On June 26th, the Tmall Global English website was officially launched. Alibaba plans to double the number of global brands on the Tmall Global platform through its newly established English-language website, and to increase its number of imported brands to 40,000 in three years. To visit Tmall Global Merchant English-Language Website, please click here.
What can TMall Global do for International Stakeholders?
Tmall Global offers services for international brands [1], through its website, brand merchants can understand the entry threshold of the platform and acquire specific services. Currently, Tmall global merchants network covers business models, payment methods, market management, user data ownership and other aspects [2].
Purpose and Feasibility
Tmall global English-Language website will increase convenience and efficiency for cross border brands, but Ali's ambition is not limited to this. The platform has plans to launch versions of the onboarding site in Spanish, Japanese and Korean in the future. In the next five years, the platform plans to cover more than 120 countries and regions.
In fact, Tmall Global has been expanding its brand team for the past two years. So far, Tmall has introduced 77 countries and regions, more than 4,000 categories and more than 20,000 overseas brands into the Chinese market. For 80% of these brands, it was their first time entering the Chinese market. In 2018, the entry of overseas brands accelerated, and the year-on-year growth of new merchants and Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) was 122% and 119% respectively, which is three times the rate of growth seen in general cross-border imports. According to the latest financial analysis released by Aibaba [3], in fiscal year 2019, the transaction scale of the Tmall platform exceeded 2 trillion RMB.
What is Motivating Tmall Global to Expand?
A major reason that Tmall is eager to expand its range of international brands is due to fierce competition among leading players in the industry. Despite TMall Global being the largest cross border ecommerce (CBEC) platform in China, there is fierce competition between Tmall and Kaola (Netease) [4]. It is reported that Kaola (Netease) and Amazon are in talks about a merger and overseas purchase deal, and if the deal is finalized, the market share of Kaola will be very close to Tmall Global.
Thus, domestic competition has forced Alibaba to find or create new markets. Data from China's CBEC monitoring report shows that in the fourth quarter of 2018, the value of retail sales in China's CBEC market reached 114.56 billion RMB, and the number of CBEC users exceeded 100 million by Dec. 2018.
Future Plans
Tmall global will continue to improve its global supply chain and to expand the scope of its global cooperation, and will chase leading products from each region such as European cosmetics, New Zealand honey, Australian dairy products and South Korea skincare products.
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