Executive Summary

The Coresight Research team was in Hangzhou, China on September 23-24 for Alibaba Group’s annual two-day investor event. These are the key insights from day one of the event:

• Tmall wants to help brand owners launch new sub brands and products exclusively for Tmall consumers by using new media, including social media, short videos, live streaming and higher quality content.
• Tmall is moving to Tmall Flagship Store 2.0 by helping brands and merchants to better manage consumers, accelerate digitalization and drive new growth by improving the connection between online and offline, allowing open source and launching new mini programs.
• In early September, Alibaba paid $2 billion to acquire online import platform Kaola. Alibaba plans to operate a “dual brand” model with Alibaba tapping into Kaola’s huge user base.
• As part of Alibaba Group’s globalization strategy, AliExpress links products, which are not only limited to Chinese products, to consumers outside China. The platform is powered by Alibaba technology and offers features such as country-specific personalization. In the future, Alibaba wants to help SMEs around the world to sell products to different countries.