CHENNAI: Indian startups might be hung-ho about technology and big data, but according to e-commerce giant Alibaba’s director of Big Data and Technology, Li Danfeng, no Indian start up has been able to leverage big data to actually boost retail sales.
Speaking at the ninth edition of The Indus Entrepreneurs Conference 2016, held in Chennai, he spoke about how imperative data mining was for understanding the taste and preference of the consumer. “Our boss Jack Ma is very prolific when it comes to understanding the requirements of data science for big data is the next big thing,” he said.
Li said that Indian extrepreneurs need to explore the usefulness of data mining and collection for delivering quality services to customers and staying ahead in the race. “The maximum amount of time it has taken for us in China to gather all that data is 13 years. For us to collaborate with any Indian start-up they need to collate their own data here after which we can think about it,” he said.
He also pointed out that a massive amount of consumer data is required to make Alibaba a global retail behemoth that it is today. “Our data base is Chinese which we cannot share. Amazon also doesn’t do that well in China,” he said.
Li spoke extensively about how big data is being used in China to access a person’s location through his GPS and wi-fi, a customer’s individual tastes and preferences can be arrived at from Alibaba’s own properties and how they are trying to use data science to understand a consumer’s offline behaviour. This includes the length of time a person stays inside a store, the sections he visits and even for how long he stays outside the store.