You cannot beat Kishore Biyani in doing business and his deal with Paytm is a great example of that

When Future Group’s Kishore Biyani entered into partnership with Paytm, his one eye was also on Alibaba, which is Paytm’s largest shareholder.

Biyani's deal with Paytm for selling Big Bazaar products on the latter's site was also a bid to build a relationship with Alibaba, which is planning to build Tmall in India.

Alibaba wants to enter into business-to-consumer (B2C) site Tmall in India within six month and is mulling to morph the Paytm marketplace into Tmall.

Biyani's Future Group, which ended its exclusive selling contract with Amazon in 2014, will be a key seller on Alibaba's B2C platform.

"India is an important emerging market with great potential and we are absolutely committed to developing this market for the long term. But we do not in principle discuss market speculations about our business plans in the media," an Alibaba spokesperson told ET.

"We are not aware of Alibaba's plan for India. They are a great strategic investor for us. Our tie-up with Future brand is part of our larger strategic initiative of enabling O2O commerce. We are aggressively working on getting more such brands on the Paytm platform. Through the marketplace, we are focussing on offering options to our customers across both unstructured as well as structured goods. We will continue to build our platform with many such partnerships," a spokesperson for Paytm told ET.

Biyani is looking at multiple channels to push ahead the Future Group and an alliance with Alibaba that this juncture can be important and crucial.

Tmall and twin B2C marketplace Taobao. com get more than 100 million daily visitors in total. Tmall, which calls itself the "5th Avenue of Ecommerce", sells more than 70,000 global and Chinese brands on its site. Tmall and Taobao collectively generated about $149 billion in gross merchandise sales for Alibaba in the quarter ending December 2015.

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