'Ark of China' sails from Dalian

Dalian-based CIMM Group is building an online vessel designed to carry China's 70 million small and medium-sized enterprises to global cooperation.

"I'm doing what Jack Ma (founder of China's e-commerce giant Alibaba) has not done," said Ma Shujun, president of CIMM, a general contractor and international trader of ore and metals.

Last June, CIMM began construction on what Ma calls the Ark of China. Its full name is the Global SME International Corp and Development Service Platform.

Trial operation of arkofchina.com has contributed to the signing of more than 100 export contracts with a total value of more than $100 million, said the founder.

In 2013, President Xi Jinping put forward the "Belt and Road" initiatives, short for the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

Ma said he was surprised to find that CIMM's traditional business areas such as India, Russia and Turkey are inside the range, while the countries and regions served by the Ark of China also dovetail with it.

"With 66 countries and a total population of 4.3 billion, this region boasts great business opportunities. I believe the 'Belt and Road' will become a new growth pole for China's economy," Ma told China Daily.

He is making efforts to build the Ark of China into a State-level industrial online to offline Internet platform by applying the public-private partnership model.

The platform will provide supply and demand information on foreign investment, overseas mergers and acquisition, international project contracting, and product and labor exports, as well as services such as financing guarantees, technology transfers, personnel training, and legal support.

Ma calls himself a little man doing great things. CIMM has invested nearly 100 million yuan ($16.1 million) creating the Ark of China. "Based on CIMM's global team, this platform will make good use of what our technical and sales personnel accumulated over the past three decades," said Ma.

Ma has been engaged in foreign trade since 1991. He has been to 129 countries and established a web of connections with more than 1,000 outlets around the world.

"The world will be a mobile one in the future. Every place and everything will be interconnected. All issues can be solved on the Internet," he predicted, hoping the Ark of China will better serve the "Belt and Road" strategy and carry more Chinese small and medium-sized businesses onto the global market.

Contact the writers at zhuchengpei@chinadaily.com.cn and zhangxiaomin@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 03/26/2015 page6)