Alibaba began in a Hangzhou apartment and became history's biggest stock debut
In June 1999 Jack Ma and 17 friends and students launched a business-to-business trading website from his apartment in Hangzhou. Fifteen years later its New York share sale raised 25 billion US dollars, more than the flotations of Google, Facebook and Twitter put together, and at the time the largest ever.
The name borrows the hero of a tale from the One Thousand and One Nights, picked because Ali Baba is recognised almost everywhere. Money arrived quickly: in October 1999 Goldman Sachs, SoftBank and the Swedish firm Investor AB put in 25 million dollars, and by 2002 the site was turning a profit. In 2005 Yahoo paid 1 billion dollars for a 40 percent stake, which a group of Chinese investors bought back in 2012.
Its defining battle came against eBay. When the American company pushed into China in 2003, Ma set up Taobao, a consumer marketplace that won over wary shoppers with third-party verification and by giving most services away free, charging only for extras. Taobao overtook eBay in 2007, and eBay eventually shut its loss-making Chinese site. Today the group runs what are described as the largest business-to-business, consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer marketplaces anywhere, and it set a record during the 2018 Singles' Day, the biggest shopping day on the planet.
The 2014 flotation priced shares at 68 dollars, above the planned range, valuing the company at 231 billion dollars, and underwriters sold 15 percent more shares than first planned. In January 2018 it became only the second Asian firm, after its rival Tencent, to top 500 billion dollars. It has spread into cloud computing, logistics, media and artificial intelligence, and bought half of the football club Guangzhou Evergrande.
Deals reached far afield: a stake in the ride-hailing firm Lyft, an Indian payments platform, and an 800 million dollar sponsorship of the Olympic Games running until 2028. Ma handed the chairmanship to Daniel Zhang in September 2019 to concentrate on philanthropy.
Source: Alibaba Group
