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.