China • Alibaba • News

Who owns Alibaba?  

Alibaba Group was founded in 1999 by Jack Ma and 17 friends. The group had a starting capital of $60,000 at the time. Originally, Alibaba served as a B2B platform, which it still is today. Early on, Goldman Sachs and Softbank stepped in with $25 million in seed funding. In 2005, Yahoo bought 40 percent of the company for $1 billion.   

Softbank still owns 24.9 percent of the stock today. Jack Ma and his family own 2.57 percent. Yahoo had created Altaba in 2017 with the sole purpose of managing Alibaba shares. However, in 2019, Yahoo decided to sell the remaining eleven percent of its shares. In the process, the Americans raised about $40 billion.  

Who belongs to the Alibaba Group?  

Early on, the then CEO Jack Ma recognized the potential of various Internet services. As early as 2003, he founded the auction platform Taobao. When eBay wanted to enter the Chinese market in the same year, he strictly refused to sell the platform to the Americans. Taobao developed into the largest C2C platform in China.   

In 2004, Alibaba Group presented the Alipay payment system. Already in 2014, half of all online payment transactions in China were processed with Alipay. Alibaba Group expanded the application to include various services such as online banking and micro-loans. After a re-branding, the subsidiary is now called Ant Financial and is considered the world’s most valuable startup, with an enterprise value of $150 billion to $200 billion.  

Which subsidiaries are part of Alibaba Group?  

• Alibaba.com, B2B trading platform  

• AliExpress, B2C trading platform  

• Taobao, auction house  

• Ant Financial, financial services  

• Alipay, online payment system   

• Aliyun OS, web service for cloud computing   

• Alibaba Cloud, cloud computing provider  

• 1688.com, B2B trading platform (China regional)  

• amap.com, online map service  

• Alibaba Pictures Group, film producers or investors  

• Tmall.com, online department store  

• juhuasuan.com, discount website  

Why is Alibaba called Alibaba?  

 Alibaba Group’s name comes from its founder Jack Ma and is actually based on the story collection “One Thousand and One Nights”. In it, Ali Baba, a woodcutter, discovers a treasure chamber that can only be opened with the words “open sesame”. As Jack Ma sat in a sidewalk café in the USA, he randomly asked thirty passersby if they knew the name. All of them answered in the affirmative. So he chose the name because of its enormous familiarity.   

Jack Ma was CEO of Alibaba Group until May 2013. Then Lu Zhaoxi took over this post. In September 2019, Jack Ma retired from the company completely. Currently, Yong Zhang is the CEO of Alibaba Group. Jack Ma has always tried to give Alibaba a customer-friendly face. When the global financial crisis began in 2007, he cut prices for end customers by sixty percent, much to the anger of investors. However, the number of customers increased so much that revenue remained the same.   

Difference between Alibaba and Alibaba Group?  

There are two types of Alibaba stock traded on the stock market. The more expensive Alibaba stock and the much cheaper Alibaba Group stock. They are the same company. The difference is that they are two different securities in two different marketplaces. The expensive Alibaba stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. This is where most of the trading volume takes place. These are depositary receipts – so-called ADR (American Depositary Receipts). One ADR is worth eight shares of Alibaba Group, which are traded in Hong Kong.  

Alibaba.com was already traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange between 2007 and 2012. However, Jack Ma delisted the company because he felt that shareholder pressure was hindering the company’s development. The dispute over the price reduction was one reason. One of Jack Ma’s principles is: “Customers first, employees second, shareholders third.”  

What was Alibaba’s record IPO? 

When Alibaba went public again in 2014, it raised $21.8 billion. At the time, it was the largest IPO in history. Alibaba raised more money than Google, Facebook and Twitter combined. The traditional bell for the IPO was rung not by Jack Ma, as would have been customary, but by eight of the company’s customers.   

What about Alibaba’s Ant Financial IPO?  

At the end of 2020, the financial services provider Ant Financial should have gone public. Experts assumed that this would have raised $37 billion for the company. It would have been a record IPO. But Chinese banking regulators halted the process. Officially, it was said that there were significant regulatory changes.     

Unofficially, it is suspected that Jack Ma’s criticism of the Chinese financial market regulator may have something to do with it. An example should be made of the entrepreneur and billionaire. Because at the same time, billion-dollar fines were imposed on Alibaba. Jack Ma must also part with shares in Ant Financial.   

Alibaba News 

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