The World Trade Organisation has officially roped in Chinese online retail giant Alibaba's founder Jack Ma to champion the cause of liberalisation of the e-commerce sector. A trilateral initiative between the WTO, Jack Ma's recently started Electronic World Trading Platform (eWTP) and the World Economic Forum for 'enabling e-commerce' was launched on Monday at the on-going Eleventh Ministerial Conference (MC 11) in Buenos Aires.
"We want to share our experience on how e-commerce can benefit small companies. Alibaba was launched in China 18 years back when there was no infrastructure and almost no policies (on e-commerce), " Jack Ma said, adding that things evolved since then and it has now become the world's largest e-commerce company creating 33 million jobs. Alibaba's daily sale recently crossed $25 billion and the biggest beneficiaries were small and medium enterprises (SMEs), he added.
The trilateral initiative on e-commerce will encompass involvement and engagement with policy makers, industry and experts to identify best practices and see opportunities for alligning policies, pointed out Richard Samans from WEF.
India, however, is not impressed and is insistent on sticking to its stand of not supporting negotiations on e-commerce rules at the WTO . "There are no doubt many benefits of e-commerce, but it is a double-edged sword. If we allow multilateral rule-making in e-commerce, which most initiatives finally lead to, it could hurt small traders in the country and result in job losses rather than gains," an Indian government official told BusinessLine .
There are a total of eight proposals on e-commerce being currently considered at the MC 11 with some, such as the EU's, suggesting ways to fast-track discussions which some see as a prelude to starting negotiations.
Stressing on benefits of e-commerce, Jack Ma said that it can be used to improve globalisation and help develop small businesses to end the dominance of 60,000 big companies in global trade.
Alibaba announced the opening of its first Electronic World Trade Platform (eWTP) hub outside China in Malaysia to offer SMEs the infrastructure for doing commerce with services encompassing e-commerce, logistics, cloud computing, mobile payment and talent training.
WTO DG Roberto Azevedo said that a right approach to e-commerce was needed without which big players will continue to dominate and small players will be left behind.