This weekend, eBay’s CEO John Donahoe shared the stage with Alibaba’s maverick founder Jack Ma at his annual Alifest conference in Hangzhou, China. Gady Epstein, Forbes Beijing bureau chief, has an intriguing blog post about how Donahoe wished a happy birthday to Jack Ma who not only defeated eBay in China, but also “encroaches on eBay’s home turf.” Since Epstein referenced my recounting of the eBay-Alibaba battle, I thought it might serve readers well to provide an excerpt here from my book The Chinese Dream:In 2004, eBay had just entered China and was planning to dominate the China market. Alibaba was a local Chinese company that helped small- and medium-sized enterprises conducting business online. Most people in the West had barely heard about it. When eBay entered the China market, Jack Ma, founder and CEO of Alibaba, was alarmed that “someday, eBay would come in our direction.” He knew too well that there was no clear distinction between small businesses and individual consumers in China. As a defensive strategy, Ma decided to launch a competing consumer-to-consumer (C2C) auction site, not to make money, but to fend off eBay from taking away Alibaba’s customers. A new Web site named Taobao—meaning “digging for treasure”—was launched free of charge for individuals buying and selling virtually any consumer goods, from cosmetics to electronic parts. In 2004, I visited Alibaba at its headquarters in Hangzhou. It is located on a campus of three ten-story buildings in the northeastern part of Hangzhou, about a ten-minute taxi drive from West Lake. In the lobby, a flat panel TV was streaming video clips of Jack Ma speaking at various public events where his admirers, most of them in their twenties, were cheering him like a rock star. While visiting Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou, I felt the same “insanely great” energy of entrepreneurship as I felt in Silicon Valley. When I asked a senior manager at Alibaba whether the company was worried that it would be bought by eBay, I was blown away by the answer: “We will buy eBay!”EBay, on the other hand, began its most aggressive campaigns to dominate the market and thwart competitors. Soon after Taobao was launched, eBay signed exclusive advertising rights with major portals Sina, Sohu, and Netease with the intention of blocking advertisements from Taobao. In addition, eBay injected another $100 million to build its China operation, now renamed “eBay EachNet,” and was spreading its ads on buses, subway platforms, and everywhere else. Ma fought back cleverly. Knowing that most small business people would rather watch TV than log on to the Internet, Ma secured advertisements for Taobao on major TV channels. In 2004, one could easily feel the heat of fierce competition between eBay EachNet and Taobao. When I was taking a taxi in Shanghai, I noticed the ads of eBay EachNet on the back of the driver’s seat; when I checked into my hotel, I heard the ads for Taobao popping up on TV almost every half hour.


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