Baku, Azerbaijan, May 4
By Huseyn Veliyev – Trend:
Chinese entrepreneur, Founder and Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors of Alibaba Group Jack Yun Ma will visit Azerbaijan, a source on the country’s IT market told Trend May 4.
The source said that the preliminary agreement on this was reached within the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), held in Geneva on April 24-28, 2017.
Taking part in the forum dedicated to the prospects of development of e-commerce in developing countries, Jack Ma called for support to small enterprises in cross-border business. He also noted the importance in ensuring in the future the delivery of ordered goods to any country via online platforms within 72 hours.
The expected visit of Jack Ma to Azerbaijan may take place before the end of this year, noted the source.
Cooperation of the Azerbaijani side with Alibaba Group is being carried out as part of the azexport.az project (Azerbaijan’s e-commerce portal). Currently, information resources of the azexport.az portal are integrated with databases of such big e-commerce websites as Alibaba, eBay and AllBiz.
This means that products of local entrepreneurs, placed on the Azerbaijani portal, get access to the world’s leading trade platforms with a multi-million user audience.
Meanwhile, a project is being implemented in Azerbaijan in the field of e-commerce jointly by Azerpost LLC and the air carrier Silk Way. The project has a regional nature and envisages the organization of logistics of the goods delivery by Silk Way to Azerbaijan via electronic trading platforms of China, as well as sending them to other countries.
According to Azerbaijan’s State Statistics Committee, the volume of Azerbaijan’s retail e-commerce market amounted to 10.1 million manats in 1Q17 that is by 1.7 times more than in the same period of 2016.
(1.7024 manats = $1 on May 4)