Alibaba Plans to Expand Business in Russia - Senior Official

HANGZHOU (Sputnik) — Alibaba, China's biggest e-commerce group, plans to expand its business in Russia, Director General for Alibaba Russia Mark Zavadsky said on Monday.

"Of course, we are planning to expand our presence in Russia, on different directions. First, we are planning to work much more with local Russian companies," Zavadsky told reporters. 

He recalled that in June, at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) head of Alibaba Group Jack Ma outlined the strategy of the company's development in Russia. The strategy includes three phases, the first one is goods shipment from China to Russia.

"Here, we have already succeeded sufficiently. The second phase is the delivery… [within] Russia. These are [both] Russian goods and those Chinese products, which are delivered as a B2B to partnership depots, and continue their way across Russia. We have such pilot projects — a number of our major vendors import top seller to Russia in the B2B format, and then sell it from the depots in Russia, and thus, the delivery becomes faster," Zavadsky specified, adding that the third stage of development deals with the the delivery from Russia worldwide.

In September, the company will launch a pilot project which will allow the Russian companies to send goods to China under the simplified customs clearance, Zavadsky recalled.

Alibaba, founded in 1999, includes multiple online shopping websites, such as Taobao, AliExpress and Tmall. According to the company’s statistics, last year ended in March Alibaba’s revenue amounted to more than $15.3 billion.