While e-commerce giant Alibaba is enjoying the largest IPO in history today, it’s B2B e-commerce model struggles to find a foothold in what should be a natural jumping off point in its international expansion–India.
Alibaba is not along in giving the sub-continent the could should–though international players like Amazon and Walmart have made much publicized moves on the market this year, local payers such as Snapdeal and Flipkart have seem curiously uninteresting in this area, reports Business Standard.
Alibaba united the fragmented retail markets of China under one banner, but the $300 billion B2B retail Industry has no such clear organizing forces and it instead is a loose network of various brick-and-mortar depots. Regulatory uncertainty and infrastructure problems within India also work to dissuade large investments in the B2B market.