CII, Alibaba to provide global platform to Indian SMEs

The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Alibaba.com have signed an agreement for building greater engagement of India-China small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

"India is one of the key markets for Alibaba.com. We are confident that the CII and Alibaba.com partnership will support greater business engagement between Indian SMEs to the rest of the world," Timothy Leung, the head of Global Business Development for Alibaba.com said.

The agreement between Alibaba.com and CII is a step forward in forging greater partnerships, engagement between Indian and global business especially amongst Small and Medium Enterprises, Madhav Sharma, Chief Representative (China), the CII said.

Alibaba.com, headed by Jack Ma, is the leading platform for global wholesale trade serving millions of buyers and suppliers around the world. Through Alibaba.com, small businesses can sell their products to companies in other countries.

He further added that with the expertise of Alibaba.com in the digital space, especially on the business-to-business area, and CII through its network of 64 offices in India, with 8000 direct members and more than 100,000 indirect members is confident that it will be able to achieve the objectives of building greater India-China SME engagement.

"This MoU (memorandum of understanding) will provide a good platform for Indian businesses, especially small and medium enterprises to reach out to and explore opportunities in the rapidly growing Chinese market," Naveen Srivastava, the Counsul General of India in Shanghai said.

This, in turn, should also help in not only strengthening trade and economic relations between India and China but may also help in addressing to some extent the trade imbalance that exists, he said.

"There is already an interest in our major export councils to use the Alibaba.com portal to reach out to the large Chinese market. With this new MoU I believe Chinese businesses will in the future have access to a large variety of fine products from India," Srivastava said.

Alibaba.com and CII will collaborate and develop various trade opportunities and online promotions to facilitate greater economic engagement between Indian and Chinese SMEs.

The CII and Alibaba.com will also work jointly towards providing SME trainings, promoting Industry clusters for SMEs in some key business sectors. Alibaba will also work with CII to run their e-certificates programmes in India.