Alibaba’s Journey From Revolutionary to Incumbent
The Chinese software conglomerate transformed online commerce and payments. However, since Jack Ma’s forced departure, it has become a comfortable incumbent.
Alibaba and the closely related Ant Group have defined commerce in China. In 2022, online shopping accounted for 27.2% of Chinese retail sales.1 Half of that was sold through Alibaba, or about one eighth of all China’s retail sales. Meanwhile Ant Group’s Alipay mobile payment app led mobile payments to displace cash as China’s main form of payment, and today has over 1.3 billion users, roughly one in every six people alive today.2 Like the other Chinese software giants, Tencent and Baidu, and like U.S. software giants such as Google and Microsoft, Alibaba is not a single product, but a vast conglomerate with many different projects, large and small, though it is sometimes called “China’s Amazon.” In addition to its e-commerce platforms, Alibaba’s cloud computing service is the largest of any Chinese company. At its peak in October 2020, Alibaba’s market capitalization of $830 billion made it the most valuable company in Asia.3