...Alibaba Group is a Hangzhou-based e-commerce/e-auction company, specializing in global trading. It was founded in 1999 by Ma Yun (Jack Ma), and operates five e-commerce sub-companies which operate different aspects of trading. Employees 4,400 (June 30,2007). As of January 2009, the Alibaba Group is made up of 6 sub-companies: 1. Taobao.com: Online auctions web site for customers. 2. Alipay: Online payments web site, processing mainly payments within China. 3. Alisoft: Provider of web services to the Chinese Small and Medium-sized Enterprise market place. 4. Alimama: Online advertising exchange, which allows web publishers and advertisers to trade online advertising inventory. 5. China Yahoo ! As a powerful portal with excellent searching engine, it provides high- quality basic application services for internet users including email, IM, information services and so on. 6. Koubei.com: China's largest communities for exchanging basic life information such as that on clothes, food, housing and travel. In 2009, Alibaba Group employed nearly 17,000 people, 70% worked in Alibaba’s B2B business. CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS 1. Clear Strategy To be the best e-business website not only in China, but also all over the world is the mission of Alibaba Corporation. The clear strategy is the beginning of the team of Ma Yun and the highest demand of all the team members. The right strategy born with the right period of e-business development in...
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...ALIBABA Group Holding Brief History. Alibaba cooperation is a global wide Internet company founded by Jack Ma, Chinese name Ma Yun.Although Alibaba was founded in 1999, the story of how the company came to be actually dates back to 1995, when Jack Ma was on a trip to the U.S. and first became exposed to the Internet. As the story goes, he tried searching for the word "beer" on Yahoo but the search results did not turn up a single Chinese option. In fact, he could hardly find anything about China on the Internet at all. After returning home, he founded a company called China Pages - a directory of various Chinese companies looking for customers abroad. China Pages was a flop. But a few years later, Ma took another stab at an Internet business. With a group of 17 friends and $60,000 of funds, Alibaba was born. [Baidupedia Web] Within only 15 years, Alibaba became the largest e-commerce company in the world, with approximately $300 billion in annual gross merchandise volume ("GMV") - or nearly 1.5 times the combined GMV of Amazon and eBay. In fact, more than three out of every four dollars spent online shopping in China goes through its platform, which should come as no surprise given that Alibaba's user base is nearly equal to the entire population of the U.S. Alibaba's "ecosystem" is made up of three leading Chinese online retailing platforms: (1) Taobao.com, China's largest online C2C shopping site; (2) Tmall.com, China's largest third-party...
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...hand-in-hand. Every year we change 'the organizational structure in tandem with changes in strategy. Jack Ma, Chief Executive Officer of Alibaba Group, stared through the fog at the cable stays of the Hangzhou Bay Bridge whistling past on his drive to the offices of Taobao ("hunting for treasures"), Alibaba's online marketplace for Chinese retailers and consumers. The longest transoceanic bridge in the world had a long gestation period: the feasibility studies took a decade. and even after their approval the plans changed to connect the northern end of the bridge to Jiaxing, rather than the Jinshan suburb of Shanghai as initially planned. When the bridge was opened to the public just over a year earlier, in May 2008, it cut the trip between the cities of Ningbo and Shanghai and southern Jiangsu province from 400 kilometers (km, equivalent to 249 miles) to just 80 km (50 miles), boosting economic integration and development in the Yangtze River Delta, which was home to 72.40 million people living in almost 100,000 square km of land comprising Shanghai, Zhejiang province, and Jiangsu province.? Ma couldn't help but smile to himself as he thought of the obvious similarities between the Hangzhou Bay Bridge and the Alibaba Group of companies. Just as the proposed bridge changed form as its plans progressed, the Alibaba Group evolved over an equally long period from its founding by Ma and a small group of friends in 1998, to the point where it now captured approximately one half of...
