Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is open to working with EBay Inc.s PayPal to expand payment options after shoppers bought a record amount of merchandise during the Chinese companys annual Singles Day promotion.
Alibabas financial affiliate Zhejiang Ant Small & Micro Financial Services Group Co. is the owner of Alipay and controlled by founder Jack Ma.
The company is already talking with Apple Inc. about payments and may collaborate with PayPal in the future, Vice Chairman Joseph Tsai said in an interview today. Alibaba sold more than 45.7 billion yuan ($7.5 billion) of goods within 19 hours of the promotion kicking off, eclipsing last years record.
Less than two months after completing the biggest initial public offering ever, Chinas largest e-commerce operator is setting its sights on global expansion as it seeks to attract international merchants and consumers for its platforms. Its financial affiliate is the biggest payments processor in China and also has 17.9 million active users overseas in more than 100 countries.
If you look at our footprint of being the largest online payment company in China, and PayPals position of having a very good international position, not just in the U.S. but also in some other countries, these are some complementary footprints, Tsai said today in Hangzhou, China.
EBay is splitting off PayPal to create two independent companies in 2015. The split may value PayPal at $47 billion, applying a multiple of 1.8 times trailing 12-month revenue -- similar to Amazon.com Inc.s -- to EBays marketplaces and advertising businesses, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Praveen Menon and Paul Sweeney said last month.
Merchandise sold today by Alibabas platforms is more than the $5.29 billion of U.S. online sales from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday in 2013, the company said. The company using 27,000 labels to attract shoppers, including Calvin Klein, Costco Wholesale Corp. and American Eagle Outfitters Inc.
Singles Day, a Chinese twist on Valentines Day, was invented by students in the 1990s, according to the Communist Party-owned Peoples Daily. When written numerically, the date is reminiscent of bare branches, the Chinese expression for single people.
