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Alibaba To Invest $1 Billion In Rival Ecommerce Platform Lazada

By Cal O'Connell on April 13, 2016

Global Marketing News – 13th April 2016

Alibaba to invest $1 billion in rival ecommerce platform Lazada

The Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba has announced it is going to invest 1 billion US dollars in Lazada.

Lazada is an ecommerce company that currently targets Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore and the Philippines.

The investment is a mix of buying new shares in Lazada and also buying existing shares from shareholders such as Tesco and Rocket Internet.

Alibaba hopes that the investment will help it to expand its ecommerce empire, which is currently very much focused on China.

South East Asia is an appealing market due to its rapidly rising mobile internet population.

Google implements mass application of outbound link policy

Google has implemented a mass application of its outbound link policy.

Google’s ranking algorithm penalises websites that have unnatural outbound links, in an effort to crack down on link networks.

Over the weekend, scores of webmasters have reported that they have been hit by the penalty, having received an email saying: “Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to the affected portions of your site.”

Webmasters are advised to either remove the links or tag them as “no follow”, and then submit a reconsideration request via Google Search Console.

It is unclear whether the websites the links point to are also being penalised.

Prada to focus on ecommerce

The luxury retailer Prada has said it is going to change its strategy and focus on ecommerce in the future.

Prada is currently struggling and just announced that its profits are now the lowest they’ve been in the last 5 years.

It hopes to reverse this trend by lowering prices, closing some physical stores and focusing instead on online sales.

It wants to double its ecommerce sales over the next 2 years. To achieve this goal it will increase the range of products it offers on its ecommerce site and will also embrace social media. It plans to join Snapchat by this autumn.

The global luxury ecommerce market is expected to surpass 20 billion US dollars by 2020.

Research reveals internet advertising landscape in Thailand

Research by DAAT and TNS has revealed the internet advertising landscape in Thailand.

It predicts that Thai companies will spend 281 million US dollars on digital advertising this year.

The most money is expected to be spent on display advertising, with the study predicting that it will account for 58% of all digital ad spending.

Search advertising is expected to come in second place, accounting for around a quarter of all digital ad spend, with classifieds coming in third place accounting for the remaining 16%.

Communications companies are expected to spend the most on digital advertising, with motor companies also expected to spend large amounts of money on digital advertising.

Thailand has an internet penetration rate of 29%, equivalent to 19 million people.

Israel to tax foreign internet companies

And finally, Israel will soon start collecting tax from foreign internet companies.

Companies that engage in ecommerce or sell online advertising in Israel will now have to pay income tax and VAT at a rate of 17%.

The change comes after Israeli companies had complained that foreign companies had been paying lower levels of tax than their domestic counterparts.

Google, Facebook, eBay and Amazon are all thought to be affected by the new tax rules.

Webcertain’s global marketing news bulletins are daily 5-minute videos, providing marketers with the latest international digital marketing news in an easy-to-digest format.

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Cal O'Connell

Lead Videographer at Webcertain
Cal has been the Lead Videographer at Webcertain for nearly seven years, creating a whole range of digital video content. As his main passion, and with over ten years of experience, he also has a hand in making feature films, short films and other online content, as well as providing his voice (and sometimes his face) to videos. In addition to Webcertain’s content, he also plays a part in creating content for a wide selection of our clients!

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