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...BUSINESS ENGLISH—M1 ------------------------------------------------- DR. BRAHIM BARHOUN IMRANI PRE-READING: http://www.inc.com/jack-ma/alibaba-jack-ma-reveals-his-global-strategy.html ALIBABA : THE EVERYTHING COMPANY In 1999, Trudy Dai used to spend all night sending e-mails from her friend Jack Ma’s apartment, trying to answer queries from American customers without letting on that she was Chinese. Ms Dai was one of the first dozen employees of Alibaba, an online listings service Mr. Ma, a teacher, had just started. It was already having some success connecting small Chinese manufacturers to potential customers, including the overseas ones Ms Dai was reassuring over e-mail. But the friends and students who made up the workforce were earning just 550 Yuan (then $66) a month. Mr. Ma, though, already had big dreams. That year he said: “Americans are strong at hardware and systems, but on information and software, all of our brains are just as good.” The company that started in Mr. Ma’s apartment now employs 24,000 workers at its headquarters in Hangzhou and elsewhere; Ms Dai is president of human resources. A few years ago Alibaba began to turn a profit; in the year to September 2012 it made $485m on revenues of $4.1 billion. Today, Alibaba is more than just the “Amazon of China”—it’s the Dropbox, PayPal...
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...Milestone Alibaba’s 18 founders first gathered in Jack Ma’s Lakeside Gardens apartment in Hangzhou in 1999 and founded Alibaba.com. The founders and management would go on to launch a number of Alibaba’s core businesses from that apartment, including Alibaba.com.cn (now known as 1688.com), Taobao Marketplace and Alimama, meeting in the same spirit of partnership and with the same goal: to make it easy to do business anywhere. Jack Ma began operations in 1999 with Alibaba.com, an English-language marketplace for global trade. They founded Alibaba.com to help small exporters engaged in manufacturing and trading, primarily located in China, to reach global buyers. In 1999, they also launched a Chinese-language wholesale marketplace for domestic China trade among small businesses, now called 1688.com. This domestic platform has since evolved into a wholesale channel for merchants doing business on our retail marketplaces to source products. In 2003, Alibaba established Taobao Marketplace as a free platform for buyers to explore and discover products and for sellers to establish a low-cost online presence. According to iResearch, Taobao Marketplace was the number one consumer-to-consumer, or C2C, marketplace in terms of gross merchandise volume in China in 2013. In 2004, Alibaba established Alipay to address the issue of trust between buyers and sellers online. Buyers were unwilling to effect payment before receiving and inspecting their purchases, and sellers were unwilling to...
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...Alibaba Group Management recommendations and preparation Company summary: Alibaba is one of the Chinese biggest e-commerce company, with hundreds of millions of customers buying products from three main sites: Taobao, Tmall and Alibaba.com. Since the development of Alibaba, the company has established a leading in the e-commerce, online payment, B2B online marketplace and cloud computing business. They provide a platform for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online stores that mainly cater to consumers in China and abroad as well. I think they will grow over the next five or ten years with the 564 million Chines internet users. Furthermore, Alibaba is improving their business to comprehensive level. They have invested in some high-potential companies that could fuse well with its e-commerce business. To face the competitions from the companies in the same type, I agree with that they are going to make a virtual world to further reduce the competition. Moreover, while fighting to stay at the front line in Chinese e-commerce, Alibaba has ambitions of going international. Its initial strategy to bring Taobao abroad is clear: target Chinese users outside mainland China. As the mere description in Part 1, expanding to Korea with wholly owned model is the best way for a company like Alibaba. I think Alibaba’s main goal is maintaining their status in Asian by entering Korea. Alibaba’s intermediary model has replicability, which provides samples...
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...Case Study: Should Alibaba Group Centralize? Jack Ma founded the technologically evolving and economically progressing business, Alibaba Group. Ma saw the potential of the Internet early on and created a multifaceted conglomerate, capturing a business market at its foundation. His goal was to provide a simple, efficient e-commerce platform and now holds half of the B2B in China. Wherever there was a need, Ma would adapt and create different business units to effectively provide the service. Alongside online trading, Ma provided a platform for retailers, individuals, payment services, management solutions, and an entertainment portal. Alibaba Group developed synergies within the units and subsidiaries to coordinate ideas, spread resources, and develop additional units to complement each other. He down streamed manufacturers provided a cheap storefront and added value services (such as keyword bidding and commission based sales). His model was unlike any other at the time. This kind of consolidation, led to competition among the subsidiaries. This kind of competition, however, has inspired efficiency and differentiation. Ma promoted collaboration and created cross-business and cross-functional teams. The business units also did not depend on large teams but rather channeled its focus on engineering and customer service. By the mid 2000’s, China had transitioned into a primarily private economy—which ultimately brought the nation to an economic boom. By 2009, 70% of Alibaba...
