The “Made in Italy Pavilion” is born
Abbreviated to MoU, which stands for Memorandum of Understanding, this document will be nothing short of strategic for developing Italian trade overseas. Recently signed by Alibaba.com and ICE Agency, the agreement has, indeed, started the process that will lead to creating the “Made in Italy Pavilion” inside the world-leading B2B marketplace, the first in Europe that Alibaba is setting up with a governmental partner.
An important achievement and the second step in a collaboration that began in 2018 with the opening of “helloITA”, a special section on Alibaba’s Tmall B2C platform, through which hundreds of virtual Italian brand and company stores have had the chance to directly reach about 800 million Chinese consumers.
But with the recently enacted virtual Pavilion, the challenge has become even wider: this “permanent on-line showroom” offers a cost-free premium membership for 24 months to 300 Italian companies which will thus be able to take advantage of training programs and assistance services for managing their own on-line profiles as well as to have a portfolio of up to 26 million buyers.
And that’s not all. In order to boost the visibility of individual stores, ICE Agency and Alibaba have also established smart marketing and keyword advertising campaigns which are sure to facilitate supply and demand interaction. The possible scenarios are extraordinary: in 2019, the turnover among B2B companies in Italy came to 410 million, a staggering amount that becomes almost insignificant against the 12 trillion dollars that e-commerce has recorded so far in 2020.
Numbers that Carlo Ferro, President of ICE Agency, commented on by saying: «Consumer behavior is being increasingly more drawn towards digital and the pandemic has accelerated this transition. As ICE, we are extremely active on this front and, in agreement with Minister Di Maio’s Export Pact, we have re-defined the programs of our initiatives with a digital key. Creating the first Made in Italy showcase on Alibaba’s B2B platform is a new milestone that extends our on-line trade support to all goods sectors in order to reach on-line customers in 190 countries. This initiative, the first in B2B, joins the 25 other agreements that ICE has signed with top B2C marketplaces, already operative in 14 countries, to promote and sponsor Italian SMEs’ access to 1.45 billion consumers who make purchases on the web every day.»
Numbers that Rodrigo Cipriani Foresio, Alibaba Group’s General Manager for Southern Europe is well aware of. Commenting on the agreement, he said: «It is no coincidence that our renewed collaboration with ICE has come during a particularly delicate moment for the Italian economy, one which has forced companies to re-think their strategies and operations in a digital key.
Together with ICE, the Alibaba Group reaffirms its commitment to support Italian companies and entrepreneurs with solutions and skills that will strengthen their expansion strategy on the global markets, taking the excellence and uniqueness of our country all over the world thanks to e-commerce.» Italian entrepreneurs have been told. Now, all that remains for them to do, is to step forward and put their names down for inclusion on the list of the top 300 brands: the “Made in Italy Pavilion” is open.
Loremza Scalisi, Senior Editor VO+
