By Liang Chunxiao

With the increasing development of the knowledge economy worldwide, all countries in the world including China pay more attention to promoting scientific and technological innovation, so as to cultivate the national core competitiveness and realized economic sustainability.

Innovation is also the internal gene of Alibaba's development. Since the beginning, Alibaba has not been copying the overseas existing mode, but has been making great efforts to serve SMEs (small-and-middle-sized enterprises) and business initiators based on "to help SMEs succeed".

Good faith, payment and logistics are the three major problems having to be tackled in E-business. Alibaba does its best to collaborate the finance, logistics and authentication industries for jointly establishing a brand-new business environment with "good faith, high efficiency, convenience and prompt". 

In terms of good faith, in March 2002, Alibaba initiated a plan named "Trust Pass", putting forward an innovative imagination on establishing a business society with good faith. The plan is designed to check and record the faith of the client applying "Trust Pass" service through such five aspects as the third party's authentication, certificates and honors, records of Alibaba's activities, credit reference man and member evaluation.

In the field of finance, difficult financing is the main trouble for SMEs. Alibaba has united Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and China Construction Bank (CCB) to creatively launch an unsecured loan service based on Alibaba's faith system of e-business platform, so as to assist SMEs tackle the financing trouble. By 21st April, 2009, Alibaba has supported the banking industry to lend RMB1.88 billion yuan to 907 enterprises in East China., which has released some SMEs' capital demand.

In the aspect of online payment, China Post and Alipay jointly launched "Wang Hui e", enabling those clients having not opening online banks also have safe online consumption. And the Alipay Dragon Card launched by Alipay and CCB makes the online shopping have not to be paid with online bank logging in, which has shorten the transaction flow effectively.

In the field of logistics, Alibaba Group has a close cooperation with logistics companies, jointly serving e-business users. Take "e You Bao" as an example, it is a kind of domestic economic express business that China Post specially build up for the users of Taobao.com and is especially designed for personal e-business. Its price and service have been welcomed widely.

Alibaba's innovative achievement has gained the global recognization. Take Alibaba's B2B Company as an example: it has been listed as one of the best B2B websites for successive 7 years in Forbes; in 2007, it won Wharton Infosys Commercial Innovation Award, and the judging committee of this award believed that Alibaba had promoted the global trade with a brand-new method.

Currently, the B2B company affiliated to Alibaba has provided over 40 million subscribers with e-business services worldwide; Taobao.com has become the largest internet retail website in China with over 100 million subscribers and its transaction volume is nearly RMB100 billion yuan in the whole year, taking up about 1 percent of the total national retail amount in 2008.

SMEs are the root for Alibaba's survival. All of Alibaba's innovative initiatives are implemented through encircling SMEs and business creators. And such products as "Trust Pass", "Chinese Suppliers" and "Chu Kou Tong" are all established on the basis of their demand. For the moment, the international financial crisis has impacted China's SMEs, thus Alibaba has announced "A special initiative plan on assisting Alibaba's SMEs to 'go through the winter', survive and develop", and will take more measures to support SMEs' survival and development.

The author is the Vice President of Alibaba Group