As Alibaba founder Jack Ma announced earlier, the Chinese tech giant is launching the first overseas expansion of its electronic World Trade Platform and will make Malaysia a regional fulfilment hub.

 

Alibaba Cloud is key to that plan, providing the infrastructure and training to make the venture a success. Alibaba will also soon open a data centre in Malaysia and is already making strategic partnerships with local companies. Rian Maelzer  reports from Kuala Lumpur.

 

Alibaba Cloud announces a partnership with Fusionex, an up and coming local company specializing in Big Data Analytic, the Internet of Things and Artificial intelligence all areas Alibaba Cloud is geared to enable.

 

Alibaba Cloud will soon set up a data centre in Malaysia to support the creation of Alibaba Group's first e-fulfilment hub outside of China, under its electronic world trade platform.

 

RAYMOND MA, REGIONAL HEAD ALIBABA CLOUD "We mainly take the tech part, to build up the infrastructure, the data centre, the content delivery network, to support the whole project can run smoothly on the platform and the second part is that we also have the responsibility to support the EWTP to train those smes talent to let them have the capability to adopt our technology."

 

IVAN TEH, CEO FUSIONEX "We believe that combining our strengths with Alibaba's advanced and sophisticated technology we will be able to cater to a wide and large audience, whether it's a smart city initiative, whether it's a smarter bank or fin-tech, whether it's a smarter e-commerce platform, whether it's going to be artificial intelligence. And we want to be able to scale that with Alibaba Cloud."

 

While Alibaba Group will make Malaysia a hub to expand its businesses and services across Southeast Asia, it's far from alone in targeting this market.

 

RIAN MAELZER KUALA LUMPUR "Aside from global giants like Amazon, China's second largest e-commerce company behind Alibaba, JD.com, already has a foothold in Indonesia and plans to use Thailand as a hub to service other parts of Southeast Asia."

 

Alibaba, though, got a jump on its Chinese rival by purchasing leading regional e-commerce firm Lazada. And through initiatives like Alibaba Cloud, its training programmes, and tie- ups like this one with Fusionex, Alibaba is looking to quickly put down deep roots in this region. Rian Maelzer, CGTN, Kuala Lumpur