It’s Official? Alibaba doing more business than Amazon + eBay (Charts)

June 8, 2013 Leave a comment

It’s Official? Alibaba doing more business than Amazon + eBay (Charts)

Jim Erickson  | Jun 07, 2013 | 03:50 PM

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Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore gave a shout-out to Alibaba Group at the 2013 Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition this week in Chicago, noting that China’s largest e-commerce company generated more GMV (gross merchandise value) than Amazon and eBay combined. The inventor of the Internet may have misspoke himself a tad. Gore’s syntax implied that the comparison was confined to the fourth quarter of 2012. In fact, what was being compared was total GMV for the companies for all of 2012—it was during Q4 that Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms passed the two U.S. giants for the year. Well, he got the gist right. Gore apparently sourced his material from stats offered by well-known tech pundit and KPCBpartner Mary Meeker during a “state of the Internet” talk she gave at the Wall Street Journal’s annual D: All Things Digital conference in California last week. Here’s the chart from her hard copy report, which appeared in a section entitled “Lots to Learn From China – Volume + Innovation.”Meeker’s report contained other charts reinforcing the notion that China is ground zero for the mobile Internet explosion.

The Chinese are now spending almost as much time staring at their mobile phones as watching TV.

Meanwhile … back to gee-whiz statistics on China’s booming e-commerce industry.

The China General Chamber of Commerce has released its annual China’s Top 100 Retailers Development Reading Report for 2012, which concluded that last year, eight online shopping websites accounted for nearly half of the overall sales growth rate of 20.2 percent registered by the country’s major retailers.

The chamber evidently felt online retailing was too important to ignore any longer. This year’s report was the first to include online shopping websites. In the past, the chamber only counted brick-and-mortar retailers in its Top 100 list.

Eight e-tailers made the chamber’s top 100: Tmall.com, JD.com, Tencent B2C, Amazon China, Dangdang.com, Vipshop.com, Yihaodian.com, and Vancl.com. The group of eight garnered total online sales revenue of RMB 346 billion in 2012, accounting for 14.5% of total retail sales for the top 100.

No. 1 in sales was appliance and consumer electronics giant Suning, which sells online and through physical stores. Suning’s sales totaled RMB 230 billion last year, according to the Chamber. Close behind in the No. 2 position was Tmall, China’s largest B2C shopping website, with retail sales revenue of RMB 210 billion.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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