Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto and Alibaba Group Executive Chairman Jack Ma have witnessed the signing of a memorandum of understanding that will bring the Chinese company’s e-commerce, digital payments and logistics expertise to Mexican small- and mid-sized enterprises, allowing them to expand into international markets—in particular, China.
Alibaba will create a special program specifically for Mexico to benefit from the company’s business-to-business trading platform, Alibaba.com. In addition, Alibaba will share best practices in the operation of its logistics and payment platforms so that Mexican companies might bolster their cross-border e-commerce operations, as well as attract Chinese tourism to Mexico.
Alibaba said it would also provide training in the kinds of analytics that have driven consumer insight and product innovation in the Chinese market.
This is significant as it shows that Alibaba are serious about extending the reach of their marketplace to merchants around the world. They’ve recently run their Gateway ’17 program in the US attracting close to 3,000 merchants to sign up to sell in China in a single day. Later this month the Gateway ’17 program will move to Canada and doubtless will move on to further territories soon.
Alibaba are doing really interesting things, they appear to have realised that to sell on TMall is out of reach for all but the biggest ecommerce merchants with four or five staff to commit to working on China and deep pockets to splash out on bonds as a deposit. Their new program which partners up smallers retailers with Taobao merchants, effectively becoming a wholesaler, might mean lower profits per sale, but such is the scale of the Chinese opportunity that a smaller profit on massive sales is well worth pursuing if you have the stock to maximise the opportunity.
