In a noteworthy development, senior executives of the Alibaba group have entered the board of Paytm Mall, as per reports from the sources from Registrar of Companies. The senior executives comprise Joseph Tsai, the vice-chairman of the online behemoth; director and president of the company, J Michael Evans; and director and CEO of the company, Daniel Zhang.
These leading executives are also the board members of Alibaba group representing the significance of being attributed by the Internet major of China to India.
The appointments come on the back of Paytm Mall getting a funding worth $200 Million headed by Alibaba coupled with association from venture fund SAIF Partners. Now, SAIF Partners is a premature sponsor in One97 Communications, the parent company of Paytm. The parent company had to divide its payments and commerce businesses in order to receive a green signal from the RBI for rolling out its payments bank.
Post having held discussions with various companies in India, comprising Flipkart, Alibaba is moving ahead with Paytm Mall to execute its e-commerce tactics in the country. In the long term, Paytm Mall may be capable of offering more ammunition to SoftBank in the war of e-commerce here owing to the close association among SoftBank and Alibaba.
Paytm Mall claimed that it is planning to strike a run rate of $4 Billion on an annualized basis. Amit Sinha, the COO of Paytm Mall, claimed that a sequence of corrective measures such as removing logistics partners and delisting sellers to clean its platform had previously been carried out. The firm has on-boarded 1,000 brands as it gears up for the battle of festive season with larger rivals such as Flipkart and Amazon.
In addition to this, Paytm mall has started discussions to pick up a share in BigBasket. On the other hand, the online grocer’s trade discussions with Amazon, the Seattle-based online retail major, have been wedged for the last few weeks. These details were shared by two people having deep knowledge of this matter. Paytm Mall is expected to spend almost $200 Million in the Bengaluru-based company. All this efforts are done for a noteworthy minority share.