Sunday, October 28, 2007

Contrary views on Alibaba

Once the IPO is obviously a cracking success, it seems to be becoming increasingly de rigeur to post clever-clever dumps on Alibaba. However, the China Law Blog is always workth reading and I would commend this post to you titled "I Hate Alibaba (The Website, Not the Company)". The basic theme is thus:


But then I think about all the harm Alibaba has caused to so many Western SMEs and I change my mind about calling my broker/brother. Alibaba makes the naive think China sourcing is easy. I realize blaming Alibaba for the mistakes companies make in using its site is really not fair to Alibaba, but at the same time, I do not see much use for the site beyond its serving as a really good directory of potential manufacturers of particular products.
Many would disagree and the real 'secret' value of the company would seem to me to lie in the subscriber base for the Chinese site and not the glorified yellow pages which is the Alibaba.com English site they are writing about here.

However, let 100 flowers bloom and then try to get your hands on some Alibaba shares. They're surely going to pop quite gloriously. "Then what?" is anybody's guess.

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