360Buy CEO: We’re Gonna Be Bigger Than Alibaba’s Tmall Within 5 Years

(Image source: Chinaluxus.com)

The CEO and founder of 360Buy.com, Liu Qiang-dong (pictured right), reckons that his site will hit 10 billion RMB (US$1.57 billion) in sold items in 2012, and that his B2C e-commerce platform can surpass its larger rival, Alibaba’s Tmall.com, just before 2016. Them’s fightin’ words.

His rationale seems to be that 360Buy – also known as Jingdong Mall – is currently growing at a rate three-times faster than Tmall, and so is on a trajectory to be larger in the B2C sector than the current market leader.

360Buy has expanded very aggressively in the past few years (and says it’ll hire 20,000 new staff next year) by focusing on low costs for consumers – and thereby angering its adversary Dangdang.com (NYSE:DANG), which has IPO’d but has been surpassed in market share by Liu Qiang-dong’s company. By the end of Q2 this year, Tmall had 48.5 percent of the B2C sector, 360Buy had 18.1 percent, while Dangdang had 2.2 percent (behind third-placed Amazon, with a fractionally larger 2.4 percent).

Renaissance Capital reckons that 360Buy will achieve US$4.4 billion in revenue by the end of 2011 (see here), and is reportedly heading towards the world’s biggest web/tech IPO next year which could raise $4-5 billion. That would give it a lot of cash to further strengthen its growth, which is perhaps what’s making Mr Liu sound so very confident these days.

[Source: DoNews – article in Chinese]