Alibaba

Alibaba group is the online Chinese Company that offers cloud computing, electronic payment, ‘search engine’ services for buying through different portals such as consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-consumer (B2C) and business–to-business (B2B) sales. Its C2C portal is Taobao, the B2C portal is TMall and B2B portal is Alibaba.com.

• Industry: The Internet
• Founded: April 4, 1999
• Founder(s): Jack Ma
• Headquarters: Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
• Subsidiaries:com, TMall, AliExpress Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao F.C,Juhuasuan.com, U C Web, Ant Financial, Alimama.com, Lazada, Cainiao, Youku Tudou
• Website: alibabagroup.com

History of Alibaba 

The Alibaba Group was founded by Jack Ma. He founded the Alibaab.com (B2B) portal in 1999 for connecting the Chinese manufacturers with the overseas buyers. The Company operates in the ‘People’s Republic of China.’ It has operations in over 200 countries and is known to have surpassed USA’s Walmart and has become the world’s biggest retailer in April 2016. It has even surpassed eBay and Amazon in generating merchandise volume.

Both its Tmall.com and Taobao portal features more than billions of products and is among the 20 most popular websites internationally. It’s Alipay, an escrow online payment service accounts for more than half of China’s payment transactions online.

As an e-commerce consumer platform, Taobao was established in May 2003. Alipay came into existence in the month of December 2004. It began as a service on Taobao platform but emerged as a separate entity. The Alibaba Group undertook the operations of the China Yahoo in the month of October 2005 as a strategic move.

More about Alibaba 

Jack Ma along with the 17 founders released the online marketplace known as ‘Alibaba Online.’

Alibaba.com was enlisted on ‘Hong Kong Stock Exchange’ in the month of November 2007. This B2C portal Taobao Mall was established in April 2008. The ‘Alibaba Group R&D Institute’ was founded in the month of September 2008. The Alibaba.com Corporation announced that all the websites of the Alibaba Group would be ‘shark-fin free’ from the 1st of January 2009. In the month of September 2009, ‘The Alibaba Group’ established the Alibaba ‘cloud computing on its tenth anniversary. In the month of October 2010, eTao was launched as the ‘shopping search engine.’ The Alibaba Group divided the Taobao Company into three different groups in the month of June 2011. The three separate companies were Taobao Mall, Taobao Marketplace, and eTao.  ‘Alibaba Cloud Computing’ launched the self-developed first mobile operating system, the Aliyun OS, over the ‘K-Touch Cloud Smartphone’ in the month of January 2012. Alibaba unveiled ‘Roewe RX5’ officially as the first ‘internet car’ in association with the SAIC on the 9th of June 2016.

Alibaba acquired AutoNavi, a Chinese map supplier in 2014. It launched its first messaging service and application, Laiwang in the month of October 2013. It launched the 11 Main, the USA shopping site on the 11th of June 2014. It purchased Xiami, the online provider of music service and acquired 365fanyi.com, which is a domestic translation platform. Alibaba’s healthcare unit was launched in 2014. It even launched UCWeb which is leading service provider of Internet mobile software technology.