Beijing: E-commerce giant Alibaba pledged to fight online sales of counterfeit goods, quickly settling a public dispute with a Chinese regulator after the value of its US-traded shares plunged.
Alibaba founder Jack Ma and the director of the Cabinet’s State Administration of Industry and Commerce met and pledged to cooperate more closely to combat sales of fakes, the agency said in a statement.
A report on Wednesday by the SAIC accused Alibaba of lax oversight and allowing sales of counterfeit goods on its popular Taobao e-commerce platform.
Alibaba said it was not to blame and, in a break with the usual deferential tone of Chinese companies toward regulators, took the unusual step of publicly accusing the agency and one of its officials of misconduct and bias.
But the company faced pressure to end the conflict after the news caused its US-traded shares to fall. They tumbled further Thursday after its latest quarterly revenue disappointed investors.
The two-day decline knocked $38 billion off the Alibaba’s $264 billion market capitalization.
Alibaba is one of China’s biggest corporate names and a star of a fast-growing Internet industry communist leaders are eager to develop. But it has little leverage against the powerful SAIC, which has stepped up anti-monopoly and other enforcement against Chinese and foreign companies.
In today’s statement, SAIC director Zhang Mao affirmed the importance of e-commerce in generating jobs and economic activity. He said, though, that it “still has problems” and companies need to “strengthen self-discipline.