Chinese E-commerce giant Alibaba, after overtaking Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY) combined is now looking forward to outperform Wal-Mart (WMT), as the World’s biggest retail store in 2016. CEO Jonathan Lu of Alibaba told Reuters that the company is working to increase the volume of transaction by three times on its marketplace platforms to post around CNY3 trillion ($490 billion) by 2016.
Expanding overseas
In order to achieve the mammoth target, Alibaba is also working on expanding its marketplace model overseas. For the same, e-commerce giant launched its Taobao marketplace in Singapore to gain traction in Southeast Asia.
Alibaba has also expanded into the United States market by investing significantly in two day shipping service Shoprunner.
Focus on data processing
Apart from expansion and investment plans the online retailing giant is working to process data about its customers in a tough competition scenario as the physical stores are increasingly foraying into the online space and expanding themselves.
“The old companies that aren’t willing to transform will be wiped out by competition,” said Zeng Ming, Alibaba’s chief strategy officer. “Most traditional retailers now understand if they don’t move online, their time is limited.”
With the help of data processing, Alibaba will be able to track the demand and supply for its products along with focusing on those areas that are in need of more products and more investment. Investment will targeted towards establishing new warehouses and also making the process smooth for the movement of goods traded on Alibaba’s e-commerce sites Taobao and Tmall, which according to Reuters accounted for 3 billion of the 5.69 billion parcels moved around China last year.
Reforming Chinese Retail Industry
The retailer is looking forward to reform retail industry in China and in the quest it has planned to invest $16 billion in logistics and support by 2024, according to the reports of Reuters. Through the investment, Alibaba is looking forward to focus on China’s untapped potential market and make the service available for hundreds of millions of potential customers.
Alibaba can be seen as the role model for the brick mortar retailers to make them more tech and internet savvy, and create a nationwide network to take orders and distribute the goods.
