News about Alibaba.com going IPO is a franticness in town these days especially in the B2B circle. I also read a lot of reports about Alibaba.com on newspapers. But most of the news look barely scratching the surface. They cover basically the economic valuation of the company. Because I am not a financial professional, so I don’t have any empirical base to support my doubt on the ratios and numbers. I then trust the accounting justification is professional and creditable.

But when it comes to B2B strategy, market, technology, practice; alright, I have something to say.

On the business level, I want to start commenting a speculation about whether or not Alibaba will extend its core online business to offline trade show. Yes, I think they should do trade show. It is a natural step for Alibaba to push the envelope. And I will be surprised if Alibaba drops this idea.

The reason is simple. A complete B2B media portfolio includes trade show, trade publication, and web. All channels share the same group of customers. Let me give you an example. An exhibitor who exhibits in a trade show will usually buy ads on a relevant trade magazine. They also do online advertising to enhance the effectiveness for leads generation and conversion. This is a typical integrated media buy for a B2B marketing plan. Since the key competitor, Global Sources, is in the first mover position to provide this integrated B2B service, Alibaba should react to the competition.

Besides, there are issues of business communications, barriers on languages, etc, in the context of sourcing in China and selling in the overseas markets, people do need to have face to face communications before closing the deals. The norm is not going to change in any time soon.

As a matter of fact, Alibaba has been partnering with many trade show organizers for quite some time now. In fact not only Alibaba, almost all the online sourcing portals are working with different trade show organizers. Global Sources even started its trade show business and is doing very well. Alibaba has a very good base of online suppliers who can be converted as the trade show exhibitors. It also has a very good online traffics to be converted as the trade show buyers.

And when we look at the current Global Sources business result, trade show business can have a significant contribution on revenue. Trade show is an effective vehicle to drive revenue growth. A comprehensive model serves the customers better. Go offline is a natural path for Alibaba to complete its B2B business portfolio.

On the technology level, in my opinion Alibaba has better edge over other competitors in this region. If you have been following Alibaba for long enough over the years, you will find a big improvement on its online features before and after the Yahoo era. Now Alibaba.com and Yahoo.com share a lot of similarities on the usability design. So my wise guess is, Alibaba has inherited from Yahoo for many know-hows that improve its technical capability.

One more indicator. If you do a site search on Google and look at how many Alibaba.com pages have been crawled and indexed, the SERP reveals Alibaba has better and carefully designed website and content architecture, which outperforms its competitors on search engine visibility and popularity. Nowadays we all know buyer experience starts on the web and the most effective channel for leads generation is the organic traffic. It is very important to be found online.

In my previous posts, I talked about the online portals have better advantage over other traditional B2B media in terms of marketing technology; and in general their marketing practice are more analytical with better understanding on data mining and profiling. In view of the competition among the Sourcingizers, since the offline business model is pretty static, the winning card will go to the online value-added service integration. Alibaba has a rich product mix, so in my theory, they have better competitive edge if they manage to have a good vertical integration.

What I have just written has nothing to do with Alibaba. But if you consider yourself as a competitor of Alibaba, this article is for you. It is my observation for your future competition. And no matter how perfect or oligopolistic the competition will be, it is always good to prepare for the changing business landscape.

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