Each day brings more evidence of China’s arrival as an Internet superpower. The latest hook-up between Yahoo and Alibaba is particularly interesting to us, as we keep a pretty keen eye on Alibaba’s B2B business and see it as something of a bell-weather for our market.
On Alibaba.com they’ve built a large, global community of dealers, wholesalers and small manufacturers who use their platform to list products and generate sales leads. Which is precisely what we are hoping to achieve at Kitmondo, albeit in a different market.
Unusually, they’ve managed to develop a strong consumer brand at the same time. The question is…will the integration of Yahoo’s Chinese consumer websites shift the balance of Alibaba’s focus away from B2B? They have a big battle looming with ebay if they want Taobao to keep a hold on the auction space (and one has to presume a big factor in Yahoo’s investment is their expectancy that Alibaba can replicate Yahoo’s defeat of ebay in Japan). Will this have an effect on their focus on B2B?
It'll be fascinating to see what happens next!
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