The government continues its struggle. After Shein, the government will bring to justice AliExpress and Joom, two digital platforms accused of selling “child pornography dolls”, the Minister of Trade, Serge Papin, announced this Wednesday morning on TF1.
The online trading platform AliExpress is owned by Chinese tech giant Alibaba and is well-known in France. This is not the case with Joom, a platform for selling low-priced objects – often made in China -, founded in 2016 by Ilya Shirokov, who is still the company’s CEO.
There you can mainly find household products, make-up, accessories, but also scooters and coffee machines. The site lists a lot of outfits — more than 600,000.
A Russian company
On LinkedIn, the group says Joom was founded in Riga, Latvia, but it’s actually a Russian platform. In February 2019, the founder showed his ambitions with LSA: “I founded one of the biggest Tech companies in Russia. Now I want to create one of the biggest Tech companies in the world. » Ilya Shirokov aspires to make “Joom number 2 in e-commerce in Europe” and it doesn’t matter “whether it takes five years or ten years”.
Currently, the company’s headquarters are in Lisbon (Portugal). On its website it says that the fact that its headquarters are in Portugal “is symbolic” because “this country revolutionized world trade five centuries ago by opening sea routes to Asia”. The company “aspires to take over and lead the next wave of revolution in the industry by implementing AI and other cutting-edge technologies.”
The group also has several offices around the world: Beijing (China), Hong Kong, Berlin (Germany), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Seoul (South Korea) and Riga (Latvia).
A platform that wants to compete with Amazon
The Joom site and app have been available in France since 2017. When it was created, Ilya Shirokov started working with Chinese sellers “because they know how to ship anywhere.” But the founder did not want to limit himself to a simple site for reselling Chinese products.
In 2019, the Russian graduate in mathematics and economics, holder of a doctorate in computer science and an MBA from Stanford University, formalized the recruitment of French companies and brands to expand his network of local distributors. Thus, tricolor brands such as Le Temps des Cerises or Kaporal (now liquidated) appeared on the site. Currently, the “products from France” tab appears to mostly represent products shipped from France, but not necessarily produced in France.
The electronics retailer at the time believed that its competitor was not Wish or AliExpress, but rather Amazon.
