Bloomberg
Beijing
Alibaba Group Holding will open offices in three European countries and expand further in the US as it seeks to revive growth and reassure jittery investors.
China’s biggest e-commerce operator will enter France, Italy and Germany within the next few months, president Michael Evans said at Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou yesterday.
With a slowing domestic economy, Alibaba is stepping up its global ambitions to turn around investor sentiment battered by a $117bn slide in market value since November. With less than a month until Singles’ Day, the busiest shopping promotion on the Chinese calendar, the company is looking to lure global merchants to sell to the country’s rising middle class.
“China should shift from exporting to importing,” chairman Jack Ma said in Hangzhou. “This is a huge change for China, it’s an opportunity not only for China, it’s an opportunity for the world.”
Singles’ Day on November 11 has morphed into China’s biggest excuse to shop, leading e-commerce operators to flood the Internet with promotions and discounts. Alibaba, which started the event in 2009, began replicating its success overseas last year, seeing sales spikes led by Russia.
The one-day promotion generated 57.1bn yuan ($9bn) of sales through Alibaba’s payments system in 2014 and this year’s focus is on cross-border trades for its global expansion.
Analysts are looking closely at next month’s result for signs of a revival.
“This is going to be the biggest day of the year. If this doesn’t have the same level of growth, it won’t reflect well on them,” said Mark Tanner, founder of Shanghai-based research and marketing agency China Skinny. “There is a lot of negative sentiment particularly in America where potential stock traders are, so they really need to show the kind of growth that they’ve shown over the previous years.”
Ma: Eyeing global expansion.
