Jack Ma, the richest man in China, with a net worth of $19.5 billion, wants Alibaba to say ‘open sesame’ and sell more Indian goods in China. The 50-year-old e-commerce billionaire was in India last week as a part of a 100-member delegation from China.

Ma’s Alibaba is not new to Indian sellers. The marketplace platform has been working with Indian companies for over 15 years on business-to-business transactions.

Alibaba’s Indian website lists over 13 lakh suppliers. And Ma says that Indian companies are the second-largest sellers on Alibaba after Chinese firms. Products from small Indian businesses — which sell spices, chocolate and tea — are bought by over four lakh Chinese customers.

But Ma does not want to add to India’s huge trade deficit with China — $36.2 billion as of 2013-14 — but rather reduce this.

So rather than focus on bringing Chinese goods into India, Ma wants to take the road less travelled — taking Indian goods to China. This strategy makes sense — China’s e-commerce market is pegged at over $500 billion, while India’s is just $10 billion.

Big potential For Indian firms, listing on Alibaba could open the doors to a huge potential. Alibaba Group websites accounted for 80 per cent of China’s online sales as of September 2014. The company set a record by selling $9 billion worth of goods on a single day — China’s Singles’ Day — on November 11, 2014. The Indian equivalent of this online sale is the Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF).

The last GOSF in December 2013 saw two million visitors over four days.

Alibaba, which was valued at $160 billion during its IPO in September 2014, sold merchandise worth $296 billion in the year to June 2014.

This compares with a valuation of $7 billion for Flipkart, which sold goods worth $1 billion in the year to March 2014. Alibaba has 8.9 million active sellers on its platform, compared with 50,000 sellers each on Flipkart and Snapdeal.

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