though they’d go positively wild if it was a big American tech firm opening up shop here.
They’re basically wanting to offer support for Australian businesses who want to enter the astoundingly lucrative Chinese online shopping market. Turns out businesses like Woolworths, Bellamy‘s, Blackmores and Chemist Warehouse are already mad keen to get onboard.
Does it mean that Aussies will be able to buy and sell on the market? Probably at some point, yeah. “We see a lot of potential in the Australian market as Alibaba continues its globalisation efforts,” the company told the AFR via email.
The business already faced a bit of controversy among mums online after the baby formula debacle – where sellers were using Alibaba to sell bulk baby formula bought form Australian supermarkets into the Chinese market. If anything, it proves the enormous power of the site, seeing as it created baby formula shortages here.
We might be seeing a lot more about Alibaba very soon.
Source: Australian Financial Review.
Photo: Getty Images / VCG.
