Steven Lam (right), chief executive officer of GoGoVan, which is among the first batch of startups joining the portfolio of Alibaba Group Holding's Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund, shares his views on entrepreneurship at a news conference in Causeway Bay on Thursday. Justin Chin / Bloomberg

E-commerce giant teams up with HK firms to push entrepreneurial spirit in the city

As part of mainland tech tycoon Jack Ma Yun's vow to help Hong Kong's budding businesspeople get off the ground and promote the city's entrepreneurial drive, e-commerce titan Alibaba Group Holding has taken minority stakes in three SAR-based startups.

The development marks the launch of the first batch of joint-venture investments to achieve the declared goals.

The investments are made through the Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund set up by the Hangzhou-based conglomerate.

The three Hong Kong companies involved are YEECHOO - an online designer apparel rental business; Shopline - a cloud-based computing solutions provider for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to launch and manage e-commerce operations; and GoGoVan - an intra-city logistics service provider that connects customers and drivers through its mobile app platform.

Alibaba, however, did not reveal the exact amount of the investments in the startups, which have significant local operations.

"We're examining other business proposals and will announce the second batch of companies that the Entrepreneurs Fund will invest in as soon as possible once it's ready," Entrepreneurs Fund Executive Director Cindy Chow said on Thursday.

"The venture investments the Entrepreneurs Fund has made in these three startup firms are benchmarking the same stringent investment standards that other venture capital fund managers invest in companies," Alibaba's Executive Vice-Chairman and Entrepreneurs Fund Director Joseph Tsai said.

Besides securing the funding, the three Hong Kong companies will have the chance to leverage resources from Alibaba's ecosystem in order to scale and accelerate expansion into other markets.

"Alibaba is the world's largest e-commerce company with expertise in payment, logistics and cloud services that are all core to e-commerce. The Entrepreneurs Fund investment will help us strengthen our market position in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and fuel the next stage of our growth," said Tony Wong, co-founder and chief executive of Shopline.

Shopline currently solicits 60,000 SMEs in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia as its customers since its launch in 2014 and plans to expand its operations in Japan, South Korea and the Chinese mainland.

"We are leveraging each other's business strengths. Through this investment, we can utilize Alibaba's experience to learn how to distribute products and services while Alibaba also wants to capitalize on our experience in business expansion in Southeast Asia," Wong said.

The B2B (business-to-business) e-commerce startup had solicited two rounds of fundraising, including Alibaba's minority stake investment. Shopline had obtained HK$9.3 million investment from its first round fundraising in 2014 and expects to break even financially in the coming two years.

The HK$1-billion Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund, established by Alibaba Group in November last year, had received more than 200 applications from startup firms in different stages of development.

The three companies in the first batch were selected after several rounds of management interviews and extensive business due diligence reviews.

The fund is a non-profit initiative and profits generated from venture investments will be plowed back for re-investment to ensure sustainability.

oswald@chinadailyhk.com

(HK Edition 05/06/2016 page9)