Beware Amazon, Flipkart! Alibaba Set to Enter Indian E-comm Space

(L-R) Rohit Bansal, Co-founder, Snapdeal; Jack Ma, Founder and Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group; Kunal Bahl, CEO and Co-founder, Snapdeal and Nikesh Arora, Vice-Chairman, SoftBank. (Photo: Snapdeal)

Chinese e-commerce major Alibaba Group is planning to enter India this year and is looking at opportunities to build the business organically or through other means.

We are planning to enter the e-commerce business in India in 2016. We have been exploring very carefully the e-commerce opportunity in this country, which we think is very exciting on the backdrop of Digital India.

J Michael Evans, President, Alibaba Group

So far, the company had only a passive presence in India, through investment in the Kunal Bahl-backed Snapdeal and Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led One97Communications that operates Paytm.

If Jack Ma’s Alibaba does enter India, they will compete with Jeff Bezos’ Amazon. The country’s top e-commerce player Flipkart would also need to strategise to stay in the leadership position once Alibaba comes in as an active player and Amazon invests more. In October 2014, Amazon had announced a $2 billion investment in India.

Alibaba said it is evaluating all opportunities to build the business organically or look at any other thing that might come along. Evans, who along with the group’s Global Managing Director K Guru Gowrappan met Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Friday, said the company plans to come here and work to serve both customers, consumers and small businesses because that is the history and the DNA of Alibaba.

In November 2014, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, who was on his first visit to India, said he would “invest more in India, work with Indian entrepreneurs and Indian technologists to improve the relationship between the two nations”.

Ma, one of the richest persons in China with a fortune of about $24 billion, founded Alibaba in 1999 in Hangzhou, capital of east China’s Zhejiang province. Meanwhile, Prasad also met Asia-Pacific head of Amazon Web Services (Public sector) Peter Moore, who discussed the company’s plans to launch a dedicated cloud region in India later this year.

(With PTI inputs)