Albaba Hires Big Gun in US Image Drive 阿里巴巴重金聘请美国前高官启动形象改善工程

By newsdoug on April 18, 2012

Alibaba on image clean-up drive If you’re going to seek a New York listing, it seems only appropriate you might want to get your name removed from a major business blacklist before doing so, or at least that’s what e-commerce leader Alibaba seems intent on doing with its latest big-name hire. Foreign media are reporting the company has put up big bucks in the US to hire James Mendenhall, a Washingtonian with strong government ties, with a mandate to improve the company’s image in intellectual property protection. (English article) Of course that looks like a thinly disguised way of saying the company is giving Mendenhall the big paycheck to get Alibaba removed from the annual US list of notorious companies that fail to protect intellectual property by engaging in or facilitating piracy. China’s leading online search site Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) trumpeted its removal from the notorious list last year, after being included on it for years, and now uses that removal as a major plank in its public relations campaign to show the world it’s serious about playing in the same leagues as its big western rivals. (previous post) Alibaba’s Taobao sites, which engage in consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce and business-to-consumer (B2C) until recently, weren’t so lucky, and were once again included on last year’s notorious list. A quick look at Mendenhall’s resume shows he clearly has the connections to help Alibaba tackle the issue. A Harvard law school graduate who now works in a private law firm, Mendenhall has extensive past experience in the US Trade Representative’s Office, and also served as an adviser to the 2008 presidential campaign of Republican John McCain. That will give him good access to many of the key players he will need to convince that Alibaba should be removed from the notorious list, which is compiled by the Trade Representative’s Office. Of course, hiring big name executives doesn’t always work, at least not immediately, as telecoms equipment giant Huawei Technologies has discovered. Despite hiring a string of well-connected political insiders in the US, Britain and Australia over the last 2 years, Huawei has been repeatedly thwarted in all those markets, most recently being denied permission to bid on contracts to build a state-of-the-art new high-speed network in Australia. This latest move by Alibaba is clearly designed to clean up its image in the west, and seems like part of a longer-term plan for an eventual listing of the entire company in New York, which could come in the next few years. In the shorter term, all eyes will be on the next notorious list due to come out at the end of this year, with Mendenhall and his team coming under pressure to show some results for their big paychecks.

Bottom line: Alibaba’s latest hiring of a well-connected Washington insider to lobby for removal from a piracy list is part of its drive to clean up its image in the run-up to an eventual New York IPO.

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