Alibaba is China’s biggest online commerce company. It is chiefly a domestic operation, which sounds limiting, but when one considers the numbers around China’s discovery of the internet, one can see the appeal: China had 618 million internet users at the end of December 2013, according to China Internet Network Information Center, or CNNIC; that figure was up 9.5% year on year but still represented less than half the national population, showing clear room for growth.
Alibaba owns stakes in all sorts of things, but operates chiefly through three sites: Taobao, China’s biggest shopping site; Tmall, which specialises on online sales of branded goods and focuses on China’s fast-growing middle class; and Alibaba.com, which connects Chinese exporters with companies elsewhere in the world. Between them they host millions of merchants and businesses, and have hundreds of millions of users; in terms of the amount of business handled, one can argue that Alibaba is actually the world’s biggest online commerce company, not just China’s. On top of its core sites it owns alipay.com, a Chinese equivalent of Paypal; and has large stakes in Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter; and Youku Tudou, the closest Chinese equivalent to YouTube. Lately, it’s gone a bit scatty in its acquisitions, buying a film business and half of the Chinese football club Guangzhou Evergrande. It has even talked about entering the banking industry, and already has a remarkably popular mutual fund called Yu’e Bao.