Analysts led by Fawne Jiang noted that “Alibaba reportedly will increase its investment in India due primarily to India’s enormous population and number of young users. ~400 thousand Chinese customers have to date purchased Indian chocolate, tea and perfume on Alibaba. Alibaba will focus on its globalization strategy over the next three years, aiming to attract more global SMEs onto Alibaba’s platform.”
In rural China “Alibaba entered into a strategic partnership with the Gansu municipal government to work together on ecommerce, e-government affairs, cloud computing, big data and O2O, aiming to further promote Alibaba’s rural ecommerce strategy.
The company has also been expanding the Alipay service. Jiang commented that “Alipay announced a distribution of RMB 60 million red envelopes on Tmall International, Taobao Global Purchase and Etao Overseas Shopping from November 24th to December 1st to promote Black Friday overseas shopping.”
Alipay also “launched a project to support SMEs; specifically, BABA will waive mobile service fees for SMEs that have annual transaction volume of less than RMB 100 thousand. It is estimated that the initiative should help SMEs save 25+ percent on their mobile payment costs,” according to the analyst note.
