Alibaba moves into events

They now, of course, have enough money to buy the whole Chinese coal-mining industry (see here if the reference isn't clear to you). So far, however, it seems that our friends at Alibaba are going to stick to their core business and focus on providing B2B media services.

As expected, and frequently denied, the company is already moving into organising events. These may not yet be fully-fledged public trade fairs, but that is surely the logical next step. Thanks to Eddie Choi for pointing me to this link on the Alibaba site regarding a Shenzhen private buyer event for Woolworths next week. It notes "More Big Buyer sourcing events will be announced in the near future".

Mind you, they'll need to get an awful lot of Woolworths buyers into Shenzhen meetings with 220 suppliers to justify a market cap of (as we write) of US$23 billion. Heck, they could probably buy Woolworths, take control of the whole Australian supply chain and still have change to spare.