Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba had removed over 90 Million fake product listings, in the build up to one of the largest IPO’s in Internet history, the company announced in a conference at Hangzhou today.
Alibaba, which raised a staggering $25 Billion through its IPO, burned up over $160 Million ($160.7 Million to be precise) to remove fake or counterfeit listings from its e-commerce platform. These statistics, which Alibaba released in a separate press release today, were earlier reported by Reuters.
Alibaba’s $25 Billion IPO was larger than Credit card payment systems giant Visa’s $17.8 Billion and social networking giant Facebook’s $16 Billion. China’s largest e-commerce company has since gained 60 percent over its opening day share price , as compared to a 0.9 percent decline in the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index.
Alibaba employed a task force of over 2,000 which spearheaded the counterfeit effort with the plan to add another 200 people next year. The Group has also enlisted around 5,400 volunteers to assist with daily online surveillance and selective inspection.
The company also complimented on Chinese Government’s continuous efforts to fight counterfeiting. Alibaba Group cooperated with Chinese law enforcement agencies in over 1,000 counterfeiting cases this year. As a result of this collaboration, 400 suspects from 18 counterfeiting rings were arrested while a massive 200 brick and mortar stores, factories or warehouse involved in production and selling of counterfeits were closed.
The forged goods market in China is one of the primary concerns among various Chinese Governments. Alibaba, acknowledging the state of affairs, said in its press release,
A report issued by China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce showed that counterfeiting is still rampant offline, constituting the majority of trademark-infringing and counterfeit cases investigated. According to the report, of the 83,000 counterfeit and trademark-infringing cases investigated by the SAIC last year, online counterfeit cases constituted about 300 cases.
Alibaba, which was put in U.S. Government’s Notorious Markets List, was removed in the year 2012. T ramp up its efforts to stay off that list, the company hired James Mendenhall (via Bloomberg), a former general counsel for the USTR under President George W. Bush.
IMAGE : FLICKR / WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM / CC 2.0 LICENSE
