Cooperation with Alibaba
President Park Geun-hye met Ma Yun, chairman of the world’s largest online company Alibaba of China, at the Blue House on August 18. She said to him, “We expect your cooperation such as an electronic transaction distribution system efficiency and product verification services so that small and medium-sized companies in Korea can enter the Chinese online market.”
President Park also said, “If Korea and China relieve the regulations in the digital content sectors including broadcasting, movies, and games, and expand mutual investments and interactions, we will be able to achieve outcomes early and widen the scope of cultural exchanges. We ask Alibaba to play an important role for all of this.”
President Park mentioned General Secretary Xi Jinping’s visit to Korea in July and added, “Economic cooperation between Korea and China has been primarily led by manufacturing businesses so far, but we both agreed to expand our cooperation to services industries as well and to penetrate each country’s domestic market. Chairman Ma’s visit is a very crucial step towards this.
Chairman Ma answered, “I completely agree with President Park. The reason for my visit to Korea this time is to implement specific action plans for the agreement of the summit, especially to revive the domestic market.”
Alibaba, established by Chairman Ma in 1999, has been number one for seven years since it reached a market share of 80 percent in the Chinese electronic transaction market in 2007. Alibaba is the world’s biggest electronic transaction company with 250 trillion won (US$245 billion) in annual sales revenue and 23,000 employees.