Jack Ma delivers a speech during the Business 20 summit in Hangzhou, China, on September 3, as part of the G20 summit. Photo: Zuma Press

Alibaba is run by China’s richest man Jack Ma and is the world’s biggest online shopping company. It’s often referred to as the Amazon of China but as the Chinese already know, it’s much more than that.

As Maggie Zhou, Alibaba Australia and New Zealand managing director, explained to the Sydney China Business Forum on Monday, it also offers China’s version of YouTube, music, travel services, restaurant reviews and a platform to order takeaway food.

“It’s like a lifestyle,” Ms Zhou said.

Alibaba launched in Australia six months ago and now offers local businesses access to its products, which reach hundreds of millions of users in China and other countries.

While it’s still early days for Australian users, Ms Zhou explained how integrated it has become into ordinary people’s lives in China.

Ms Zhou said that e-commerce in western countries was seen as “dessert”, but in China it was considered the “main course”.

In the past 17 years the company has evolved from being an e-commerce platform, to being an “e-commerce ecosystem”.

Ms Zhou said the average user of Alibaba’s mobile Taobao app, which offers online shopping similar to eBay and Amazon in China, launched it seven times per day, and spent more than 25 minutes per day in the app. It has more than 427 million monthly active users, more than the entire population of the US.

The app also acts as a social media platform where buyers can share their recommendations of the products. This year Ms Zhou said its marketing strategy would focus on merchants creating their own content on the platform and chatting with consumers.

Alibaba has leveraged the huge growth in internet users in China to become a place where social interactions happen and is now a portal for commerce and digital entertainment.

Live streaming is a new innovation and a recent event where celebrity Angelababy, known as China’s Taylor Swift, live streamed the new Maybelline lip gloss was watched by five million users.

“10,000 units (were) sold in only two hours,” Ms Zhou said.

Hong Kong actor Angelababy speaks during a press conference for her latest movie Ferryman in Beijing on October 23. Picture: Andy Wong/APSource:AP

On the Tmall website, which has 434 million active users and which is where Chinese and international businesses sell brand name goods to consumers in China and other countries, a live streaming event on the weekend to showcase the latest collections had 1.3 million concurrent viewers. This did not include those who replayed the event afterwards.

Ms Zhou said live streaming was an interesting model for the future but Alibaba is also branching into other areas, including looking at the potential for virtual reality to transform the consumer experience. The company is also looking at ways of integrating its platform with an internet car, further entrenching it into everyday life and helping to develop smarter transportation and smarter cities.

She explained that Alibaba was actually a “dream-driven, value-driven company”, that hoped to become one of the top 10 internet companies in the world.

When it was founded in 1999, its original vision was to make it easier for Chinese companies to do business anywhere in the world, and to build the future infrastructure of commerce. It aimed to be a company that lasted “at least 102 years”.

“Our ambition to support tens of millions of merchants and to serve two billion consumers, it’s huge, it’s big,” Ms Zhou said.

“The globalisation efforts are still just at the very beginning.”

Ms Zhou said the company’s expansion into Australia and New Zealand is seen as an important step, and the company’s goal was to help local businesses trade on its platforms.

Alibaba is no longer a pure e-commerce site, it’s morphing into a lifestyle brand. Picture: Brent Lewin/BloombergSource:Bloomberg

After launching in the country six months ago, Australia is already ranked fourth in sales volume on Tmall Global, Alibaba’s international online platform that allows direct sales to Chinese consumers, behind the United States, Japan and Korea.

“We already have 1300 Australian brands in Tmall and Tmall Global,” Ms Zhou said.

She also noted that for 80 per cent of the businesses using Tmall services, it was their first entry to the Chinese market.

So far the majority of Australian products sold online are focused on wellness, nutrition, lifestyle and fresh food. They include vitamins and supplements, dairy items, breakfast cereals and beauty products.

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Ms Zhou told news.com.au that parenting products, cosmetics and food like meat, abalone and oysters, were “very interesting to Chinese consumers”.

But the platform doesn’t just make it easier for companies to sell to Chinese consumers, it also links them to those in India, South East Asia, Russia and Brazil.

In September, Alibaba signed an agreement with Austrade to help Australian businesses sell products to China using YouKu, one of China’s biggest video sites, through its e-commerce platforms, online payment system Alipay and other businesses.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull joined Jack Ma to witness the signing of the agreement that included a dedicated promotional channel for Australian companies on youku.com, which has 500 million active users.

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And Alibaba is not only just about giving established brands entry to China’s lucrative market, Ms Zhou said Jack Ma’s vision for the future was about empowering small to medium sized businesses.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull meets with Alibaba executive chairman Jack Ma at the Alibaba Xixi campus in Hangzhou, China. Clearly the two have similar goals — they’re wearing the same outfits. Picture: Sanghee LiuSource:News Corp Australia

Alibaba already offers the Tmall supermarket, as a “one-stop service” for consumers so businesses with a small amount of stock can use it to test the water for their products.

Through Taobao Global, Australian companies can supply to resellers via consignment.

“We already have 59 new fashion stores on this platform,” she said.

This year Mr Ma introduced his concept for an Electronic World Trade Platform (eWTP), which aims to set up an open platform for private businesses to focus on the development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It includes co-ordination among international organisations, governments and social groups.

Ms Zhou said Mr Ma’s perspective was that the World Trade Organisation was created last century just for the big companies, but no small to medium sized enterprises could benefit.

“This century we need to build up an electronic world trading platforms, which can enable SMEs, enable the young people.”

She said the concept needed to be led by business and supported by government.

“Jack Ma always said small is beautiful, small is powerful. Because you are small you are fearless, because you are small you dare to challenge, you dare to innovate, you dare to fail so small is beautiful,” she said.

charis.chang@news.com.au