Rhea Liu
Alibaba’s premium e-commerce portal, Tmall, is about to set up a new headquarter in Beijing in time for the November “Double 11” celebration, reports industrial blog Huxiu.
Alibaba announced today its “Hangzhou+Beijing dual-center strategy.” The strategy entails the the plan for Tmall in time for the November 11, “Double 11”shopping festival, a particularly important annual event for Taobao and Tmall. The “Double 11” sales event last year generated over RMB 57.1 billion (USD 8.95 billion) revenue in the space of a single day.
It’s reported that Tmall’s offline business branch, Tmall Supermarket, has already moved to Tmall’s temporary Beijing headquarters in the south of Beijing. Staff at Tmall will be able to move into Tmall’s newly acquired office building in Wangjing, North Beijing, as early as June next year.
Tmall also announced today that Beijing would form the basis of their expansion in the offline retailing business. A poster released by Tmall on Weibo this morning reads, “To serve the people of Beijing. More products, faster, better and cheaper: Tmall is coming.”
Tmall used to have its headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. Hangzhou is home to many of China’s light industries including food production, clothing and paper manufacture, which have contributed to Alibaba’s fast development in e-commerce.
An industry analyst commented to Huxiu that a complete relocation to Beijing is impossible for Tmall, considering that 70% of Tmall’s retailers are based in the south of China. An increase in distance will surely hamper effective communication between Tmall and its retailers.
Alibaba’s rival e-commerce platform JD.com is headqurtered in Beijing and had 105 million yearly active users by early this year. Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall combined yearly active users amounted to more than 350 million by early 2015, according to its first quarter earnings report.
