Jack Ma to work with Thai government to help small business, boost e-payment

Jack Ma, founder and chairman of China's e-commerce giant Alibaba, said here on Tuesday that his company was going to work with the Thai government to help small business in the country to develop and also to boost e-payment.

During a speech in Thai ministry of foreign affairs, Jack Ma said he earlier had a talk for over two hours with high ranking officials of the Thai government, during which they agreed to work on several areas together including offering help to small business and training them for online trade.

"We want to hire at least 30 Thai young people to work at the Alibaba headquarter in Hangzhou for one or two years and send them back, so they understand our system and can support more people here," Ma said.

Ma also mentioned that he and the Thai government had also talked about making it more convenient for Chinese tourists visiting the kingdom.

"We want to make every shop connected with tourists to use mobile payment," Ma said during his speech as this will be more convenient for Chinese tourists, especially the younger generation which has already got accustomed to mobile phone payment developed rapidly in China in recent years."

Nowadays, Chinese tourists can already use Alibaba's online payment system, Alipay, in many 7-eleven convenient stores around Bangkok.

According to Somkid Jatusripitak, Thai deputy prime minister who met Ma earlier on Tuesday morning, Ma also expressed his intention to develop an effective e-payment system with the Thai government, focusing on fraud prevention.

For e-payment, Ma emphasized " We can expect an e-payment society without cash in the future and e-payment will make our society very transparent as all data will be recorded by machines.

Ma also said in his speech that he and the Thai government also talked about "empowering" Thai consumers and promoting free trade areas for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Alibaba and the Thai government would form a joint working group to formulate an action plan for the e-commerce development, Somkid said, according to Thai media Bangkok post.

Besides, Ma said agricultural products of Thailand have a great potential, and that people in rural areas should be trained to use the online trade platform to plant and sell their products according to consumers' need, which will make a great difference in the rural areas.

He also asked governments to formulate new policies for small business to export and import quickly, to develop logistics networks and e-payments.

In his speech, Ma kept saying that his company is just a platform to help small business to develop while also mentioning the goal of his company in 20 years, which is to create 100 million jobs for the world, to make 10 million small businesses successful and profitable and to serve 2 billion population. a