Chairman Alibaba Group Jack Ma Wednesday evinced keen interest in investing in Pakistan and to build an e-Commerce platform to further promote online business ventures.  

The Chairman met Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif in Davos on the sidelines of the 47th World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting. Jack Ma said his country had a lot of interest in investing in Pakistan as they had closely followed positive economic developments in the country.

He said China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) had provided immense opportunities for the region and added it would generate lots of economic activity. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif invited Jack Ma to visit Pakistan at the earliest opportunity.

Jack Ma accepted the invitation and invited the Prime Minister to visit his company's hub at Ghuangzou. Ma said that 60 million companies world-wide were benefiting at the moment. To benefit developing countries, he planned to invest in small and medium enterprises.

Alibaba is a Chinese e-commerce company that provides consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer and business-to-business sales services via web portals. It also provides electronic payment services, a shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services.

The group began in 1999 when Jack Ma founded the website Alibaba.com, a business-to-business portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers,Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday held a series of back- to-back meetings with the heads of various corporations and urged them to expand their operations in the country.

During his separate meeting with Group Chief Executive Officer of Standard Chartered Bank Jose Vinal on the sidelines of the 47th World Economic Forum, the premier said Pakistan has made a remarkable recovery and all its economic indicators were positive.

"Pakistan was an important partner of Standard Chartered Bank," the CEO said, adding they were working with Chinese banks on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. He said his bank was also working on the improvement of the SMEs.

Jose said the profile of Pakistan has gone up significantly under his leadership, and added, the economic matrix was moving in the right direction.

Mentioning that there was a lot of positivity in the country, he appreciated that the confidence of investors has gone up and image of the county has improved with the successful completion of the IMF programme, He said the SC bank was also happy with the progress made by Pakistan in security and the energy sector.

-Business Recorder