Business opportunities for Italian companies on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms

Abstract

As the Covid-19 pandemic is having a great impact on the way businesses operate, adaptation to new economic and social conditions becomes essential to allow survival. The sanitary emergency has given great boost to digitalisation, and e-commerce platforms offer increasingly interesting opportunities to businesses willing to stay competitive in a rapidly changing environment. At the same time, China is emerging as one of the most important markets in the world not only in terms of size and growth, but also in terms of capacity: despite the crisis caused by Covid-19 it remains very attractive for foreign companies. The goal of this dissertation is to outline the main features of one of the world’s leading and fast-growing tech companies, the Chinese Alibaba Group, to understand the role that its e-commerce platforms can have to give to Italian companies strategic business opportunities on the Chinese market. This study reports three successful case studies of Italian cosmetics companies who started to sell their merchandise on Tmall and attempts to investigate the role that platform-based e-commerce will have in the post- pandemic economic recovery, focusing specifically on opportunities for Italian companies on the Chinese online retail market.