Western Economists are completely wrong. There are definitely lessons that we can learn from China in terms of E-business and Omni-Channel strategy. Some words to explain the Chinese E-Commerce ecosystem include: Fast moving, aggressive, imperfect and hungry to grow-up.
A few of my Digital Omni-Channel team were fortunate to attend the Alibaba Story yesterday, featuring a very inspiring interview with Porter Erisman. Erisman worked with Jack Ma from 2000-2008 to transform Alibaba from a modest start-up into a multi-billion dollar business, which now dwarfs the likes of E-bay and Amazon combined. Alibaba now dominates the China E-Commerce market and is now one of the biggest E-businesses in the world. It boasts USD4.4 bill in revenues and an impressive market capitalisation of USD170Billion++, accounting for over 60% of the parcels delivered in China. The next step in its lifecycle is to take over competitors or become a target. Interestingly it is now looking to New York rather than Hong Kong for its recently announced IPO which will provide it with much needed capital to help satisfy its appetite for global expansion.
So, how did Alibaba become so successful? Well in a nutshell it was fast moving, aggressive, imperfect and hungry to grow up. Seizing every day of its short life, developing a multi brand, multi business strategy before anyone else (i.e. Business to Business (Alibaba.com), Consumer to Consumer (Taobao.com), Business to Consumer (Tmall.com), Online payment services(Alipay.com) and a Shopping Search Engine (eTao.com)). It basically beat E-Bay, Amazon, Google et al to the China market and now dominates.
We have a lot to learn from Alibaba and I urge everyone to hop on to You-Tube and watch this interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C53TzSDnzug) or the Crocodile in the Yangtze, which documents Alibaba’s rise to the top of the heap.