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...Introduction: Alibaba Group was established in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma, a teacher from Hangzhou, China. Company’s founders shared a 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. Currently it operates in leading online and mobile marketplaces in retail and wholesale segment, cloud computing and other services. It provides technology and services to consumers and other participants to conduct commerce in their ecosystem. Mission: To make it easy to do business anywhere. Vision: We aim to build the future infrastructure of commerce. We envision that our customers will meet, work and live at Alibaba, and that we will be a company that lasts at least 102 years. Subsidiaries and its ecosystem: 1. Alibaba.com (B2B market place): There were 40 million small businesses in China. Many of them operated in fragmented market with limited access to communication channels and information services. Alibaba developed small online trading platform designed to help connect small Chinese businesses with buyers, retailers and trading companies. With Alibaba.com they started acquiring customer on line at an extremely low cost. In 2008, Alibaba increased its operating profit by 48% and had 7.9 million registered users and 970,000 store fronts. Revenue from value added services increases in line with user base. 2. Taobao:...
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...COMPANY NOTE Initiating Coverage 27 October 2014 CHN | Technology | Internet BUY Price target $118.00 Price $95.76 The Powerful E-Commerce Ecosystem Connecting Half of China; Initiate at Buy Key Takeaway China's changing Internet user demographics and mobile development support our favorable view on e-Commerce for the next decade. Alibaba is the largest Chinese ecommerce player, with 80%+ GMV market share, but is only selling to less than 25% of the population now. We estimate well over half of Chinese population will be shopping on Alibaba’s platforms in 10 years. Initiate with Buy; PT USD118. Changing demographics & mobile support ecommerce in the next decade. As discussed in our sector note, "A Taste of Domestic Consumption: The Unleashing of China's E-Commerce Power" published on Sept 19, 2014, China’s e-Commerce growth for the next decade benefit from: 1) changing Internet user demographics towards 30+ year old age groups; 2) accelerating structural shift to online from traditional retail; 3) Chinese government’s massive support for urbanization and domestic consumption; 4) proliferation of affordable smart devices; 5) improving wireless and transport infrastructures in lower tier and rural markets, and 6) rising consumer demand for better quality, design & fashion, authenticity and timely delivery. Growth driven by mix shift towards Tmall, and improving mobile monetization. We expect Alibaba, as the largest e-Commerce player, to sell to...
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...How does Alibaba group create corporate advantage? (Why are the businesses under one roof?) Is this corporate advantage sustainable? Is the current degree of competition amongst the business units appropriate? Do you think Jack Ma should encourage more cooperation? If so how? The Alibaba group has thrived in the Chinese e-commerce sector from its inception in 1998. They currently account for over 70% of online shopping in China and delivered annual revenues of $636 million in the 12month period ending June 2009 (case p1-2). Alibaba’s successes are due to multiple factors that have allowed them to create corporate advantage, and thus establish market leadership in China (Case p1). The configuration and coordination of Alibaba’s multi-business activities are paramount to understanding the way in which corporate advantage is created. The relationships between subsidiaries are also a key point of scrutiny, as to whether Ma achieves the correct balance between competition and coordination of business units. Primarily Alibaba’s organisational structure has allowed the firm to create corporate advantage by encouraging subsidiaries to be leaders of their respective industries (Case p7). Alibaba has also benefitted from a strong set of shared values and a culture which focusses on serving the consumer above all else. This can be seen as a major source of corporate advantage creation across a number of subsidiaries. The sustainability of Alibaba’s corporate advantage hinges on...
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.... 6 6. FINANCIAL ANALYSIS........................................................ 7 7. SWOT ANALYSIS ................................................................ 10 1 1. Introduction 1.1. Alibaba Group Alibaba (SEHK: 1688) (Chinese: 阿 里 巴 巴 ; pinyin: ā lǐ bā bā) is a Hangzhou-based e-commerce/e-auction company, specializing in global trading. It was founded in 1999 by Ma Yun (Jack Ma), and operates five e-commerce sub-companies which operate different aspects of trading. 1.2. Business profile The English-language web site alibaba.com specializes in business-to-business trades, especially for international buyers trying to contact Chinese sellers. The Chinese-language web site china.alibaba.com focuses on business-to-business trades within China, while www.taobao.com is a consumer-to-consumer trade site for Chinese customers. The Japanese language website "Japan.alibaba.com" is for Japanese customers. Alibaba Group Type e-commerce Founded Hangzhou, China (1999) 6/F Chuangye Mansion, East Software Park, Headquarters No.99 Huaxing Road, Hangzhou, 310099, China Key people Ma Yun (Jack Ma) Industry Internet Employees 4,400 (30 June 2007) Website http://www.alibaba.com Japan's Softbank was one of the earliest investors in Alibaba. Its founder, Masayoshi Son, invested $18 million in the company in 2000 and also participated in subsequent rounds of financing. . 1.3....
