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Alibaba Thinks Outside the China Box
As its business matures at home, the Chinese e-commerce giant seeks growth in India and Southeast Asia
By NEWLEY PURNELL in New Delhi and ALYSSA ABKOWITZ in BEIJING
Aug. 12, 2016 5:43 a.m. ET
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Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., its business maturing at home in China, is seeking out growth in India and Southeast Asia.
In India, the internet giant in recent months has snapped up executives with experience in the country’s fast-growing, highly competitive e-commerce sector, a sign it could be planning an online-shopping push there. In Southeast Asia, Alibaba paid 1 billion dollars in April for a controlling stake in Singapore-based e-commerce startup Lazada Group, its biggest overseas acquisition to date.
“We acquired the majority control of Lazada in an effort to start to serve local consumers in Southeast Asia, and that’s something that’s going to be a very important potential market for us,” Alibaba Executive Vice Chairman Joe Tsai said on a conference call Thursday after the company reported revenue growth of 59% for its latest quarter. “It’s a market with over 500 million potential consumers.”
The attention to other parts of Asia comes as Alibaba faces competition at home from e-commerce rivals such as JD.com Inc. and as it attempts to boost revenue outside of its core commerce business.
Analysts say e-commerce in India, the world’s second-most-populous country, could take off the way it did in China as broadband internet spreads and incomes rise. Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research projects e-commerce sales in India will rise to 127 billion dollars in 2025 from 11.2 billion dollars last year—though even with such growth the market would be dwarfed by China, where Alibaba alone sold 3 trillion yuan (485 billion dollars) worth of goods in its latest fiscal year.
“We have decided to place some very strategically located assets in that market,” Mr. Tsai said of India, calling the push there and the tie-up with Lazada just “the start of our international activity.”
A person familiar with Alibaba’s strategy said it is taking a broad-based approach in India. It has a business-to-business website that connects buyers and suppliers of goods like chemicals and minerals, but no stand-alone domestic consumer-to-consumer offering. That is an area in which local startups are battling, the person said, and “the first winners may not be the ultimate winners.”
In India last year, Alibaba led a 500 million dollars fundraising round for e-commerce firm Snapdeal.com, while its financial-services affiliate, Ant Financial Services Group, paid over 500 million dollars for 40% of One97 Communications, the parent company of online-payment and marketplace startup Paytm.
The investment in Paytm, which makes a popular mobile wallet that can be used to pay for services and products, ranging from electricity to iPhones, gives Alibaba an edge, the person said. Nearly all Indian consumers coming online for the first time are doing so on low-cost smartphones.
Recent hires suggest Alibaba is looking to ramp up its own consumer e-commerce offerings in India. It has added Vinay Bhartia, a co-founder of Mumbai-based e-commerce logistics startup Mypacco, as a senior executive, and recruited former Bain & Co. consultant Bharati Balakrishnan, who previously held an senior position at Bangalore-based services-booking platform LocalOye.
Alibaba, which declined to comment on the hires or any consumer e-commerce plans in India, would be playing catch-up there against the likes of Flipkart Internet Pvt., which analysts estimate accounts for nearly half of India’s e-commerce sales, and Amazon.com Inc., which has pledged to invest 5 billion dollars in the country.
In a quest for customer loyalty, Flipkart and scores of smaller e-commerce startups are spending heavily to offer deep discounts. Flipkart, valued at 15 billion dollars by investors when it raised money last summer, doesn't disclose its revenue, but says it is working to become profitable.
Rival Amazon has built up robust warehouse and delivery technologies in India, and like its peers provides services to suit the local market, such as allowing customers—many of whom don’t have credit cards—to pay for goods when they are delivered. Other India e-commerce complications: patchy internet connections, poor infrastructure and unconventional addresses that make logistics operations difficult.
In Singapore, Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma, on a June visit to Lazada, told employees he had been attracted to the company’s quick growth and ability to execute in new markets, according to a Lazada staff member who was in attendance. He added that he sees Lazada as “a key cog” in Alibaba’s international expansion, said the person, who declined to be named.
In another move that will increase Alibaba’s exposure in Southeast Asia, Ant Financial said in June it planned to buy a 20% stake in Thailand’s Ascend Money, an e-payment firm.
Alibaba said Thursday that fiscal-first-quarter revenue for its international commerce retail business more than doubled from the year-earlier June-ending period, to 168 million dollars, primarily due to the integration of Lazada.
“We need another at least 1.2 billion population outside China,” Mr. Ma told investors at the company’s headquarters in Hangzhou, China, in June, noting that he wants one day to serve two billion consumers world-wide.
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