When Alibaba acquired Lazada, it wasn’t just buying an e-commerce company. It was buying a beachhead. A way into Southeast Asia’s fragmented markets, and a launchpad for what came next.
Not long after, Alibaba also acquired Daraz, giving it South Asia. Together, those moves created a corridor: China to SEA to South Asia. It wasn’t just expansion, it was infrastructure.
The real story wasn’t the front-end marketplaces. It was what happened behind the curtain. Almost overnight, Chinese packages from Shenzhen could be shipped to Manila, Jakarta, or Dhaka for less than it cost to move a parcel from East Malaysia to West Malaysia. The economics of distance flipped. Domestic logistics were more expensive than international logistics.
That inversion wasn’t an accident. It was strategy — and it was backed by the state. Subsidized logistics networks, scale-driven discounts, and export incentives turned China’s delivery system into an engine that ran at a global level.
Jack Ma once described his vision as delivering a package from China to anywhere in the world within 72 hours. At the time, it sounded ambitious. Today, it’s reality. Platforms like Temu and Shein are the proof. They don’t just compete with domestic e-commerce — they undercut it, because their supply chain isn’t bound by national borders. It’s bound by state-sponsored infrastructure.
The West often frames Chinese tech dominance in terms of apps or AI. But the deeper story is logistics. Software is replicable; infrastructure is not. The combination of state support, scale, and speed created something no individual company could build alone.
At Lazada, we felt this shift firsthand. What looked like an acquisition was really absorption. The company wasn’t just given capital — it was plugged into a logistics empire. Once inside that system, the rules changed. Sellers had new reach. Customers had cheaper options. Competitors had to play by a new set of economics.
This is the essence of Chinese state-sponsored capitalism: companies as instruments of national strategy. Private firms like Alibaba, Temu, and Shein aren’t just chasing profits — they’re advancing a logistical vision underwritten by the state.
And that’s why it’s so hard to compete. You’re not just competing against a company. You’re competing against an entire country’s industrial policy.
The vision worked. The 72-hour dream is real. But the question lingers: what happens when the rest of the world realizes the cost of letting one nation own the world’s supply chain?