Alibaba looks to take e-commerce to rural China

Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, gave Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang a guided tour of the company's headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, on Tuesday, and showcased how the company will expand into the rural areas of China.

During the visit, Alibaba demonstrated efforts by its security department to get rid of the counterfeited products off the shelves of Taobao and Tmall, the country's biggest online stores, according to a PingWest report.

Comprised of teams that specialise in big data, certification, and intelligence, the department not only protects intellectual property rights and the security of users' accounts and transactions, but is also able to find counterfeits among as many as 1 billion online goods.

Another theme of the visit was the future expansion of e-commerce in 200,000 villages across China. Ma showed Vice Premier Wang to the Bainiu county in Zhejiang, one of the biggest villages in the country in terms of online sales volume.

According to PingWest, by helping local villagers set up service centres in rural areas and providing technical training and infrastructure support, Alibaba looks to encourage hundreds of millions of rural residents to use its e-commerce platform to buy the things they need online, as well as sell their crops online.

"During the past 15 years, we don't judge ourselves by how much money we make or how many goods we sell; we want to see the changes in the Chinese people and the nation," Ma reportedly said. "The company would be more meaningful if it could change the world in the next 15 years."

Alibaba listed on the US stock exchange last September, and recently joined a $600 million financing round for Chinese mobile taxi-booking app Kuaidi Dache, as well as investing in Israeli QR code startup Visualead.