Russia opened its doors to Alibaba on Tuesday, giving the Chinese e-commerce giant its first ever sales office in the country. The move will ultimately give Alibaba a deeper foothold in a market where foreigners Amazon and eBay have also set up shop.
Business daily Kommersant reported yesterday that Alibaba had registered a subsidiary under the URL www.alibaba.com.ru on May 15. Alibaba Group opened a new office in Moscow in order to "facilitate interaction with Russian government agencies,” a company exec named Mark Zavadsky was quoted as saying.
China's Alibaba owns the e-commerce sites Taobao, Aliexpress and Tmall. AliExpress is already in Russia, but the new sales office will eventually lead to corporate expansion in the country. As it is now, Aliexpress is the most visited e-commerce site in Russia with an average of 15.6 million customers a month in the second half of 2014. By comparison, eBay gets 3.7 million a month and Amazon gets 1.7 million, Kommersant calculated.
Alibaba is no stranger to eBay. It took the American consumer-to-consumer giant head on in 2005, two years after eBay launched in China. Fearing eBay would move into Alibaba's core business-to-business market, China billionaire Jack Ma, the owner of Alibaba, decided to go after eBay's consumer-to-consumer market. Within a couple years, Alibaba's Taoboa surpassed eBay sales. There's been no looking back.
Alibaba is on a tear lately.
In September it launched on the NYSE. Last month it signed a deal to acquire a 25% stake in Paymt, an Indian e-commerce company.