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...Alibaba Goes Public I. Executive Summary Alibaba competes in the e-commerce industry with a focus in China. The main service offering in the e-commerce industry is to provide an online marketplace that links buyers and sellers across a wide breadth of product lines. The ability to connect buyers and sellers on an accessible platform allows market constituents to engage in trade opportunities to which they previously would not have access. II. Key Factors Alibaba Group had the pioneer advantage and gained a significant share of the Chinese e-commerce industry. Its core value proposition of connecting “small and medium-sized Chinese manufacturers” has been dramatically revised as a result of the business’ rapid growth to suffice customer needs. Categorizing their business units according to the profile of the vendor, the Alibaba Group has established market exclusivity in an effort to segment their vast consumer market. Segmenting their market allowed the firm to expand their consumer base, while strategically positioning themselves competitively and avoiding the risk of cannibalization across their services. To support the large extent of commerce, the business units are supported by peripheral services, Alipay and Yu’e Bao, which structure Alibaba’s main service offering. Alibaba Group strengthened the value of their existing service offerings by providing an escrow service, Alipay, to reduce the risk of online purchasing. This supporting service is a response to the...
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...the Corporation Now pg.13 * Business Environment pg.14-pg.15 * The Financial Analysis pg.17-pg.18 * SWOT Analysis pg.19 * Recommendation for Alibaba pg.20 * Conclusion pg.20 * References pg.21 Definition * E-commerce Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, is a type of industry where the buying and selling of products or services is conducted over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at one point in the transaction’s life-cycle, although it may encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail, mobile devices, social media, and telephones as well. Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business. It also consists of the exchange of data to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of business transactions. This is an effective and efficient way of communicating within an organization and one of the most effective and useful ways of conducting business. * B2B...
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...Ankit Singh and Juan Alberto Calero Part A – e-Commerce in China vs USA 1. Overall, what are some key opportunities and challenges (obstacles) that confront ecommerce in China? How are these challenges similar / different from those confronting e-commerce in the US (or other countries that you are more familiar with)? Some of the key opportunities of e-commerce in China are: The internet penetration rate in China is growing at a much faster rate as compared to other countries. 25.5% users in China have engaged in e-commerce, while in US 71% has done so. This represents an enormous opportunity for e-commerce services, given that there is room for growth in China. The market is China is still in the beginning of its growth stage. The manufacturing prowess of china provides an excellent complement to the ecommerce market. Online shopping market has grown 64.1% over last year to $1.5 Billion. Online B2B market is valued at 65.7 B 69.8% yearly growth. With these accelerated growth rates, the e-commerce market will developed very quickly, players need to be aware of the stage of e-commerce in China and address the market accordignly. Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) contribute to 68.8% of nation gross industrial output. Only 28% of SMEs utilised third-party B2B e-commerce platform. The government has a plan to increase it to 80% by 2012. Given this, the projected demand for e-commerce is known. In addition , players also known which type of businesses are using e-commerce...
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...Ma was born in Zhejiang Province, China, in 1946. Ma taught himself English and graduated from Hangzhou Teacher's institute in 1988. Jack Ma is the CEO of Alibaba Group, the Chinese leader in e-commerce with counts five companies specialized in online shopping as Tabao.com, the second global site behind eBay and Yahoo China, the search engine and portal bought by Yahoo in 2005. In his younger years, Jack Ma was a tour guide; his excellent command of English and his perfect knowledge of the province of Hangzhou where he comes from allow him to be really good in this job. Graduated from Hangzhou Teachers' Institute in 1988, Jack Ma taught for some time before creating a translation agency that knows a big success thanks to U.S. and foreign companies who move in China. During a trip he made in the USA as an interpreter, Jack Ma discovers computers and internet. Fascinated, he ordered to a friend a website for his translation agency. Back in China, he borrowed $ 2,000 from friends and launched the website China pages, considered as the first commercial website in the country. The site has difficulties to find its business model and stops. Jack Ma got a job at the Ministry of Foreign Trade, a position which enabled him in 1998 to meet Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo. Jack Ma really wants to invest in the web. He managed to borrow $ 60,000 for the launch of Alibaba.com in 1999. Quickly, the company is a leader in the sector of business-to-business (B2B). The credibility...
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