Kochi SME among Top-10 e-biz champions

Anand Parthasarathy Hangzhou (China), Aug 3 From Koovapadam in Kochi to the global headquarters here at Hangzhou of the world’s biggest business-to-business (B2B) enterprise, Alibaba.com, is a long way. But it has taken the 24-year-old Mr Ansif Ashraf just five years to turn a small capital of Rs 2 lakh — all that he had saved in his job as a teenaged professional photographer — into a Rs 90 crore business encompassing rubber and polymer technology with a local presence in five countries. The engine that powered Mr Ashraf’s entrepreneurial success story was the Internet — ecommerce to be exact. Which is why Alibaba chose to honour him as one of the world’s Top Ten e-Business Champions of the Year at the Small and Medium Enterprise Summit of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). “I was working as a photographer when a... [read full story]