Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday visited the headquarters of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group in scenic Hangzhou city of China’s Zhejiang province. Accompanied by Federal Commerce Minister Engineer Khurram Dastgir, the prime minister was received by Executive Chairman of the company Jack Ma, who founded the entity in 1999 which has now flourished as one of the world’s largest global online market.
The prime minister visited the Alibaba Museum wherein he was giving an overview of the company’s history and profile, what Executive Chairman said had also set a record of earning a revenue of $18 billion dollar in a day.
Besides online trade, the prime minister was apprised that, Alibaba has also spread its network to rural economy, micro-financing, marketing, public welfare, life sciences and traffic control with 33,000 stations operating across the globe. Jack Ma told that the company had a consumer base of around two billion besides providing jobs to 100 million people.
On the sidelines of this visit, a memorandum of understanding was signed between Alibaba and Trade Development Authority of Pakistan under which both sides agreed to foster growth of worldwide exports of products by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Pakistan through e-commerce. Online and off-line training programs for the SMEs will also be conducted by Alibaba in a bid to assist SMEs with on-boarding on to Alibaba’s platforms and optimizing exports through e-commerce.
The Prime Minister was quoted as saying “I am honored to have had the opportunity to visit the Alibaba Headquarters in Hangzhou, China. Today by entering into this agreement with Alibaba and Ant Financial we further strengthen mutual cooperation and look to bring about a positive change for our small and medium enterprises. With the support of the Alibaba Group and Ant Financial we hope to elevate our local businesses to new heights and bring them into the realm of the e-commerce platform.”
Alibaba chief told the prime minister that in its micro-financing business, the company had a recovery ratio of around 99 percent in what the prime minister remarked that smaller entities had a very low default ratio. He exemplified his government’s Yellow Cab scheme that had a recovery rate of around 94 percent.
The prime minister was told that Alibaba delivered 60 million packages across China every day and the company had a record of delivering products to the toughest locations in the world including Mount Everest. The buyers on Alibaba are located in over 200 countries.
Image credits: CNBC
