Alibaba’s AliExpress steps up investment in Spain and South Korea as China’s e-commerce players look for growth overseas

E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding is continuing to expand overseas along with its Chinese peers, as companies look to offset slowing growth at home and bring their technology to new markets.

AliExpress, a retail service launched in 2010 that offers products to international buyers, is targeting growth in Europe and South Korea. The unit held an AliExpress Choice service launch event on Thursday in Spain, where it has been providing a nine-day delivery time for users since the beginning of March.

AliExpress will run as many as nine charter flights per week to Spain, the most among its EU markets aside from Belgium, which is the logistics hub for AliExpress in Europe. It also plans to increase the number of its pick-up points in Spain from the current 5,000 to 7,500 by the end of March.

Gary Topp, AliExpress’s commercial director for Europe, said in an interview with the Post that the company has been “really focused on the basics” in the past year, making sure “they have the widest selection of products in the market”, to compete with other peers that “specialise in a certain category”.

“We’ll be investing a lot in the user experience, including logistics, also free returns, paying by instalments, product selection and quality, and guaranteed prices,” said Topp. “This is really our main direction for the year … retail basics.”

AliExpress said it will invest 100 billion South Korean won (US$76.2 million) in South Korea this year to improve logistics, the user experience and price-performance ratio of its products. Its daily active users in the country increased by more than 60 per cent year-on-year last month, according to Ray Zhang, AliExpress South Korea general manager.