Can Alibaba Be An International Success?

There is little doubt that Alibaba Group Holding Ltd BABA is the undisputed leader of e-commerce in China. That’s what made it the biggest e-commerce company in the world. However, investors have doubts over whether it can have the same kind of success outside its home turf.

Mike Butcher, editor at large with TechCrunch, was recently on CNBC to discuss whether Alibaba can succeed globally and what steps the company needs to take for doing that.

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"I don’t see any reason particularly why you can't," Butcher said. "I think a lot of people are very tired of eBay for instance; they are very familiar with how eBay and Amazon operates. So, in a sense those companies have already done the education piece. Alibaba also has the big […] TaoBao marketplace, which it plans to launch in the International market and in the English language and if it gets the user experience right, if it gets the marketing right, I don’t really see a reason why it couldn't succeed."

When queried about whether regulations and transparency would be a concern for U.S. and European consumers, Butcher replied, "Not particularly. I mean, so long as they punch the numbers on, you know, those European headquarters that they might put in for instance or transparency of the data or privacy, things like that, something which a lot of western companies haven’t particularly done brilliantly on recently themselves."

Shares of Alibaba were recently trading at $112.26, up 1.4 percent.