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Alibaba
Tagline
Net Worth
$648,320,000,000
Started in (City)
Hangzhou
Started in (Country)
China
Incorporation Date
04th December, 1999
Bankruptcy Date
-
Founders
- Jack Ma
About
Alibaba Group Holding Limited also known as Alibaba group or Alibaba.com is a Chinese multinational company that handles various sectors such as e-commerce, internet, technology, and retail. The company was established on 4th April 1999 by 17 people led by Jack Ma. Alibaba is said to be Jack Ma’s third venture after the failure faced in the other two. The current net worth of the company is around US$19.82 billion (2020). the group consists of three companies tabao.com, tmall.com, and alibaba.com These play their roles to collectively make the Alibaba group efficient for all types of customers; be it buying or selling things wholesale, offering competitive prices for retail items, and so on. It has reached over 200 countries around the globe.
Beginning
Jack Ma was brought up in a poor communist family in China. After his schooling, he tried for admission in college and failed twice. On his third attempt, he made it into college and graduated in 1988. He faced a number of rejections through the years at various jobs. He finally landed a job as an English teacher earning a salary of $12 per month. Jack Ma had no prior experience in coding and computers but was intrigued by the internet when he used it for the first time in 1995, while he was in America. The first online search he made was, “beer”, he noticed that there was no Chinese beer available. This motivated him to start an internet company for China so that Chinese products would appear too. Jack Ma failed in his first two ventures and Alibaba was his third. April 1999, towards the tail end of the dot-com bubble, Jack Ma called his 17 friends to his apartment and convinced them to invest in the visionary company, ”Alibaba”. Agreeing to his idea, the company was started and soon it attracted a large number of members from all over the world. The launch of the online retail platform, which provides business to customer and business to business services via web portals and shopping search engines, was fortunately timed.
Road to Success
The beginning of the 22nd Century saw the company receive a $25 million investment from Goldman Sachs and Softbank. From here on, the company grew exponentially. Alibaba was expected to improve the domestic e-commerce marketplace and perfect an e-commerce platform for Chinese enterprises, especially small and medium-sized ones. The company was to help export Chinese products to the global market as well as address World Trade Organizations. From 2001 onwards, the company grew exponentially and became cash positive in 2001. Jack Ma wanted to improve the global e-commerce system, so from 2003 onward, Alibaba launched Taobao Marketplace, a customer-to-customer marketplace. The aim was do to for China what eBay does overseas. Another round of funding that raised $82 million was followed by the launch of the instant messaging tool, Aliwangwang, and third-party online payment platform Alipay. Alipay was an immediate success and allowed customers to receive goods before payment was released to the sellers. These businesses would evolve in the “iron triangle”, of e-commerce, logistics, and finance.
Alibaba benefited greatly from the strict internet-controlling policies of its home country. The Chinese government, while keen to establish an entrepreneurial ecosystem akin to the US was wary of foreign entities capturing the market at the cost of local corporations. China set up a massive internet filtering censorship, that delivered blows to the Chinese operations of tech giants like Google, Yahoo!, and eBay.
eBay announced its expansion into China that same year, Jack Ma viewed the company as a foreign competitor and rejected eBay’s buyout of Alibaba’s subsidiary Taobao. Through applying existing technologies and gaining trust in the Chinese e-commerce market as well as through dominating the market, Taobao outperformed eBay and claimed a growing percentage of consumers from eBay. Taobao would later force eBay out of the Chinese market.
Challenges
The journey of the group was laden with highs and lows. In the initial days, the company had no money and was lagging behind in technology. The Alibaba Group expanded too fast initially and then it had to face layoffs. By 2002, it had only enough capital to survive for 18 months. Later, they developed a product for Chinese exporters to meet US buyers online. This saved the group from extinction. At the end of 2002, they made just $1 profits, but there was a gradual improvement every year.
Failure does not define you, it is not a roadblock, just a bump on the road to success. Alibaba has also become a great example of success coupled with responsibility. The Alibaba Group is set apart from its rivals not only in terms of operations of diversity but also in its principles and ethos.
Failures
Jack Ma’s has been in and around roadblocks his entire life. Getting rejected from 30 different jobs, applying for college over and over again, and yet no luck seems to come his way. While starting his very own business Hangzhou Haibo Translation Agency didn’t seem to go his way either, fascinated by the internet in search of Chinese beer Jack Ma and a few of his friends made a not so user-friendly website that addressed some information about China. As soon as the website hit the internet many investors were interested in knowing more about him and the company that made Jack Ma realize the power of the internet. He established his second company and started making Chinese websites for companies with a wait of around three and a half hours for half a page to load still made him proud of his creation.
Achievements
- Alibaba launched three more successful ventures, Taobao University an online e-commerce education program, Alimama an online marketing platform and TMall(Taobao) an online marketplace for third-party branded products.
- In September of 2014, the company made global headlines with a $25 billion initial public offering(IPO) at the market value of $231 billion.
- The biggest US IPO in history, making Alibaba the 23rd most valuable company on the Standard & Poor index, ahead of other online commerce titans like Amazon($150 billion) and eBay($65 billion). Alibaba went on a $12.9 billion spending spree in 2015.
- In January 2018, Alibaba made history by becoming the second Asian company to cross the $500 billion valuation mark( after Tencent) with its market value at $527 billion.
Subsidies
- Alibaba.com
- Daraz
- Tmall.com
- Taobao
- Ant group
- DingTalk
CEOs
- Daniel Zhang
- Pierre Poignant