There are many words that could be used to describe the success story of Alibaba, which now dominates much of the online trade in China. Or as the story of a man named Jack Ma who never seemed to be satisfied and who, like Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, has been striving for a steady improvement. At least until last year.
However, just recently, Alibaba’s success story has been given another description: that as a source of inspiration. As Citibank’s head of retail banking revealed, new technology trends within the payment industry would always lead to China, especially Ant Financial, the Alibaba segment that provides payment services.
So let’s take a look today where Alibaba could possibly be a role model or source of inspiration. Because in addition to the financial services business, Alibaba also seems to do a lot in other areas.
A first important area where Alibaba is still exemplary is the e-commerce segment. In the last, deviating financial year, which ended at the end of March, the Chinese were once again able to underscore how agile they are in their main business field.
Revenues in the past twelve months increased by a whopping 51% to 56.15 billion US dollars. The annual active users increased by more than 100 million users to now 654 million users, the volume of goods increased by 19% to 853 billion US dollars. Definitely impressive figures outlining the current dimension of this e-commerce player, which, despite a market capitalization of over $436 billion, still has rapid and significant double-digit growth rates in all key areas.
A success story, which should still have excellent chances of a continuation. By the end of 2021, Chinese e-commerce sales are expected to increase to more than $2.6 trillion. As a result, Alibaba could continue to function as a fast-growing role model in classic online retailing.
Alibaba is not only a prime example in the classic e-commerce sector, but also in other segments. For example, the cloud segment of the Internet group continues to record rapid growth, which is now contributing properly to the group’s operating success.
Alone in the quarter ending in late March, Alibaba continued to show rapid growth rates of 76% year on year to $1.15 billion. Of course, annualized means that this smaller segment is now responsible for a not inconsiderable part of the revenues of the tech group.
Alibaba can boast of supporting more than half of its domestic leading index companies with its cloud solutions, which is definitely an impressive milestone, while demonstrating its strong market position in China. Of course, this is not the only segment where Alibaba is successful.
Only recently have been loud reports, after which Alibaba is now one of the larger, more innovative tech insurance providers and can now welcome a large part of the Chinese policyholders in its ranks. A market in which other major internet and tech companies from the more western countries may need to work hard.
