ALBAWABA – Alibaba will invest more in Turkey, the company’s Turkish arm Trendyol announced, after the head of the Chinese tech giant, Michael Evans, met with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday.
Evans said his company has “confidence in Turkey’s sound economic fundamentals” and has already invested $1.4 billion in the country through Trendyol, Turkey’s biggest e-commerce marketplace.
He intends to invest an additional $2 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Alibaba group director and president Michael Evans takes part in a roundtable during the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair in Paris, on June 15, 2023. (Photo by LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP)
Evans expressed support for Trendyol’s international expansion plans and underscored that Turkey has the potential to become one of the leading e-export countries, according to the statement.
He didn’t provide detailed information about the investment calender, saying the plan is for “the coming period,” as reported by Bloomberg.
Trendyol was valuated at $16.5 billion in 2021, raising funds from investors including SoftBank Group, General Atlantic, Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi sovereign fund ADQ. Trendyol said Alibaba has 76.1 percent stake in the e-commerce operator.
Turkey’s total e-commerce volume rose 109 percent in 2022 to over $29.6 billion, with almost a fifth of all shopping done online, Trade Ministry data show, according to the New York-based news agency.
In 2021, Turkish authorities launched an antitrust probe into Trendyol in 2021. In July this year, Turkey’s top court upheld a law tightening regulation on e-commerce companies. It stipulates restrictions on e-commerce companies’ advertising spending and use of customer data if their sales exceed given thresholds.
Objections were made, mainly by the primary opposition party, but the Constitutional Court said the law was in line with the constitution.
According to Bloomberg, the ruling was meant to help smaller e-commerce firms to compete after rapid growth of the market since the pandemic. Later in July Turkey’s Antitrust Board fined Trendyol $2.3 million, saying it used third-party vendors’ data to give its own retail operations an unfair advantage.
