Jack Ma Says Alibaba Has No Plans To Invade America, It's The Other Way Around

Chinese online retail billionaire Jack Ma has been all over the U.S. business press in the last couple of days, kicking off a transcon journey to shake hands with small-biz America and penning an op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal about how Alibaba’s expansion plans do not include an invasion of the U.S. market. Rather, the executive chairman of Alibaba wants U.S. businesses to use Alibaba, already the world’s busiest platform for buyers and sellers online, to sell into China.

He’s a stellar pitchman. In remarks today at the Economic Club of New York, Ma started off by asking the crowd of around 300 to raise their hands if they’ve ever bought or sold anything on Alibaba. No one raised their hand. He then asked who’s been to China. Most hands went up (this was an unrepresentative sample of Americans, a third of whom lack a passport). There’s a huge gap between BABA and what people know about BABA, even though Alibaba pulled off the largest global IPO in history and sells more goods by gross value than Amazon and eBay combined.

Ma laid out the big vision for Alibaba: $1 trillion in gross merchandise value on a global, single, transparent place for anyone to sell anything to anyone in China (and, eventually elsewhere, but mostly in China).  ”In America, e-commerce is commerce. In China, it’s a lifestyle,” said Ma. “More than 500 million people will be middle class in China in five years. And they will want good products and services, many of which they can’t get now… China must learn how to buy not just import.”

Ma clarified what makes Alibaba different from Amazon and eBay, which is its “asset-light” strategy (to borrow an unfortunately coined Enron term). It has one billion items for sale, 10 million sellers, 350 million buyers and arranges for 30 million shipments a day but, says Ma, “we don’t buy or sell anything. We don’t own warehouses. We manage them for other people. We don’t ship anything, leaving that up to partners.” Ma calls it “playing ping-pong” compared with the game of basketball played by the U.S. majors Amazon and eBay.