Alibaba: the Chinese cyber-economic revolution By Tazeen Hasan on February 22, 2015

Alibaba: the Chinese cyber-economic revolution By Tazeen Hasan on February 22, 2015

The Alibaba service has had unprecendented success and is now gaining in popularity worldwide

Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba has been recognised as one of the world’s largest online businesses-to-business platforms for small businesses. It provides electronic account payment services, a shopping search engine, and date-centric cloud computing services.

The service processed more orders in 2013 than E-Bay and Amazon combined. Despite the slow economic growth, the Chinese namesake of legendary Arab character Alibaba raised 25 billion dollars in Newyork stock exchange, making it the largest initial public offering (IPO) in the history.

Alibaba provides consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer and business-to-business sales services via web portals where you can buy frozen shrimp to stone cutting machinery. It accounts for 80 percent of the Chinese online retail business.It primarily operates in the People’s Republic of China but is expanding its operations rapidly.

The company’s English-language portal Alibaba.com handles sales between importers and exporters from more than 240 countries and regions. AliExpress.com allows smaller buyers to buy small quantities of goods at wholesale prices. Taobao Marketplace is China’s largest consumer-to-consumer online shopping platform. Its Chinese portal 1688.com was developed for domestic business-to-business trade in China and is responsible for daily transactions worth 30 million dollars. Tmall.com offers global brands to an increasingly affluent Chinese consumer base. With 291 million active buyers, Alibaba does not compete with its merchants or hold inventory, it just provide a link to the buyers and Sellers of all kinds.

Alibaba began in 1999 when English teacher Jack Ma founded the website Alibaba.com, a business-to-business portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers. In 2012, two of Alibaba’s portals handled 1.1 trillion yuan ($170 billion) in sales. It grabbed headlines in international media when it floated its shares in Newyork and experienced record revenue. Alibaba’s market value was measured as $231 billion at that time.

“Our founders started our company to champion small businesses, in the belief that the Internet would level the playing field by enabling small enterprises to leverage innovation and technology to grow and compete more effectively in the domestic and global economies,” the company’s website states.

While internet giant Yahoo is a key investor in Alibaba.com, the group has an active research and development division. The group is leading the traditional Chinese market with hi-tech technological innovations and on Feb 4, 2015, it started drone delivery trials in China.

– Tazeen Hasan, Correspondent (Business)

Image Courtesy: Clive Darra (https://www.flickr.com/photos/osde-info/4054631799), Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic | Flickr