Alibaba Ignores Paytm & Decides To Launch A Fully-Owned Ecommerce Business In India Via UCWeb

We have received an official statement from UCWeb on this news:

“This is with reference to the news reports that Alibaba Group is to launch an e-commerce business in India. We would like to clarify that the new service is in fact a business initiative undertaken by UCWeb. Rather than competing with other e-commerce players, the new initiative would adopt a content platform model for promoting and supporting e-commerce players in India. Leveraging our extensive user communities in India, the new service is in line with our strategy to enrich the experience for users and clients alike.”

Earlier..

According to reports, Alibaba group is planning to enter in e-commerce domain through UCWeb.

As we know UCWeb is owned by the Alibaba Group. Their main product is UC Browser, a web browser developed by the Singapore/China-based mobile internet company UCWeb. It is the fourth most popular mobile browser in the world by market share, after Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, as of December 2018.

Alibaba Group Holding Limited is a Chinese multinational company specializing in e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology. It was reported in 2018 that Alibaba’s single day sale equaled India’s entire e-commerce market. 

Plans for Future

As reported by ET, Alibaba owned UCWeb is planning to build a recommendation engine which will show product listing along with the company’s existing offerings like videos.

The Vice President of UCWeb Global Business said that their firm is looking to partner with e-commerce firms such as Flipkart and Paytm Mall for the services and launching it within this year.

He added that “We will integrate products from different platforms which people can browse through and share, but if people have to make an actual purchase, the engine will lead them to the actual website for the purchase to happen,”. 

Earlier there was also a news coming in for American multinational company Apple is to launch its online portal in India.

No Plans To Dive In Payments Space

Yang said that the company has no immediate plans to swoop into the payments space.He said that this new venture will not have any adverse effect on Paytm in which the company owns 30.15% stake. They also own 3% stake in Snapdeal.

Since 2009, UCWebs UC Browser is available in India. It claims to have 130 million monthly active users in India. Out of total, half of its installs is from India, while it claims to have registration for 1.1 billion users downloads worldwide excluding China.

He also said their company’s mission is to connect with the half of the world’s population, India is the main market for them as 30-40% of the population is connected with the internet. He added that “There is a lot of focus on videos now. We are trying to provide content in many local languages to the local users apart from the 15 languages we already offer.”

Company Plans On Data Localization and Monitoring

He added that the company will fully comply with the government’s policy of data localization and they have already started to store most of the Indian user’s data locally in India. He informed that the company is having a close partnership with 120,000 bloggers/content creators and has 700 media organizations on its platform.

He said that “We take privacy and data security very seriously and are serving users across the globe, we will follow all the government guidelines and the majority of the data is already stored in India and is encrypted end to end while transmission”. He also added that the user’s data is only transmitted when they access websites or applications which are hosted outside of India.

About government’s concern on monitoring content on platforms like social media, Yang said that their company uses a mix of machine and manual auditing to ensure such content is not get posted on its website.