Alibaba Group’s aim is to become the equivalent of the world’s fifth-richest country in four years. Founder and Chairperson Jack Ma laid out the company’s goals during its first Investor Day, which took place this morning at its headquarters in Hangzhou, China.
Alibaba Founder & Executive Chairman Jack Ma said, “Alibaba is not a retail business, we are a data business.” Jack added that everything Alibaba does, including financial services like Alipay and investing in logistics, is to gather more data. He added that Alibaba wants to double its revenue more than to a trillion dollars by 2020.
To do that, Alibaba will have to double more than the $463 million in gross merchandise value it made last fiscal year. Achieving one trillion dollars in GMV by 2020 would make the Alibaba the equivalent of the world’s fifth-largest country by gross domestic product, Ma claimed, after the United States, China, the European Union, and Japan.
According to Jack Ma, “E-commerce alone, however, will not be enough to take it that far.” Ma told investors that Alibaba’s growth strategy revolves around Aliyun, its cloud computing, and big data unit. In fact, Alibaba “is not a retail business, we are a data business,” he said, and everything it does now—including financial services like Alipay and investing in logistics—is to gather yet more data. But Alibaba is still pumping a lot of money into e-commerce, and it focuses on big data.
“Fifteen years ago, I had a problem with my venture capitalist investors. They kept asking, in 2001, 2002, what is your revenue, what are your page views? At that time page views were the business model, then click rate was the business model,” Ma said.
“Then in 2005, we started giving something called GMV that we learned from eBay. Investors needed it, so we gave it to them, and it became standard. But in our heart, we know this is not the only index,” he added.
In addition to Southeast Asia, Alibaba is also eyeing India and has made significant investments in e-commerce companies like Paytm. Alibaba has grappled to establish a foothold in the US. Also, want to opening data centers in the U.S.
Alibaba’s aim is to serve two billion people by 2020. Means it needs to expand quickly beyond China, which has a population of about 1.36 billion. Ma says he expects about 30% of Chinese consumers will never use Alibaba’s services, so it has to find 1.2 billion users in other countries.
