Alibaba Gateway ’17 Day 1 Takeaways

Executive Summary

• The Fung Global Retail & Technology team is at the Alibaba Gateway ’17 event in Detroit, Michigan. This inaugural conference, which attracted over 3,000 attendees, is the largest event Alibaba has hosted outside of China. Alibaba Gateway aims to help small- to medium-sized businesses in the US to better understand the China opportunity and enable them to sell into China via Alibaba’s various platforms.
• Jack Ma, the Founder and Chairman of Alibaba, believes that the biggest global economic driver for the next several decades is going to be the Chinese consumer market. Every American business should think about selling into China. Various Alibaba executives reiterated the company’s US strategy, which is to become the go-to platform for US businesses of all sizes to sell into China. It is part of Ma’s commitment to creating 1 million jobs in the US.
• Taobao.com and Tmall.com are two Alibaba-operated platforms that can enable US brands and retailers to sell into China. For small- to medium-sized business with little China experience, Taobao is the platform to supply to Alibaba’s wholesale partners who will distribute their products to China. For large brands, the branded marketplace Tmall offers an opportunity for brands and retailers to operate their own flagship stores on the site and leverage the large volume of traffic.