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Two Chinese companies are tapping Chinas provinces and using e-commerce to help foster businesses and find customers. Alibaba.com is an e-business site that matches buyers and suppliers over the Web. Haolaiwu Textiles, a small company that makes and sells curtains, is one of the 3.6 million registered users. It found its first foreign buyer within three months of joining Alibaba and has grown from 20 employees to over 80. Alibaba, founded by Jack Ma, targets small enterprises and individuals rather than sophisticated multinational corporations, and many have little experience on the Internet. To that end, Alibaba offers Alicollege, designed to teach the ways of e-business, and Alifest, a big off-line gathering of its customers. Huawei, Chinas leading provider of telecoms equipment, used a similar strategy to Alibaba in that it started its operations in Chinas provinces and worked its way up from there. It bypassed Chinas big cities and instead set up shop in Heilongjiang province where it employed over 200 people in the towns and small cities were their equipment was sold. From there, the company grew, venturing to Algeria and Iraq and eventually making incursions into prosperous markets such as British Telecoms recent contract to build its 21st-century network. Huawei also helps its less experienced customers with task such as formulating business plans.
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Information Sources, Inc.
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