Alibaba leads B2C market with 45.1%

ALIBABA Group, which generated a massive "11.11" online sales on Sunday, holds a dominant share in the Chinese business-to-consumer (B2C) market, a research firm said yesterday.

Alibaba's Tmall accounted for 45.1 percent of the Chinese market by the third quarter, followed by 360Buy's 17.4 percent and Tencent's 3.5 percent, Beijing-based Analysys International said.

"Alibaba's Tmall expanded its market share, thanks to Alibaba's brand awareness and services like taobao.com and Alipay for online payment," said Chen Shousong, a researcher at Analysys.

Alibaba's taobao.com and tmall.com achieved 19.1 billion yuan (US$3.03 billion) in online sales within 24 hours on Sunday. More than 213 million netizens purchased products on Alibaba's websites on Sunday, according to the firm.

After the "11.11" Sunday sales, Tmall's share of the Chinese B2C market will surpass 50 percent, industry insiders said.

In the third quarter, China's B2C trade totaled 129.6 billion yuan, up 80 percent annually, Analysys said.

From April to June, Alibaba Group's net profit soared 129 percent from a year ago to US$273 million, according to Yahoo Inc's recent filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The group's revenue rose 71 percent to US$1.1 billion.

Yahoo, which sold a partial stake in Alibaba back to the privately-owned group in September, still holds 24 percent of Alibaba.

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