Amman’s Mini MBA Gathering

Amman’s Mini MBA Gathering

Tonight I was invited to attend a new session of Amman’s Mini MBA Gathering that was started by Zaid Masri and some other activists. It’s a gathering of selective entrepreneurs who meet every week at Progressive Generations Studios office. They simply suggest an interesting Case Study from Harvard Business Reviews every time, share it with the attendees and gather every Wednesday to discuss it.

They are also experimenting with a new suggestion to allow entrepreneurs to practice their pitch in front of attendees every now and then. Attendees act like mentors to help entrepreneurs enhance their pitch wither it’s an investment or a sales pitch. They’ve created a website: start-ub.com for this purpose to enable interested entrepreneurs to submit their requests to present during their gatherings.

Tonight’s discussion was about Alibaba’s Taobao Case Study. Taobao Marketplace was launched in May 2003 by Alibaba Group to counter eBay’s expansion in China especially after eBay’s acquisition of Eachnet (China’s C2C online auction leader at the time).

To compete with eBay, Taobao offered free listings to sellers (as opposed to eBay’s paid listings) and introduced website features designed to better cater to local consumers, and then they offered new paid services in a new innovative business model. As a result, Taobao became the new market leader in China within two years. Later on, eBay had to shut down its own site in China in 2006.

The discussion included lots of exciting points. Below I am listing only a few of them:

• - What would eBay have done differently to keep it’s leading market position at that time? I think that being a giant company that can’t quickly adapt to new market changes and completely change it’’s revenue streams, eBay could have also created a new company that adapt the new business model, and make it compete head to head with Taobao. This could have guaranteed a good market share for eBay under those new market dynamics. Giant companies can also innovate in this field instead of simply going for acquisitions.
• - What is the best strategy for a global company to penetrate a new local market? I think that different industries require different local strategies. E-commerce for example still needs a local partner, but social media and most of the mobile services don’t. Only few years ago, it made sense to have a local search engine, a local social network, a local games platform, etc… but now in the exponentially growing global trends, any global company can penetrate any local market without the need to acquire or even partner with a local partners. It’s now easier than ever to go global, even for startups.
• - Is it still valid to follow the cloning model for local markets? Well, I think it depends on how open/close the target market is. China and Russia are still some how a closed markets, so they can have their own Google and Facebook. But for Arabia, it’s an open market, and I think that we missed that train in creating our own versions of international models with some exceptions of course. So in my opinion, our best bit now is to work on new innovative products and services that can be used by any user in the world, and global service from day one.

Over all, it was a great gathering and a great discussion. Keep up the good work.

Thanks a lot for having me tonight.