Dive Brief:

• Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. announced Monday that it sold 3 trillion yuan ($463 billion) of goods through its online shopping websites in the past year ending in March, a milestone for the company.

• The retailer has been working to expand into more rural areas of China and sell better-quality goods, including forging more partnerships with non-Chinese brands. Alibaba now delivers to 12,000 villages out of some 600,000.

• The company Monday also confirmed that it is contemplating a major push into India and has been talking with the Indian conglomerate Tata Group about the possibilities of an e-commerce partnership.

Dive Insight:

Last year when Alibaba took a 19.9% stake in Suning, a brick-and-mortar electronics retailer with more than 1,600 stores in 289 cities in China, covering 90% of the vast country, it was clear it was going to structure its expansion in China with the help of brick-and-mortar stores.

Suning has a logistical network of eight national distribution centers, 57 regional distribution centers, 353 city-based fulfillment centers, and more than 1,700 last-mile delivery posts in addition to its stores, and has allowed Alibaba to create the kind of omnichannel synergies that are mainly coming from brick-and-mortar retailers in the U.S.

As China’s super-growth ebbs somewhat, Alibaba is now interested in maintaining steady growth there and in expanding elsewhere in the world, Alibaba vice chairman Joseph Tsai wrote on the company’s Alizila blog Monday.

“The shift toward consumption and services is a massive transformation that will drive a new Chinese economy for years to come,” Tsai wrote. “At the heart of this new economy is Alibaba.” 

As Bloomberg notes, Tsai didn’t mention one of Alibaba’s biggest challenges—getting control of the problem of counterfeit goods sold on its marketplace, which has made its goal of expanding partnerships with name brands more difficult.

In December the company said it had spent nearly $161 million fighting the so-called “grey market” of fake goods since the beginning of 2013, that it had penalized 131,000 sellers, and that it’s cooperating with law enforcement in China in more than 1,000 counterfeit cases.

Alibaba’s various businesses have been listed as “notorious markets” by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, though it was removed from the list in 2012. In December that office singled out the Chinese conglomerate and its online marketplaces Tmall and Taobao as needing to work harder to excise counterfeits. Brands continue to report that Alibaba Group’s enforcement program is too slow, difficult to use, and lacks transparency, the December report said.