Alibaba have announced a signed partnership with a European distributor as part of the marketplace’s ongoing focus to establish itself in Europe.
The marketplace are holding on revealing the distributors name, but the deal has been officially confirmed, as originally reported by CRN.
“We have a pan-European distributor; the contract is signed but it is too early to say [who it is].It will create general coverage to provide services, and they will deal with resellers and VARs.This is their purpose and they very much believe that hardware will go to the cloud, so this is the right thing to do.”
-Yeming Wang general manager, EMEA of Alibaba
The partnership marks Alibaba’s first solid step towards a pan-European expansion. This follows the marketplace’s record-breaking Single’s Day that saw a high demand for European products in the Chinese market, which possibly had given Alibaba a green light to move forward with their expansion plans. Alibaba’s Europe general manager Terry von Bibra has already confirmed that that “[Alibaba has] already started” working on developing the logistics centre in Liège, Brussels to increase the shipping efficiency of pan-European goods to China and vice versa. But, those plans are yet to be seen as the marketplace has a track record of promising, but not delivering. Their list of promised plans includes the establishment of a fulfilment centre in France and the ‘Silk Road’ trade route between Asia and Europe. With the ever-increasing competition from Chinese sellers on Amazon and eBay, this signals even more competition in the future. Yet, as the marketplace say that the new Europe distributor deal has been officially sealed it is only a matter of time to see this announcement manifest.
