China's Alibaba Announces Purchase of U.S. Auctiva

The acquisitions will add more than 250,000 customers to its overall business, and create access to 7 billion U.S. dollars’ business opportunities annually.

Alibaba.com, world’s largest online business-to-business trading platform for small businesses, said Wednesday it had agreed to buy U.S. software developer Auctiva for an undisclosed sum to boost its presence overseas.

This is Alibaba’s second overseas purchase of its kind this year. Alibaba acquired another e-commerce company Vendio Service in June, which owns more than 80,000 online sellers with a annual sales volume of 2 billion U.S. dollars.

Auctiva, which sells tools to help businesses list their products on eBay, currently owns 170,000 active online sellers whose turnover exceeds 5 billion U.S. dollars annually.

Alibaba said the acquisition of Auctiva, together with Vendio, was part of a 100-million-dollar investment plan for AliExpress, which was officially launched in April. The wholesale transaction platform was designed to help small businesses boost online cross-border trading.

Both of the two acquisitions are beginning of Alibaba’s overseas expansion, the company said, adding that its ten-year-strategy is to transfer from “selling Chinese products worldwide” to “selling global products globally.”

The acquisitions will add more than 250,000 customers to its overall business, and create access to 7 billion U.S. dollars’ business opportunities annually, according to Wei Zhe, chief executive of Alibaba.com.

Ablibaba reported yesterday that the first-half net profit jumped 39.8 percent from a year earlier to 693 million yuan and revenue for the first six months stood at 2.59 billion yuan.