With or without his 40 thieves, Alibaba is expanding and amassing wealth across Asia.

Frayed by China’s strengthening currency, weakening exports, and rising labor costs, China based Alibaba.com, is expanding into neighboring markets - Japan and India. The e-commerce company,which operates a business-to-business service targeting small and midsized importers and exporters, recently expressed its interest in expanding globally, while reducing its reliance on its home market.

The first stop on the global tour: Japan, China’s largest trading partner. The company in July launched a joint venture with Softbank, an Alibaba shareholder. In August, Alibaba signed a memorandum of understanding with three Korean partners to start a Korean-language service. And in May, Alibaba teamed up with Mumbai-based Infomedia India in an effort to attract small and midsized Indian companies. “China is getting a little less competitive,” Arthur Chang, vice-president for global sales at the company told Businessweek. “India is an obvious choice for us.”

However, the expansion to overseas markets doesn’t imply that Alibaba will focus on foreign businesses. On the contrary China is going to remain the center of Alibaba’s business for a long time yet. The Chinese market remains a source of strength for Alibaba, as the latest earnings announcement shows. Morgan Stanley estimates full-year profits of US$194 million, a rise of 37 percent on last year, on sales of US$454 million, an increase of 44 percent for Alibaba.

Alibaba.com currently controls Yahoo! China, and runs China’s biggest consumer auction site, Taobao which raised US$1.5 billion in a November IPO last year, with its Hong Kong-listed stock price soaring 290 percent in the first day of trading.

The Ecommerce Journal has predicted that Asian service companies will be among the greatest beneficiaries of growth in e-commerce over the next few years. Consumers in leading Asian consumer markets are only beginning to grow accustomed to booking air travel, car rentals, and hotels via the Internet, while double digit sales growth in those sectors was noted last year. One of the largest beneficiaries would be motion picture companies as moreviewers purchase videos and movie theater tickets via the Internet, the ecoomerce journal said.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Business, Trade. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.