Alibaba.com Vice President Andrew Zheng speaks during a press conference in Seoul, Monday. Courtesy of Alibaba Group

Alibaba.com will launch a new business-to-business (B2B) online platform next month dedicated to Korean small and medium-sized companies (SMEs), aimed at supporting their businesses and boosting their sales to consumers around the world, its vice president and regional office head said, Monday.

Alibaba.com, China's largest online marketplace, is the group's B2B-specializing subsidiary.

According to the group, the new platform, named South Korea Pavilion, will debut on Aug. 8. It will help Korean SMEs promote their products to global online markets, which have so far remained unreachable for many companies due to limitations in their business networks and marketing tools. The group pointed out that, as a result of these disadvantages, SMEs have turned to local Korean markets and conventional offline approaches for their operations.

Vice President Andrew Zheng of Alibaba.com said the company aims to hitch some 5,000 Korean SMEs to the global e-commerce market.

"Alibaba Group's multiple e-commerce platforms, including Alibaba.com, will use each of their unique business advantages to promote Korean SMEs and their brands," Zheng said in a press conference in Seoul.

Marco Yang, head of Alibaba.com Korea who accompanied Zheng, also said, "I would like to highlight that we've never launched a single e-commerce B2B platform dedicated to a specific Asian country until now."

Alibaba Group's latest move comes as its e-commerce B2B platforms, such as Taobao, Tmall and Lazada, helped some 7,600 Korean brands generate 34.3 trillion won ($24.7 billion) in sales from consumers in China and Southeast Asia from 2020 to 2023. Alibaba.com, during the same period, attracted over 2,550 Korean SMEs. Last year alone, the Korean companies generated some 610,000 transactions altogether that led to exports worth 130 billion won.

Alibaba Group, which also runs business-to-customer (B2C) e-commerce platform AliExpress, said that some 100 million Chinese consumers purchased Korean SMEs' products through Taobao and Tmall each year from 2020 to 2023, adding that this shows how popular Korean products are in China.

The company said that beauty products made in Korea have been particularly popular among global consumers who shopped on Alibaba's online platforms. Brazil has shown the highest growth rate of purchases in this category in the past few years at 260 percent, followed by Germany at 253 percent and India at 95 percent.

A major portion of purchases made in Alibaba e-commerce platforms comes from Chinese tourists to Korea, according to Zheng.

Fliggy, an online travel booking platform run by Alibaba Group, saw some 1 million Chinese tourists visit Seoul last year. The group said that those tourists especially spur consumption of Korean products through online platforms.

"Chinese consumers experience Korean brands and products through travel," Zheng said.

"Returning home, they tend to purchase the same or similar Korean products on cross-border e-commerce platforms. They generate sales both inside and outside Korea."

Playauto, a Korean e-commerce solution provider, has joined in developing South Korea Pavilion. It introduced a Korean-English simultaneous translation application programming interface function for the platform that allows Korean sellers to expand globally without language barriers.