Alibaba hosts offline sourcing event

BANGALORE, INDIA: Alibaba.com Limited, small business e-commerce company, today announced that it has hosted an offline sourcing event in New Delhi this week to provide small Indian suppliers with an opportunity to connect with EUROGROUP, one of the largest buying offices in Asia for four retailers from Europe.

The event was attended by about 60 Alibaba.com Gold Supplier customers in India from across sectors such as household products, garden tools, granite tiles, electronics items, and food and personal care products, said a press release.

Held from 28-29 June, the two-day sourcing event aimed to promote made-in-India products to the European market by connecting high-quality Indian suppliers directly to EUROGROUP, which represents some of the largest European retailers which together have a customer reach of 38 million people spanning Central Europe, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

“This is the first time that Alibaba.com has held an offline sourcing event in India after we recognized the need of Indian suppliers to interact with prospective customers globally,” said Vincent Wong, Senior Director of Buyer Service and Development, Alibaba.com.

He added that these buyers are looking for high-quality and competitively priced products. They believe that Indian small businesses have the capabilities to meet the exacting global standards and they are keen to provide their Indian members with the ideal platform to network and conduct business with large buyers from around the world.

“We want to expand our supplier base to bring more innovative products to our customers. India has emerged as a leading supplier market and the appreciating Chinese yuan and increasing labour cost in China are giving Indian suppliers an added advantage,” said Robert Kronhofer, deputy managing director, EUROGROUP Far East Ltd.

The event was an initiative of Alibaba.com’s Buyer Service and Development team, which caters specifically to big corporations with large-scale procurement needs such as P&G, Wal-Mart and Woolworths Australia.

The team provides those big buyers with a myriad of services and user-friendly tools ranging from online supplier matching to online promotion, sourcing training and customized private sourcing events, the release added.