If Alibaba’s Jack Ma is serious about expanding in the US after his historic public stock offering, he’d better roll up his sleeves.
Ma told reporters this week he plans to aggressively expand his e-commerce operations to the US and Europe after his much-hyped US market debut on Friday.
But Ma has his work cut out for him if he wants to make it in the ultra competitive US market, where some of his e-commerce operations already have a bad rap, business insiders said.
“They would have to clean up the farm to be accredited with us. They have a lot of work to do,” said Steve McFarland, CEO of the Better Business Bureau’s Silicon Valley arm.
The trade group has given Alibaba a big, fat “F” for failing to respond to 79 complaints in the last three years, nearly half of the 144 lodged against it, according to McFarland.
The complaints — lodged against Alibaba.com, the company’s wholesale web site for businesses, along with AliExpress, its factory-direct web site for consumers — focus on fake goods, delivery issues and false advertising by sellers.
“An ‘F’ rating is not going to fly with Americans,” said Mona Bijoor, CEO of wholesale website Joor. “They may have to do more work to ensure they have legitimate buyers and sellers.”
Alibaba also will have to work on its privacy protections and security practices, according to a new report from investment research firm MSCI.
“Its privacy policies and security structures are limited … significantly lagging those of global Internet leaders,” according to a copy of the report MSCI obtained by The Post.
For example, MSCI said it could find “no evidence of data security inspections … or data security management programs” for Alipay, Alibaba’s online payments system.
Meanwhile, a large hacker attack or data breach could leave it open to litigation and reputation damage, MSCI said.
Alibaba, which operates the largest e-commerce market in China, is gearing up to raise up to $25 billion this week through the sale of 368,122,000 shares.
The stock will begin trading Friday under the ticker symbol “BABA” on the New York Stock Exchange.
