An Ad. on Facebook

Today I found this when I was on facebook .com, a social relation website.

This picture is not very clear, but you can click on it to get a full size.

The text is in French, its meaning is contact millions of supplier ,24 hours / 24, 7 days / 7, and this Ad. belongs to alibaba.com, a Chinese Internet firm.

You may never heard of this firm. Actually it's currently the leader of the B2B e-commerce market, its founder, Ma Yun, was a famous person in China.

Alibaba.com is founded with other e-business websites like 8848.net, joyo.com,eachnet.com during the Internet bubble in 1999, now the original 8848.net has disappeared and now it has been transformed as a alibaba-like website, joyo.com and eachnet.com have been bought respectively by Amazon.com and ebay.com, the two American giant who want to get into the Chinese market rapidly. But Alibaba.com, with its well chosen strategy on the B2B market,survived through ths Internet crisis in 2000, and now as the importance of Chines market is increasing, alibaba.com is becoming a star among the IT companies, Yahoo! has became its biggest shareholder, and on its first day of IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, its shares has soared 192.6%. In China, alibaba.com 's Ad.is placed after the very famous News of 7 o'clock on CCTV, the central television station, it's CEO, Ma Yun, is being invited everywhere for interview.

But why did alibaba.com make such a success? In my opinion, it's because it's genius strategy of aiming the B2B market. China is known for its enormous manufacturing industry, and lots of manufacturing firms lack information, especially in the inland area, so that it is difficult for them to find a international buyer. Now as the appearance of services proposed by the firms like alibaba.com, they can get contact with the buyers all around world, and these Chinese companies are willing to pay for that. Of course this is not all of the reason of alibaba.com's success, but for me it is the most important one. Not as another star of China's IT firms, baidu.com, which has been criticized for copying its American competitor Google's ideas, alibaba.com is leading the market with its own way, and it has the incomparable advantage in the face of overseas competitor, the proximity of Chinese market. Now it's trying to enter the American and European markets, as you see, this Ad. on facebook.com, so just don't be too surprised if someday you found yourself around by Chinese companies.