What are the key moments of the development of Alibaba as an organization?
Alibaba is the largest e-commerce company in the world. The gross merchandise volume of that Alibaba has generated is more than Amazon and Ebay together. In all listed internet companies, the capitalization of the company was second only to Google. Alibaba was not the first comer in the e-commerce market in China. EBay entered China first through a joint venture with Eachnet. At that time Alibaba was a B2B company which helped small and medium sized Chinese companies making deals with western importers.
Shortly after EachNet launched online auction, Alibaba established Taobao as a defensive step. Ten years later, EachNet terminated to existence while and Taobao dominated the market. Alibaba can be called a conglomerate. It has set foot in C2C, B2C, B2B, group buying, online payment, logistics, online advertisement and cloud. Another factor that was in the advantage of Alibaba was that Jack Ma knew the Chinese consumer environment. The internet was new in China and Alibaba knew how to adapt to this new environment in China.
Describe the reasons as to why Ebay did not manage to set foot to the Chinese market.
Alibaba is a business-to-business marketplace. Not a particular proposition at first sight. EBay was already active in China. How Alibaba's market share may have risen so fast relative to the established American competitor? Alibaba knew that the relationship between a buyer and seller is more than just a transaction. In China, people do not buy or auction by auction, but they want a personal relationship with the buyer or seller.
EBay was never enormous in China. The Internet has always been a key concern of the powers that be and so is the economy. The desire to control one to benefit the other as well as maintain party control created a situation where local companies could grow and develop without outside threat while benefiting the economy and stabilizing party control over the Internet and real economy through close relations with Internet giants Baidu, Tencent Alibaba. In addition Alibaba's roots are very different from eBay. Alibaba today generates most of its money from Taobao the online market it runs as well as Tmall, an upscale version of Taobao.
To what extent social aspects and culture has affected the successes of failures of Alibaba up until this day?
Jack Ma compared the values of Alibaba after a martial arts technique drawn of love for kung fu. China’s biggest e-commerce company also draws their values from the Western world with a mix of East. The core values of Alibaba are; customer first, teamwork, embrace change, integrity, passion and commitment which are shaped Alibaba Group Holding.
Alibaba's ambitions helped it grow from just 18 employees to more than 20,000 today. Along the way, it knocked out eBay of China.
What are the fundamental differences you see from an organizational viewpoint between Alibaba and other competitors in the world such as Amazon for instance?
Alibaba is like Amazon a large e-commerce company with no place to stock products and they have a notable player in the market by operating through online presence alone. However, while Amazon and Alibaba each have distinct features, their business models differ greatly. Amazon is a massive retailer of both new and used goods, and Alibaba acts as a middleman operates between buyers and sellers and do not have used goods because Chinese consumer do not want to buy used goods.
Do you see Alibaba setting foot outside of China? Whatever your choices explain your arguments.
Eventually Alibaba will set foot outside of China, starting with the US. Alibaba has of course knowledge about the western e-commerce market. That is mostly due to the experience and their western employees working for Alibaba. I think that Alibaba will try to start their businesses first in the US, because European countries have a lot of rules and regulations. US will be difficult, but Alibaba can beat American companies, because Alibaba has an aggressive competition attitude which will eventually bring success to the company.
