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Chinese e-commerce major Alibaba Group is planning to enter India this year and is looking at opportunities to build the business organically or through other means.
So far, the company had only a passive presence in India, through investment in the Kunal Bahl-backed Snapdeal and Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led One97Communications that operates Paytm.
Alibaba said it is evaluating all opportunities to build the business organically or look at any other thing that might come along. Evans, who along with the group’s Global Managing Director K Guru Gowrappan met Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Friday, said the company plans to come here and work to serve both customers, consumers and small businesses because that is the history and the DNA of Alibaba.
In November 2014, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, who was on his first visit to India, said he would “invest more in India, work with Indian entrepreneurs and Indian technologists to improve the relationship between the two nations”.
Ma, one of the richest persons in China with a fortune of about $24 billion, founded Alibaba in 1999 in Hangzhou, capital of east China’s Zhejiang province. Meanwhile, Prasad also met Asia-Pacific head of Amazon Web Services (Public sector) Peter Moore, who discussed the company’s plans to launch a dedicated cloud region in India later this year.
(With PTI inputs)
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