Alibaba’s first investment came in April 2016 when it bought 51 percent of Lazada for $1 billion, and it added another $1 billion last summer to increase its equity to around 83 percent. With today’s news, Alibaba has invested $4 billion to date which it said will “accelerate the growth plans” and help further tie the Lazada business into Alibaba’s core e-commerce service.

There’s already been plenty of evidence of increased ties between Alibaba and Lazada. The latter began offering products from Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace across Southeast Asia last year, and Alibaba has replaced Lazada’s tech team leadership with executives of its own. The latest shakeup is the appointment of Lucy Peng as Lazada’s new CEO to replace Max Bittner, who was installed by former owner Rocket Internet back in 2012.

Peng, who is one of Alibaba’s original 12 founders, has been Chairwoman of Lazada and is executive chairman of Ant Financial, Alibaba’s fintech affiliate company. Bittner will remain involved as “senior advisor to Alibaba Group” and apparently involved in future strategy, including further international expansion opportunities.

Lazada has progressed significantly since Alibaba’s first investment — which came at a time when the business had been close to running out of money — but the reality in Southeast Asia is that e-commerce in the region is a loss-making industry with plenty of competition.

Amazon entered the foray last year, but it remains only in Singapore, while Shopee is a two-year-old entrant bankrolled by Sea, formerly Garena, which raised over $1 billion in a U.S. IPO last year.

Alibaba hasn’t just limited its Southeast Asia approach to backing Lazada. The firm also invested $1.1 billion in Tokopedia which competes with Lazada in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s fourth most populous country.

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Source: TechCrunch

The post Alibaba commits to Lazada with fresh $2bn investment appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.

The company has a running sales counter on its Alizila news website, which details the “gross merchandise volume” that it has fulfilled orders for so far. It’s currently just after noon in China and the company has already surpassed last year’s sales for Singles Day with nearly $18 billion USD in merchandise sold already, about $7 billion of which was sold in the first 30 minutes of the day.

The company reached $17.8 billion in sales by day’s end in 2016 so there’s plenty more orders to be made with just under 12 hours to go.

Singles Day, a Chinese holiday that’s sort of the single person’s response to Valentine’s Day, is, at its core, a day to treat yourself. Alibaba didn’t invent the holiday, but since 2009 they have come to draw the bulk of global attention for the mind-blowing sales they manage to pull off. It’s similar in theory to events like Amazon’s Prime Day, though the scope is much more expansive for Alibaba’s popular Tmall and Taobao online storefronts which offer a number of deals to entice shoppers.

Smashing through last year’s Singles Day sales will obviously be a great signal for the company which has been having a pretty great year already. Alibaba has more than doubled its stock price since this time last year, now sitting on a market cap north of $475 billion.

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Source: Techcrunch

The post Alibaba needed just 12 hours to equal last year’s Single’s Day sales appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.