Jack Ma ringing of the bell.
Alibaba, the biggest E-Commerce company in the world founded by Jack Ma in Hang Zhou 13 years ago, went public on September 19th 2014. Its services includes business-to-businesses, online web pages, online shopping, payment services, a shopping search engine, and data centric cloud portals. On its debut, Alibaba raised $21.8 billion, becoming the biggest United States-listed Initial Public Offering in history (Bloomberg). Alibaba’s total market value is now over $231 billion (Fortune) and it surpasses big names in U.S.-technology industry such as Facebook, Ebay, and Amazon.
“Ebay is a shark in the ocean, and Alibaba is a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If they try to fight Ebay in the ocean, they will lose. But if they fight eBay in the river, they will win.” –Jack Ma
I admire Jack Ma’s perseverance in his goal: he has created the largest E-Commerce company in China, with little to no inventory. His revenue streams are endless with a variety of customer segments (Business Model Generation), and he continues to broaden his “Differentiation Strategy” (Porter’s Generic Strategies) in Alibaba. In my opinion this is a great opportunity for China to move forward on the international market and to expand the idea of global trade. This is also a favourable time for North Americans to invest as there are 618 million Internet users in China which 231 million are Alibaba users (Forbes). This middle class will continue to grow, and it is an ever-expanding market. Jack Ma also loves to help small businesses grow, especially entrepreneurship, hence many businesses will prosper in the future years thanks to Alibaba. I believe that Alibaba is the future backbone to many online retail businesses.
http://fortune.com/2014/09/19/on-alibabas-big-day-jack-ma-is-an-18-billion-winner/
http://www.ctvnews.ca/business/alibaba-goes-public-10-things-to-know-about-historic-ipo-1.2016369
http://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/alibaba-jack-ma-bloomberg.jpg?w=840&h=485&crop=1