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Alibaba.com, China's biggest business-to-business website, on Tuesday said it was poised to become India 's top online marketplace by number of users as it launches its first major overseas expansion.
The company, which last year doubled the number of Indian users of its global website to more than 400,000, said it was now signing up more than 20,000 Indian businesses a month to its dedicated Indian site, launched in October in a partnership with Infomedia, India 's biggest Yellow Pages company.
David Wei, chief executive, said Alibaba.com was already among the top three online marketplaces in India and would surpass its rivals by number of users before the end of the year.
He said Alibaba.com was focusing on more than 8m small and medium enterprises in India , which the company says accounts for almost 40 per cent of India 's industrial output.
Alibaba.com needed Infomedia's customer base - established through traditional, rather than online, networks - because of India 's relatively low internet penetration rate, he said.
"I don't believe it is possible to go into India with a 100 per cent online platform today," Mr Wei told the Financial Times.
He said the success of the company's partnership with Infomedia had prompted it to consider extending the model to other countries with relatively low internet penetration. The company has received expressions of interest from similar companies in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand, Mr Wei said.
He added that continued success of its partnership with Infomedia "may lead to an equity venture" in the future.
Alibaba.com is also preparing for the formal launch of its website in Japan, where it has partnered with Softbank, a key shareholder in the parent company of Alibaba.com. Mr Wei said the Japanese service would initially target companies exporting to Japan, seeking eventually to challenge large trading houses such as Mitsubishi's trading arm.
The overseas expansion comes as Alibaba.com is continuing to grow rapidly in China, on the back of small and medium enterprises shifting towards the online platform. Profits in the first quarter of this year were Rmb300m, an increase of 111 per cent on the first quarter of last year, the company said on Tuesday.
But it also comes amid increasing concern about the prospects of Chinese exporters, who are facing rising costs and the possibility of a slowdown in US demand. "The third quarter of this year will be the real testing time (for Chinese exporters)," Mr Wei said.
On Alibaba.com, the only product categories where there had been a slowdown in activity so far were metalworks and textiles, Mr Wei said. This reflected Chinese exporters losing market share to Indian companies rather than a decline in global demand.
"China is losing competitiveness to India (in these categories), but once Alibaba's global strategy is rolled out we won't need to worry (about such fluctuations). If one country is losing, then another country is gaining," he said.
