Alibaba CFO gets an Orange heart

Posted by Aliuser on Sep 16, 2008 in Alibaba Hong Kong

Joseph Tsai, Chief Financial Officer of Alibaba Group told Aliuser that his favorite colour was blue. Yet his heart was orange- Alibaba’s corporate color is “Orange” indeed!!

The comments came after Aliuser got a chance to speak to Mr Tsai before the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Mr Tsai also delved the group’s future strategy, focusing more on infrastructure and technology development. He noted that Alibaba group was rarely seen as a technology-related company now, but it was the corporate vision to get a top ranking in this respect.

During the casual meeting, Mr Tsai explained that the merger of Taobao.com and Alimama.com would be ‘win-win’ for both parties. As Alimama’s online advertising model has lots of synergy with Taobao’s users and database profile, it could help Taobao’s shop owners to post and manage their advertising online.

In response to the latest decision of blocking search engine Baidu indexing Taobao shops and products in China, Mr Tsai said Taobao has already established a reputation for C2C eCommerce, he expected users would come to Taobao.com directly but not through Baidu.

Things are getting more interesting as Chinese portal Sohu.com, 51.com and Xiaonei have reportedly blocked Baidu from conducting searches of their sites. Anita Davis has more to tell in her report.

Preceding experiences have told us that the relationship between eBay and Google has turned sour as they collided to each other in business development. Would history be repeated itself in the East?

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