Alibaba’s chairman Jack Ma stated that sales of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s e-commerce business are expected to surpass those of the total retail e-commerce in the United States by year end. Alibaba has a also a near-term target to exceed Wal-Mart to become the world’s largest e-commerce retail company by 2015. Ma added that Alibaba aims to be an innovative company, just as Wal-Mart was in the last century, when the US based company created the business-to-consumer retail model.
Alibaba’s e-commerce ’empire’ includes Alibaba.com, Taobao Mall and Taobao Marketplace. These businesses recorded 1 trillion yuan (US$163 billion) in total transactions last year.
Established in 1999 as a b2b e-commerce website, Alibaba has matured into China’s biggest e-commerce company. Recently the company expanded into payment systems, logistics, cloud computing, retail and micro-finance. Through its micro-lending business, Alibaba has made loans to more than 10 million small and medium size companies and provided 300 million customers with payment-related services.
As a latest move Alibaba signed an agreement with China Telecom, China’s biggest fixed-line network operator, for a strategic partnership in areas including basic telecommunication services, mobile Internet, cloud computing and data centers.
Source: China Daily
