Business news

MINSK, 24 March (BelTA) – A delegation of Ant Financial Services Group , a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, led by Alipay Business Development Director for Russia and CIS markets Bogdan Zadorozhny has paid a visit to the central office of the Belarusian Universal Commodity Exchange (BUCE), BelTA learnt from BUCE spokesman Roman Yaniv.

The parties talked over promising areas of cooperation between BUCE and Ant Financial Services in particular and Alibaba Group in general. The parties considered an opportunity to set up a Belarusian pavilion at Tmall Global in cooperation with BUCE. The pavilion will display export proposals from Belarusian leading producers, while BUCE will act as an aggregator of such commercial proposals. According to Bogdan Zadorozhny, if a pavilion of the kind is created, all payments between Belarusian sellers and Chinese clients will be settled via the payment system Alipay. “It is a common practice. In that way we protect the interests of both the sides,” he said.

Public procurement is another promising area of cooperation between BUCE and Alibaba Group. BUCE as an e-commerce operator for public procurement will be able to send applications of Belarusian organizations to Chinese suppliers registered at Alibaba.com. “The move will help considerably expand the number of participants in e-tenders and bids. Thanks to healthy competition between suppliers, procurement contracts will be concluded at a more favorable price,” Roman Yaniv said.

There are also plans to develop cooperation between the BUCE e-commerce platform for industrial and consumer goods and Alibaba Group in the exchange of information on purchase and sales bids. Domestic exporters operating at BUCE will get direct access to bids of Chinese importers, while Chinese companies will get a chance to place their offerings in the BUCE trading system.

The outlined issues will be discussed in detail during the forthcoming visit of Belarus’ government delegation to China. BUCE will be represented at the negotiations with Alibaba Group by Chairman of the Board Arkady Salikov.

Alipay is China’s biggest online payment platform set up by Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma in 2004. The platform serves more than 70% of all online payments in China. In 2015 it made part of Ant Financial Services Group, an affiliate company of the Chinese Alibaba Group.

Tmall Global is an international trading website of Alibaba Group for business-to-consumer (B2C) online retail.