Ali you need to know about

Jack Ma – Biography Jack Ma Time line (Infographic) Jack Ma Interview (explains how and why he set up, and how he has become so successful)

Overview & Business Model (A mix of Amazon, Ebay, PayPal & Google!) Wall Street Journal - Alibaba Summary Alibaba has always acted as a middleman, connecting buyers and sellers and facilitating transactions between them. This means less revenue, but more profit (net profit margin is currently 44%). To increase revenue from advertising, it blocks Chinese search engines searching inside two of its most popular web stores, meaning customers have to start their search within the store, where they see the advertising from Alibaba businesses. Yahoo have a 24% share Taobao Alibaba's biggest website, has 760 million product listings from seven million sellers. Merchants don't pay to sell products on Taobao. Instead, they pay Alibaba for advertising and other services to allow them to stand out from the crowd. Tmall Another shopping site run by Alibaba, is designed for bigger merchants, including well-known brands such as Nike and Apple. Has about 70,000 merchants, charges each seller a deposit and an annual fee, as well as a commission on each transaction. Company overview

Key Figures – Alibaba v Amazon

GMV since 1999 Alibaba, Amazon & Ebay

Alibaba V Tencent Recent Articles Business Week - China's turf war Full Infographic Business Week - China's turf war BBC Tencent & Alibaba fight for dominance South China Morning Post - The tale of two leaders

Diversification & Acquisitions Last year Alibaba invested $585.8 million for a 18% stake in Sina Weibo (China’s Twitter) Bloomberg article Shares in Chinese media firm ChinaVision soared over 250% after Alibaba announced it paid $804m (£484m) for a controlling stake in the company. (BBC article) Alibaba to launch Gaming Platform China’s mobile games market is booming, up almost 247 percent from a year ago. The number of mobile gamers in China has also soared, up 248 percent to 310 million, representing 63 percent of the total online gamer base.

Competing against the state bank… and winning China Spectator - Alibaba's Yuebao gives banks a rude awakening Yuebao has more than 81 million customers 18 million more than the combined number of retail investors on China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges. Within eight months, it has managed to pull in $90 billion of deposits from investors At the moment, Yuebao offers a 6.114 per cent annualised return, whilst the big four Chinese commercial banks only offers 3.25 per cent yield for a one year term deposit. Yuebao has expanded 10,000 times in less than a year which works out to be something like 3 million yuan per minute.

BusinessInsider - Alibaba to open US online store 11 Main Market Development BusinessInsider - Alibaba to open US online store 11 Main This launch also follows Alibaba's $15 million investment in the vintage e-commerce site 1stdibs and its $200 million investment in Shoprunner, another U.S. company. 

Mission Statement & Vision To make it easy to do business anywhere Vision To become the first platform of choice for sharing data To be an enterprise that has the happiest employees To last at least 102 years

Alibaba's potential $15bn IPO - The Guardian Article Going Public… Alibaba's potential $15bn IPO - The Guardian Article "This will make us a more global company and enhance the company's transparency, as well as allow the company to continue to pursue our long-term vision and ideals.“ Jack Ma

China’s E-commerce Infographic Full Infographic

Long term internet growth