History Of Alibaba

1. Brief Profile about Country of Origin & Destination Country (e.g. political and economic structures, brief history, etc), Company and the Industry in which the Firm operates

Country of Origin - China:

Alibaba was launched by Jack Ma along with a group of 17 friends in 1999. It is China’s biggest online commerce company. EBay entered China first through a joint venture, EachNet, targeting at C2C segment. At that time, Alibaba was a B2B company that helped small- and medium-sized Chinese enterprises land deals with western importers. Soon after EachNet launched an online auction, Alibaba established Taobao as a defensive step. Ten years later, EachNet ceased to exist while Taobao dominated the market.

Alibaba can be called a conglomerate.

1. Alipay: It is an online third party payment platform, launched in 2004 by Alibaba Group. It provides payments and escrow services for transactions on Alibaba Group platforms. Alipay is the leader in China's online payment market with 300 million users. Alibaba Group spun off Alipay in 2010.

2. Alimama: It is an online marketing platform, launched in 2007. It provides a range of marketing and advertising services to sellers on Alibaba Group's marketplaces.

3. China Smart Logistics: It provides real-time access to information for both buyers and sellers to improve the efficiency of e-commerce package deliveries.

4. Aliyun: It develops platforms for cloud computing and data management. Helps to handle ecommerce portals’ massive traffic and transaction volumes.

The rise of Alibaba can be attributed to its local knowledge. It understands the local buyers and sellers better than western competitors. Alibaba is also keen on leveraging existing advantages to new market, such as B2C, logistics, finance and even cloud service. Alibaba is so successful because it swiftly adapts the business model to Chinese reality as

Connect small business with consumers: As the factory of the world, China has millions of small manufacturing companies. Before the dawn of e-commerce, they had no way to reach domestic customers, and focused on exports. To facilitate the nature of the platform, most of the items on Taobao were for sale rather than auction. The buyers can ensure they get the products at a fixed price while the sellers can ensure a fixed revenue. Auction is more suitable for collectables and second-hand items, which were not the primary turf of Taobao. Only 10% of its listings were for auction even in the beginning of the