Weeks after Alibaba Group, Chinese conglomerate, decided to temporary shut all its India investments in order to revamp the strategy, it is now planning to launch its first fully owned e-commerce business this fiscal in the country.
According to sources, the Group would launch this through its subsidiary UCWeb.
Huaiyuan Yang, Vice President at UCWeb Global Business, said that the company’s planned foray in ecommerce space will not have an adverse impact on Paytm, in which Alibaba owns 30.15 percent stake. Alibaba Group own 3 percent stake in Snapdeal.
“We have Alibaba’s ecommerce gene in us. We are actually trying to start innovative business model related to ecommerce. We are going to launch a new ecommerce product in India this year,” Yang added.
Alibaba Group was founded by 18 people led by Jack Ma in 1999. Its businesses are comprised of core commerce, cloud computing, digital media and entertainment, and innovation initiatives.
“Ecommerce is very vast business. There are various part of ecommerce business and several products. UC will choose section according to our business. We will partner with the right players and we will not compete with them (Paytm),” Yang further said.
UCWeb’s UC Browser claims to have registered 1.1 billion user downloads worldwide (excluding China) with half of its global installs from India. It also claims to have 130 million monthly active users in the country.
Apart form Alibaba, other big giants in the similar category include Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Priceline, Otto, Shopify sites, etc.