Interview with Jack Ma:
How Alibaba plans to help U.S. exporters
Mr. Ma’s e-commerce giant has revolutionized retailing in China, branched out into financial services, and is now trying to expand into mobile technology, entertainment and sports. The Wall Street Journal’s Dennis K. Berman talked with Mr. Ma about his company, the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, and the possibility of an electronic-payments alliance between Alibaba’s Alipay and Apple Inc. ’s Apple Pay. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow.
What is 11Main.com? What does it mean for Alibaba?
MR. MA: I got my inspirations from Silicon Valley, 15 years ago, on my trip to the U.S. I saw Silicon Valley, the lights everywhere, on Sunday, and people working hard. So I go back to China and build up Alibaba. Today, it’s our time to come here, invest in Silicon Valley, helping entrepreneurs. So we invested in 11Main.
A website to shop in America via Alibaba.
MR. MA: Yeah.
You’re bringing this to places like Brazil and Russia, the notion of bringing commerce directly from China to consumers in other countries—basically cutting Wal-Mart out of the process of getting cheaper Chinese goods to other nations.
MR. MA: I’m more interested in bringing America to China, Brazil to China, Russia to China, because selling Chinese products around the world—that’s the past 10, 15 years.
What I want to know is, how can we sell more American small-business products to China? More European products to China? This is the unique value that we have. Because when you have such a huge demand of good products from outside, the next 10 years, I believe, China should import.
What U.S. small business products would make sense in the Chinese market?
MR. MA: Last year we helped Washington state. We sold 150 tons of cherries. We sell Alaska seafood. We sold 80 tons of nuts to China.
There are so many farm products here that can be sold to China; because of the pollution, people cannot have good quality products.
We start with agricultural products. People here probably don’t realize that in China, when you have 110, 120 million people shopping on your site every day, you can almost sell everything.
Source: wsj.com
