The logo of Alibaba’s Taobao e-commerce app is seen next to mobile phones displaying the app, in this illustration image taken on Oct. 25, 2023.
Reuters | Florence Lo
Singapore — Chinese e-commerce giant AlibabaTaobao’s shopping app has reached the top Apple Singapore’s App Store charts after an English version was released on Tuesday — thanks to AI-powered translations.
This is according to Sensor towera market intelligence company whose data shows that Taobao has reached the top spot in Apple’s Singapore App Store in all categories as of September 11. On Tuesday, the day the English language version was announced, the app was uploaded by fifth in first place in the shopping category.
Prior to that, the Taobao app was still relatively popular and consistently ranked in the top ten shopping apps for iPhone users from mid-August onwards, according to Sensor Tower.
The new update “highlights Taobao’s dedication to serving its Singaporean users, who have shown a strong desire for an English-language interface, reflecting their diverse language fluency,” Alibaba said in press release on Tuesday. It did not specify the AI translation features. The company has its own AI model.
The release said the new platform “enhances accessibility for non-Chinese users, eliminating their need for manual translations that previously made shopping less convenient for them.”
Taobao and Tmall are by far Alibaba’s biggest source of revenue, but until now they have mostly sold to people in China using a Chinese-language interface. Taobao and Tmall Group’s revenue for the quarter ended June 30 was 26.55 billion yuan ($3.65 billion), up 6 percent year-on-year.
Alibaba in recent years has also sought to strengthen its overseas e-commerce business with platforms such as Alibaba.com and AliExpress.
Singapore is the first market where Taobao will roll out this new update, along with neighboring city-state Malaysia, according to Alibaba.
As early as last year, Taobao users from Singapore had previously made guides on how to buy clothes, furniture and lifestyle items from Taobao. These video guides were published on the TikTok platform owned by ByteDance, another Chinese app. Several videos garnered more than 10,000 views, with one garnering 105,000 views.
Alibaba’s latest move reflects a growing trend of Chinese businesses looking to expand globally and using Singapore as a cultural testing ground to advance their ambitions to reach the Western market.
Last week, consulting firm Bain and Company said in its study of consumer goods companies based in the Asia-Pacific that Chinese companies have a major advantage over South Korean and Japanese companies in the race to go global: the large ethnic Chinese diaspora settled outside mainland China. .
“There are a lot of these Chinese companies that have really ambitious global mindsets and are able to take the kind of fast-innovation business capability that they’ve built domestically and use that to create new positions overseas,” said David Zehner, senior partner at Bain. he previously told CNBC.
According to a Govt as of the end of June 2023, nearly three-quarters of the nation’s 5.92 million people in Singapore are of Chinese descent. For 20% of Malaysia’s population he is ethnically Chinese.
Not a perfect English language experience
Taobao users in Singapore and Malaysia can buy a range of products – from electronics to shoes to kitchen appliances – and have them delivered to their door for a small shipping fee. Prices are in yuan.
The new version of Taobao can convert prices from yuan to Singapore dollars, and product descriptions will also be available in English.
But as of Thursday, the user experience wasn’t perfect.
A check by CNBC found that prices were not converted from yuan to Singapore dollars despite changes to currency display options. The translations were also quite literal. However, the English translation option was also available for product reviews.
Singapore-based social media users were quick to point out the new features, despite their flaws.
A TikTok from an individual user a day after the announcement showed users how to change the look of the Taobao app to English. The video garnered 947,000 views in one day.
Sensor Tower told CNBC that Taobao’s average monthly active user in Singapore reached 167,000 in the third quarter of 2024.
