Taobao has become the default setting for online retail in China, with more than 760 million product listings, and it is only part of the Alibaba empire. The company’s nine business areas comprise all parts of the ecommerce chain, from supplier marketplaces to online shopping to payment processing.
Alibaba’s two main platforms, Taobao and Tmall, which covers luxury goods and brands, accounted for more than half of all package deliveries in China last year, and sales were over 1 trillion yuan (€120 billion) in 2012. That’s nearly 2 per cent of China’s entire gross domestic product (GDP).
Earlier this month, Alibaba announced that its Alipay unit, already China’s leading third-party payment platform, was now the world’s biggest mobile payment service, with nearly 300 million registered real-name users, including 100 million who accessed services via mobile phones in 2013.
Alipay’s mobile users made 2.78 billion transactions, valued at 900 billion yuan, or €108 billion, and said its active mobile usership beat its US counterpart PayPal in the second quarter of 2013. The group also covers wholesale through its AliExpress business, ecommerce for small businesses, it has a search engine for shopping, it carries out daily deals, a la Groupon, and Aliyun. com sells cloud computing and data management services.
Alibaba began life in 1999 as a small business-to-business site, set up by the man often described as China’s smartest chief executive, Jack Ma. An English teacher by training, Ma officially retired a couple of years ago, although he still has a key role in deciding strategy and leadership.
His recent focus has been on developing tai chi and kung fu skills in China with the martial arts star Jet Li, but he remains one of China’s most powerful people, and has strong links to the ruling Communist Party, especially premier Li Keqiang.
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