President Higgins meets Alibaba chief executive Jack Ma

President Michael D Higgins met with the founder and executive chairman of Alibaba in Hangzhou on Friday, as the IDA explores ways to attract the Chinese e-commerce giant to set up operations in Ireland.

President Higgins is on a state visit to China and he held talks with Mr Jack Ma, while executives from the company were due to meet with IDA officials for talks. Martin Shanahan, chief executive of IDA Ireland was accompanying the delegation as were other senior figures from the organisation.

“Alibaba is a very large company, it had the largest IPO in the world, and it’s entirely appropriate that the President would meet with such a company but I wouldn’t read any significance at this point,” Shanahan said in the days leading up to the meeting.

The IDA is keen to emulate in Asia its success in luring companies from the US to set up in Ireland, although it acknowledges that it is a very different market and Ireland does not have the diaspora in Asia to call upon, in the way it does in the US.

“We have a strong record in helping companies to internationalise beyond their home bases. We’ve obviously done that well with US companies and we believe we can do the same for Chinese companies,” he said.

The fact Ireland is the only English-speaking country in the euro zone is attractive to the Chinese, he said. Alibaba setting up here would be best, but there are other forms of potential co-operation.