Alibaba – The Story Of An e-Commerce Behemoth
If there is a will, there is a way. If you dream big, then you must have the courage to bring it into reality. Success kisses them, who believe in what they think and dare to come up with something new. Mr. Jack Ma dared to dream and showed the courage to bring it into reality. It is Jack Ma, who has given us the chance to have the fruit of online business-to-business facility. People have even started calling him – Chinese edition of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. This is a lovely tale of how Jack Ma established an e-commerce giant and how an English teacher from HangZhou has become the Chairman of the e-commerce behemoth Alibaba.
The strong will power of Ma made him fight against the giant online store ‘eBay in China. The dominance of an American company over Chinese e-commerce market constituted him to establish a new e-commerce retail site ‘Alibaba’ challenging the reputed US Company. It was not an easy task to compete with an already established American giant but soon Alibaba’s business strategy forced eBay to close its operations in China. Alibaba was founded in 1999 but within 15 years, it has become the largest online company in China with more than 24000 employees and with the total nine months revenue of $5.66 billion.
Few years later, Alibaba came up with two retail sites- Tmall, which is a store of prominence brands and Taobao, which is a retail store for the small merchants. It is the successful story of the Alibaba Group that this group now owns various different companies and affiliates many operations- Alibaba.com, Tmall.com, Taobao.com, eTao.com, Juhuasuan.com, Alipay(a third party online payment option without transaction fees), Aliexpress, Laiwang (online messaging service), Alibaba cloud computing, Youkou Tudou and China Vision Media Group.
The different business theory from Amazon and eBay helps Alibaba become bigger and bigger day by day to institute the name of China into the respected corporate sphere. The strong determination of Alibaba Group to enter the US stock market and the ardent aspirations from Jack Ma, have rendered this company as one of the global giants like Google and Facebook. They have involved in hundred of meetings and have dared to organize many road shows in the heart of New York City for the potential investors. No one had ever thought that a business sector from China would blow the New York stock exchange and would clench the record IPO suppressing the record of Facebook and Visa.
Alibaba Group’s success story continues sailing by acquiring the record IPO of $21.8 billion, which is the highest IPO in US history. It has been believed that if Alibaba managed to sell the additional 48 million shares, then the IPO could have beaten the record of Agricultural Bank of China, which had the world biggest record of collecting $22billion IPO in 2010.
Alibaba Group shares its success with Yahoo, as Yahoo has initiated a partnership with Alibaba Group in 2005 to begin the service ‘China Yahoo’. The record IPO of Alibaba brought smile to the investors of Yahoo, as with the raise of Alibaba’s IPO, Yahoo also gained more than $8.3 billion. On the day of Alibaba’s debut, the stock of Yahoo has reached to $20 billion and the reason behind this hike is that Yahoo still holds more than 16% stakes of Alibaba. The record IPO of Alibaba would surely blaze a spark in Wall Street in favor of Yahoo and the investors in Japan would feel good for Yahoo Japan.
People from US are likely to invest in Alibaba Group because it controls many businesses in China and the subsidiaries are there to gain the profits for this group. Alibaba is now among the leading international e-commerce companies. The huge success in domestic region works as a boost behind Alibaba’s successful international corporate recognition. Jack Ma assured the shareholders that he would never disappoint them and so, he would plan to invest into other companies along with other businesses. The CEO of Alibaba Group promises that the company will triple the transaction volume by 2016.
Jack Ma is one of the leading people, who teach us how to dream and push our hopes to bring the dream into reality to change the world vision, as Alibaba has changed the definition of e-commerce business.