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BEIJING, July 8 (TiPost)— Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma’s recent tour in Southern Asia stirred speculation about the e-commerce giant’s new expansion effort.

Credit：Visual China

Muhammad Azfar Ahsan, founder and CEO of NutShell Group, recently posted a picture with Jack Ma at Twitter. Calling Ma a herald tech entrepreneur, Ahsan revealed Ma stayed in Lahore, the second largest city in Pakistan, for more than 20 hours. Wrapping up the low-profile tour in Pakistan accompanied by five Chinese and two foreigners, Ma will visit Uzbekistan, according to Ahsan. The Pakistani businessman didn’t disclose Ma’s purpose for the visit. Prior to the trip to Pakistan, Ma was reported to travel to Bangladesh and Nepal, without any press release or official announcement left. Local news outlets said Ma made a brief stopover in Dhaka and then went to Kathmandu along with seven businessmen, including five Chinese nationals, one Danish individual, and one US citizen.

Ma’s surprise tour, which was said to be a pure personal one, may involve in future development of Daraz for Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal are major markets of the Alibaba’s unit, commented the Securities Times, a state-run financial newspaper in China.

Daraz, founded in 2015, is a leading e-commerce platform in South Asia dedicated to accelerating progress in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal through commerce and technology. Daraz was fully acquired by Alibaba in 2018.

The Pakistan-headquartered company experienced five years of high growth since takeover. Its e-commerce deliveries sustained an annual growth of 100% in four years, and revenue growth doubled on average in the same period. Daraz has a total of 35 million users in five countries and expects to top 100 million active customers well before 2023, CEO Bjarke Mikkelsen said in an interview in 2021. The company also wants to maintain a compound annual growth rate of about 100% in e-commerce deliveries and anticipates continuing doubling retail volume in the next five years, the executive said.

However, Daraz failed to maintain the rapid growth and started to slow down these years. Daraz has to lay off 11% of workforce due to the current market reality, including a difficult market environment, the Ukraine crisis, supply chain disruptions, soaring inflation, higher taxes and fewer government subsidies, Mikkelsen revealed in a letter to employees in February. He said Daraz will cut 100 jobs in each of Pakistan and Bangladesh, two biggest markets of his company, and suggested the job cuts could affect around 300 people in total.

Another Aliaba’s division Cainiao Smart Logistics Network Ltd expanded to Pakistan through partnership with Daraz. The smart distribution center in Pakistan co- developed by these partners was selected as one of Cases of China-SCO Digital Cooperation in June. The distribution center is first honored case in logistics industry. It is also Cainiao’s first deeply integrated network of distribution centers overseas as well as in South Asia, leveraging the logistic firm’s proprietary solutions, including e-PLC, control algorithm and WCS.

Jack Ma’s travel in South Asia is one of the few events that made the prominent figure in the tech sector return to public life recently. Ma came back to China and visited a private school he founded in East China"s Hangzhou city in late May after more than a year of sojourn overseas. Ma met teachers in the school to discuss the future of education and ChatGPT technology. The technology that empowers ChatGPT heralded the beginning of the artificial intelligence (AI) era, while it has posed challenges to education, according to Ma. About two weeks later, Ma gave his first lecture as a visiting professor to the University of Tokyo. The two-hour seminar focused on management philosophy and how the younger generation can achieve success, and was based on Ma’s rich experience and pioneering knowledge of entrepreneurship and innovation," according to a statement from Tokyo College.