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Shkruar nga Pamfleti
No longer the world's low-cost factory, but a giant of economic and technological resources, capable of acting as an infrastructure monopoly for European companies exporting to Dragon.
This is the new China embodied by the giant Alibaba, a multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Hangzhou, founded by Jack Ma in 1999.
Alibaba, like the "40 Thieves", is the name chosen by its founder because, as he puts it, "opens the door to small businesses". And indeed, this is what the data from the SDA Bocconi Report commissioned by the giant says: in 2024, Italian companies sold products worth 5.19 billion euros to Chinese consumers on the Taobao and Tmall platforms, a result in line with the figures for 2022 and 2023 (5,012 and 4,713).
It is unfortunate that, seen in the overall economic picture, this result seems insignificant, considering that in 6 years the trade deficit between Italy and China has more than doubled: it went from -18.7 billion euros in 2019 to -43 billion in 2025, as confirmed by Unimpresa data. The Chinese surplus towards Italy is mainly concentrated in the chemicals sector (8.1 billion), electronics and optics (7.5 billion), electrical equipment (6 billion) and machinery (6 billion).
"On the one hand, the ability of Italian companies to use digital platforms facilitates immediate access to the market, with positive impacts on profits," explains Stefano Colombo, professor of Political Economy.
He states that it should be remembered that the relationship between companies and digital platforms increasingly tends to resemble that between manufacturers and retailers, where the retailer has a (near) monopoly in the downstream market.
“The growing use of digital platforms by companies “expands the downstream market,” which, in the medium and long term, is likely to lead to “erosion of upstream companies’ profits,” the professor explains.
But the most sensitive issue concerns the amount of data that large Chinese platforms collect from European Union consumers. This vast and sophisticated flow of information, made possible by the integration of advanced artificial intelligence systems, is confusing given the provisions of Chinese law: Beijing has a regulatory framework that can require companies to cooperate with state authorities, including requesting access to information.
In January this year, EU citizens' data protection association Noyb filed complaints against TikTok, Aliexpress, Shein, WeChat and Xiaomi for allegedly unlawful data transfers to China. Under European law, data transfers outside the EU are only permitted if the country receiving the data does not compromise its protection.
"In a competitive platform market, the fact that they have a greater ability to profile consumers could lead to greater competition in the market, thus reducing prices, with a consequent advantage for consumers," explains Professor Colombo.
However, if the platform market is weakly competitive, "as it is," the opposite is true. "The more information a platform has about consumers, the more it can extract surplus from consumers by charging higher prices, since it knows consumers' propensity to spend more accurately than ever before."
In October 2023, Belgian intelligence agencies monitored Alibaba’s main logistics center in Liège, amid persistent suspicions that Beijing was exploiting the company’s European operations to increase its economic power in the West. Alibaba has denied any wrongdoing. In 2018, the group arrived in Belgium to open one of Europe’s largest centers in Liège to manage its logistics operations in Europe.
Intelligence agencies suspect that China may have the ability to use data collected from Alibaba purchases for non-commercial purposes. Liège mainly deals with goods sold to European consumers through AliExpress, the giant's B2C platform. A month ago, the Financial Times reported that, according to an unverified White House memo, the multinational had provided the Chinese military with access to personal customer data to support the People's Republic's military operations. The company has denied all allegations.
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