Alibaba阿里巴巴集团

Founded by charismatic former English teacher Jack Ma in his Hangzhou apartment in 1999, Alibaba is now the world’s most popular destination for online shopping. Annual active consumers of the Alibaba Ecosystem across the world reached approximately 1.24 billion for the 12 months ended September 30, 2021. This includes 953 million consumers in China and 285 million consumers overseas.

Alibaba operates China’s most-visited online marketplaces, including Taobao (consumer-to-consumer) and Tmall (business-to-consumer). Alibaba’s China marketplace is the largest revenue source, with advertising and other merchant data services generated from Taobao and commission fees from Tmall. Additional revenue sources include international retail/wholesale marketplaces, cloud computing, digital media and entertainment platforms, and logistics services. 

Alibaba has also invested in a vast swathe of China’s technology-related industries, and has spun off companies like the fintech firm Ant Group which are giants in their own sectors. In October 2020, following an infamous speech by Jack Ma that criticized authorities’ approach to financial regulation, Xi Jinping himself reportedly pulled the plug on the Alibaba-affiliated Ant Group IPO. Since then, financial and antitrust regulations have spread to the wider internet economy, along with a $2.8 billion antitrust penalty against Alibaba itself.

Currently, Alibaba still faces possible regulator moves against Chinese companies listed in the U.S. and other types of sanctions resulting from U.S.-Chinese geopolitical tensions.

Alibaba went public in 2014 at USD 68 per share and raised USD 21.8 billion in its initial public offering.