Alibaba has been launched in Germany

Although more B2B than B2C platform for e-commerce, Alibaba itself is slowly teaching Amazon to fear. The Chinese giant has now also hit the ground in Europe without a whimper. However, he is apparently less interested in local consumers than in global online trading.

Hangzhou 175 km southwest of Shanghai was once described by Marco Polo as the most beautiful and magnificent city in the world. Since the 1980s, it has lost much of its charm because, like Suzhou, the other old imperial city not far from Shanghai, today’s industrial metropolis with over nine million inhabitants has attracted many companies from home and abroad. The Alibaba Group has also been based in Hangzhou since 1999. These include the B2B e-commerce platform Alibaba. com, which he says is the largest in the world, and the online auction house Taobao.