Last week Alibaba subsidiary AliExpress announced that it is in the process of opening a local representation. Since 2014, the Chinese marketplace has asserted its preeminence on the Russian e-commerce market, which reached some $26 billion last year.
Company representatives also confirmed the company’s intention to comply with Russian legislation, including the law which requires to store Russian citizens’ personal data on servers located physically on Russian soil (see white paper by EWDN and EY).
A similar announcement was made nearly two years ago, a few months before the law came into force.
The Russian business news site RBC has learned from unnamed sources that Alibaba has finally selected their data center after discussions were held with several Russian providers over the past year.
Contacted by East-West Digital News, the Russian Alibaba representatives declined to provide any comment.
Nearly a hundred companies are ready to transfer data to Russia, expecting some clarifications from the Russian telecom regulator Roskomnadzor, a source close to this organization told RBC.
Among the foreign companies having already started or completed the data transfer process, or intending to do so, are Apple, Booking.com, eBay, Google and Uber.
LinkedIn, which failed to comply with the new legislation, saw access to its site blocked by Roskomnadzor in November 2016 following two court decisions.
