Looks to help US small businesses sell to China.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

January 9, 2017

2 Min Read
Alibaba Meets With Trump, Plans 1M New US Jobs

Alibaba chairman Jack Ma met with President-elect Donald Trump on Monday and discussed plans to create 1 million new US jobs by helping small businesses sell to China.

While Trump has been harshly critical of China, he praised China's richest man on Monday, according to a Bloomberg report. "Jack and I are going to do some great things together," Trump said.

Cloud provider Alibaba wants to be the principal destination for connecting international retailers with Chinese consumers, adding 1 million small and mid-sized US businesses and farmers to Alibaba Group platforms, and estimating each one will hire a new person as a result of the added business, Bloomberg said.

However, if Trump raises tariffs from China to the US -- as he has said he will do -- that will make it harder for Chinese businesses to sell to US consumers, Bloomberg notes.

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The promise by Alibaba to create jobs was "bold, if vague," says The Wall Street Journal, adding:

Alibaba is akin to eBay in that it primarily serves as a platform where businesses can sell goods online. That differs from Amazon.com Inc., which sells its own inventory as well as brokers sales for third parties.

Open trade between the U.S. and China is critical for Alibaba’s success. The company says its top objective in the U.S. is to get local businesses onto the platform so they can access Chinese consumers, rather than convince American consumers to buy from Chinese retailers. In an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal in 2015, Mr. Ma said, "We want to connect small businesses in the West with the largest, fastest-growing market in the East."

Mr. Ma's meeting with Mr. Trump echoes a meeting SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son held with the president-elect in December. At that meeting, Mr. Son promised to steer $50 billion of an investment fund into U.S. companies and create 50,000 jobs.

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About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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