Wednesday, July 18, 2007

In praise of Taobao

Xinhua has put out a piece today which originates in the Shanghai Daily (although I suppose the two things amount to pretty much the same thing). It reports that Alibaba Group's taobao.com auction site "has nearly tripled transaction volume in the first half to 15.7 billion yuan (US$2 billion)". It says this is because people are getting more used to shopping online.

iResearch data is quoted putting Taobao's market share 72.2%. The report goes on to say that "
Average daily trading volume on the site in May and June exceeded 100 million yuan - equal to peak times in 2006 when such big transactions spiked only during festivals such as Christmas, the weeklong May Day holiday and National Day holiday".

Once the Alibaba.com IPO is behind them, perhaps the gurus in Hangzhou can start to figure out how to make some money out of all this market dominance.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dear Paul,

Ali Baba will bring bad karma due to its responsibility in the oncoming extinction of sharks. It would be best to avoid them altogether.

Ila France Porcher