Alibaba to Launch Internet Commerce Bank Amid Piracy Scandal

MOSCOW, January 29 (Sputnik), Ekaterina Blinova — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the Chinese e-retail giant, has announced it will launch its new Internet commerce bank in May 2015; meanwhile, the company is facing harsh criticism from China's commerce regulators for being soft on piracy and distributing fake products.

"This week could well go down as a turning point for high-flying e-commerce giant Alibaba, whose growing war of words with a top government agency is quickly becoming a major scandal. The increasingly heated exchange has almost completely overshadowed the latest media reports that say Alibaba’s financial arm is preparing to launch a bank later this year," Forbes pointed out.

China's State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) accused the giant of being "soft on piracy," and blasted Alibaba's Taobao.com market platform for selling non-authentic goods.

"The SAIC's sample test showed that only 37.25 percent of surveyed commodities sold onthe website were authentic, lower than a 58.7-percent average of major online shopping platforms," the People's Daily, a Chinese media outlet, reported.

Taobao.com has immediately given an official response pointing out the SAIC report's inaccuracies and insisting that "the sample [examined by the SAIC] was too small compared to the website's one billion commodity categories."

Experts note that Alibaba's e-commerce business has been affected negatively by the SAIC's reports, with it stocks dipping 4.4 percent below $100 mark. At the same time, Forbes suggests that the slide Alibaba's stock is currently facing has not been actually triggered by the SAIC's exposures.

According to Doug Young, a Forbes' expert, the giant's stock was previously overvalued and "is due for a longer-term correction over the next 6 months that could see it re-approach the $68 level of its IPO price."

It is unlikely though that the scandal will slow down the steady growth of the Chinese e-commerce corporation. Zhejiang-based Alibaba’s financial unit, Ant Financial, has announced it would launch the Zhejiang Internet Commerce Bank in May 2015.

Earlier this month, Alibaba received a permission from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) to develop customer credit information services, ValueWalk reported. Ant Financial's new Sesame Credit agency, will evaluate customers creditworthiness, using Alibaba's enormous data base comprising information of 300 million "real-name" users and 37 million registered firms.

It should be noted that since 2014, Alibaba's unit Ant Financial has been rapidly attracting hundreds of millions of customers often "underserved" by China's larger banks, ValueWalk stresses. The media outlet emphasizes that Ant Financial offers various services, including personal banking, wealth management, small business loans, payment processing, personal credit and insurance.