Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba, JD.com offer support for small and medium enterprises to aid in coronavirus recovery

China’s leading e-commerce firms Alibaba and JD.com are offering support for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to help revive the world’s second-largest economy, which is showing signs of recovery after being stricken by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Small and medium businesses (SMEs) are the lifeblood of an economy. If SMEs are alive, then the economy will remain alive,” Daniel Zhang, Alibaba Group chairman and chief executive, said in a staff memo on Tuesday.

“We will deploy the power of commerce and technology that Alibaba has harnessed over the past 20 years to create new supply chains, stimulate new demand, and promote new trade through a series of aggressive measures.”

SMEs, which account for more than 90 per cent of enterprises in the country, are the backbone of China’s economy. Collectively they contribute to about half of all tax revenue, more than 60 per cent of gross domestic product and account for over 80 per cent of urban employment, according to China’s central government.

The need to support SMEs has gained urgency as businesses across China have struggled since the Covid-19 outbreak in January, which prompted the central government to extend the Lunar New Year holiday, restrict travel and transport, and order a number of communities to go into lockdown.

As part of several measures announced on Tuesday, Alibaba will help export-focused SMEs expand into new markets through business-to-business e-commerce platform AliExpress, Alibaba’s Southeast Asian e-commerce subsidiary Lazada and Tmall World. In addition, it will give a subset of these SMEs resource support, fee reductions and fast-track processing to help develop their business in the China market.