Now that it has absorbed Yahoo China, Jack Ma’s Alibaba wants to be the top search site in China and render the whole Google versus Microsoft fight over China moot.
Alibaba.com CEO Jack Ma said his firm is king of the web in China. His online commerce site Taobao.com has beaten eBay in China and he’s ready to see off Google next, China Daily reported.
Ma spoke in South Korea, and his talk was sprinkled with the kind of feisty comments that would even have Sun CEO Scott McNealy sitting up to take notes:
He said Alibaba.com was over 20 times bigger than e-Bay and has 11 million product listings on its website.
“The game is almost over, finished. I’m not interested in that competition at all,” Ma declared, referring to e-Bay.
“For the search engine, I think Google is very powerful. But it is not that powerful in China now,” said Ma, who founded Alibaba.com in 1999 with 2,000 dollars of capital borrowed from relatives.
Asked to spell out Alibaba.com’s strategy, Ma said: “We win e-Bay, buy Yahoo and stop Google. That is for fun. Competition is for fun.”
Part of Alibaba’s strategy will see Ma’s firm expand operations to South Korea, and then Japan. While Asia will be the company’s focus, they will also attempt to make some inroads into Europe as well. Europe may be a tougher ground to claim, but Ma sees Asia as his:
He accepted that Google and Yahoo were the dominant Internet powers in Europe and the United States, but he said neither was that strong in Asia.
“I call them sharks in the ocean. We are crocodiles in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the Yangtze River, we have more chances than they have.”
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
