At the age of 12, a Chinese boy would religiously listen to ‘Voice of America’ broadcasts every day. He wanted to learn English, but the options in China were limited. He would speak to visitors from the US and offer them guided tours for free. He failed the entrance exam twice before enrolling at Hangzhou Teachers College. He then graduated and started to teach English at $15 per month. By this time, he had become proficient enough in English and in 1995 he got a part-time job as an interpreter for deals between Chinese and American businesses. It was during this time that he got to visit a friend’s home in Seattle, and encountered his first computer and the Internet. Jack Ma came back to China and started a China Pages for small businesses, to help establish their web presence. Ma then launched Alibaba in 1999, a B2B marketplace. Alibaba filed for its IPO in the US recently, and it is essential to take a step back and look at its journey since Jack Ma started as a tour guide and finally gave shape to the e-commerce behemoth that it is today. It would be wrong to call Alibaba just an e-commerce company. It is China’s, and by several measures, world’s largest online commerce company. The Alibaba group comprises of Taobao, Tmall, and Alibaba. In total, the group has hundreds of millions of users, and a marketplace with millions of merchants and businesses. Alibaba handles more business than any other e-commerce company. More than $240 billion of merchandise changed hands on Alibaba in 2013. This is more than that of Amazon and eBay combined!
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 17:39:22 +0000
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