- Alibaba and JD.com, China’s two largest e-commerce players, both trace their success back to the Sars crisis in 2002 and 2003
- Now some online businesses are seeing a surge in users, but will they be able to repeat the success of e-commerce in China?
Almost two decades ago, a deadly respiratory disease with flu-like symptoms swept across China, infecting more than 5,000 and killing almost 350 by July 2003.When an employee at a fledging business-to-business (B2B) marketplace in Hangzhou showed symptoms in May 2003, the office was locked down and all 400 staff ordered to stay home as a safety precaution.It threatened to spell the end of the four-year-old start-up but instead, the Sars epidemic of 2002 and 2003 became a “watershed moment” for Alibaba Group Holding, the parent company of the South China Morning Post.
The company pushed ahead with plans that month to launch Taobao, a consumer-facing shopping site. Employees brought their work home, and even family members pitched in, answering customer calls that had been redirected to residential numbers, according to Alizila, Alibaba’s news site.
Taobao was a success, helping Alibaba defeat eBay-backed EachNet, and eventually became one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms.
Today, Alibaba is worth almost US$573 billion and its e-commerce platforms, including Taobao, processed a record 268.4 billion yuan (US$38.4 billion) in transactions during its 24-hour Singles’ Day promotion on November 11 last year.The e-commerce giant is not the only one that rose from relative obscurity during the Sars crisis.JD.com, then called JD Multimedia, was an offline operation selling disc drives and CD burners in Beijing when Sars hit, sending its customers away and forcing founder Richard Liu Qiangdong to take his business online........Experts we spoke to identified several areas that could spawn new tech breakthroughs during the outbreak.....
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