Twenty-five year-old Katy Cheung blends in quite nicely into the Hong Kong lunch crowd just tinkering away on her smartphone. But it’s not Facebook nor Twitter she’s logging on to – but Alibaba’s online retail platform Taobao. She’s making extra money on top of her regular daytime job.

 

"I got started eight to nine months ago. I was just buying accessories, clothing and bags for myself, until I found out that a lot of stuff on Taobao are sold here in Hong Kong for a higher price. So I started re-selling some of them, posting them on Instagram or Facebook." Katy Cheung said.

 

Deliveries like these from Taobao have become a regular fixture in offices: folks ordering stuff online and getting them quickly after. Say if I were to go to Taobao’s website and wanted to buy this little black dress, I would spend only five U-S dollars. Transactions like these on Taobao and its other online retail portal T-mall have amounted to 240 billion U-S dollars last year – more than those of e-Bay and Amazon-dot-com combined. And that has helped Alibaba corner what independent brokerage CLSA says now accounts for 80 per cent of the Mainland’s shopping market.

 

Some bullish forecasts even point to Alibaba’s market value reaching over a quarter of a trillion dollars – making it the fourth-biggest technology firm after Apple, Google and Microsoft. And monetizing e-commerce is exactly what analysts makes Alibaba’s upcoming IPO – a strong buy.

 

"I think in the meantime we will still see selling pressure. Right now sentiment is very bad. Actually valuation is not really overstretched. Approaching the listing of Alibaba actually we may see a recovery because right now people are preparing for the IPO." Alex Wong, Director of Asset Management, Ample Financial Group said.

 

Reason why the tech sector has seen recent weakness in the stock market. Rival Tencent shares in Hong Kong on Wednesday fell, hours after Alibaba officially filed its application for IPO listing in the US, in what will be the biggest tech offering ever.

 

But Katy is oblivious to all that. She doesn’t even know about Alibaba, nor its listing. But she does know Alibaba’s Taobao by heart, and finds enough of a payback spending lunch break trawling through it – if only to quell that occasional urge to splurge.