Jack Ma is helping Lazada grow

Alibaba founder, chairman, and former CEO Jack Ma. His company, valued at US$230 billion, paid US$1 billion in April to take a controlling stake in Lazada. Photo credit: Asia Society.

China’s Alibaba has been quiet on its Southeast Asia ambitions since it acquired Lazada back in April. But now Jack Ma’s company has outlined a couple of the ways it’s guiding Lazada and seeking to build up the Amazon-esque site in the region.

Alibaba and Lazada will team up to offer “ecommerce training” to 30,000 small businesses in Thailand in order “to aid their access to both domestic and international ecommerce platforms,” said the Chinese company in a statement. This will bring more vendors onto both Lazada and Alibaba’s Chinese stores, which are open marketplaces for sellers of all sizes.

A Lazada van in Indonesia. Photo credit: Lazada.

Jack Ma, Alibaba’s co-founder and chairman, announced the move alongside Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak as they toured the firm’s campus in Hangzhou, China.

Small businesses are a big part of Jack Ma’s ‘religion’.

Lazada operates in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand. It’s the largest pan-Southeast Asian online store, chasing the region’s small but quickly growing ecommerce market. Online shopping in those six countries will hit US$14 billion in 2016, with Thailand’s shoppers alone ringing up US$2.9 billion. An analyst at Emarketer foresees “healthy double-digit growth over the next four years, with the total for those markets more than doubling by 2020.”

However, poor roads, decrepit railways, inefficient delivery networks, and nightmarish customs processes are among the numerous things holding back ecommerce across much of Southeast Asia, according to a 2015 report by AT Kearney and the CIMB ASEAN Research Institute.

Building bridges

Ma is helping Lazada replicate how he built up his China marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall, in the early days – by educating business owners on how their small operations can reach shoppers across the region – or even globally – by going online. And in playing the politician, he’s seeking to persuade Thailand’s government that ecommerce is a job creator.

Small businesses are a big part of Jack Ma’s “religion,” he explained in 2010. He believes “small is beautiful” and that Alibaba’s raison d’être is to be a medium for vendors to sell directly to consumers. Now, for the first time, it’s clear that Jack Ma’s fanaticism is being applied to Lazada.

Lazada boss Maximilian Bittner. He built up Lazada as part of the Rocket Internet empire before the Alibaba sale. Photo credit: Lazada.

“Since the founding of our company 17 years ago, Alibaba’s vision has always been about empowering small businesses and young people, particularly those in developing nations,” said Ma yesterday, returning to his motif.

In return for the nod from the Thai government, Ma and Alibaba have vowed “to strengthen the competitiveness of Thailand’s [small and medium-sized enterprises] and help them succeed in an increasingly digital era” as part of the government’s task-force to get Thailand’s firms to export more goods.

Alibaba and Lazada also promised to share “their experience and expertise with Thailand Post” to boost the state-owned firm.

While these aren’t very concrete first steps for Lazada’s new era under Alibaba stewardship, Ma knows that his deft politicking builds bridges and smooths roads – albeit only figurative ones.

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