Alibaba

About

Alibaba is a Chinese-based Internet e-commerce business made of several websites, payment services a search engine and cloud computing services.

History

In December 1998, Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma^[4] collaborated with 17 other founders to create the online retailer “Alibaba Online.”

According to Ma, he came up with the name “Alibaba” while sitting in coffee shop in San Francisco.

One day I was in San Francisco in a coffee shop, and I was thinking Alibaba is a good name. And then a waitress came, and I said, “Do you know about Alibaba?” And she said yes. I said, “What do you know about Alibaba?”, and she said, “Alibaba and 40 thieves”. And I said, “Yes, this is the name!” Then I went onto the street and found 30 people and asked them, “Do you know Alibaba?” People from India, people from Germany, people from Tokyo and China … they all knew about Alibaba. Alibaba -- open sesame. Alibaba is a kind, smart business person, and he helped the village. So … easy to spell, and globally known.

^[1]

On April 4th, 1999, Ma launched Alibaba.com^[3] as a business-to-business website to link Chinese manufacturers and overseas buyers. That year, Alibaba Group raised $25 million in investment from various banks and institutions, including Softbank, Goldman Sachs and Fidelity. In 2003, the Alibaba Group launched the Chinese online shopping platform Taobao Marketplace. In 2004, Alibaba made the Alipay online payment and escrow service. In October 2005, Alibaba partnered with Yahoo! Inc to operate China Yahoo! In April 2008, Alibaba created the Tmall online retailer platform. In September 2009, the Alibaba Cloud Computing platform was launched. In 2010, the online retail service AliExpress was created. On May 10th, 2013, Ma stepped down as the Alibaba Group chief executive officer (CEO) to become executive chairman, being replaced by Jonathan Lu as the company’s new CEO.

IPO

On September 5th, 2014, Alibaba was priced at $60 to $66 per share for its initial public offering (IPO) in a regulatory filing by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. On the following day, Big News Network^[2] reported that the listing was expected to reach upwards of $20 billion on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to become the largest tech listing in U.S. history. On September 22nd, the Alibaba IPO was raised to $25 billion after Alibaba’s underwriters announced they would be selling investors more shares than originally planned. As of September 26th, Alibaba Group has a NYSE share price of $89.47 (shown below).

Controversies

Gold Supplier Memberships

Alibaba.com provides “Gold Supplier” memberships to sellers that have been verified as authentic and reputable. In February 2011, the Alibaba Group announced that it had supplied 2,236 Gold Supplier memberships to sellers that subsequently defrauded customers.

Illegal Uranium Sale

In August 2013, Alibaba seller Patrick Campbell was arrested for attempting to export 1,000 tonnes of yellowcake uranium from Sierra Leone after an United States law enforcement agent posed as a broker seeking to purchase the radioactive material.

Traffic

According to the traffic analytics site Alexa,^[5] Alibaba.com has a global rank of 63 and a rank of 24 in China as of September 2014.

Search Interest

External References