Alibaba is slowly, but steadily spreading itself deep into the DNA of India’s largest eCommerce firms

Indian eCommerce giants have made an impressive growth in the market, and now it’s time for the global firms to penetrate in a more holistic way as well. After investing in Paytm and Snapdeal, China born Alibaba is now looking for ‘more mature’ entities in the Indian market.

If sources are to be believed, Alibaba has appointed Citi Group, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch to look for another round of investment with a base of over $100 million as it is shifting focus from early stage start-ups to developed eCommerce companies.

Jack Ma, the founder of Chinese eCommerce firm had publically spoken about its interest in investing in India. Alibaba firm had already created similar records with its $25bn listing on NYSE and is especially keen on O2O (offline to online) space, apart from pure play eCommerce and mobile-focused commerce companies.

"Alibaba is looking to replicate its China model in India and is in no hurry as India still is in early stage and needs to mature. So, it is meticulously screening several firms on different set of me metrics apart from the often-used metric of gross merchandise value (GMV),” sources aware of the development told The Economic Times.

Senior executives from Alibaba’s Hong Kong office have been visiting Indian more often, thanks to the company’s key interest in the Indian eCommerce market. In China, Alibaba group runs multiple companies and affiliated entities in eCommerce and segments in the periphery of it.

Also it has a whole eco system around online commerce as the group has established companies such as online payment escrow service Alipay; consumer-to-consumer online shopping platform Taobao Marketplace; comparison shopping website eTao.com; third-party online payment platform Alipay, eCommerce data mining and processing platform Alibaba Cloud Computing; and Ali Express.