Today we visited Alibaba.com, the largest ecommerce company in China. Alibaba started in 1999 with 18 employees and 10 years on; they now have over 14.000 employees. The company serve over 40 million registered members across China and have over US$60 million in transactions per day (yes, that's per day!).
Our host for the visit was Brian Lee (Vice President). Brian started the presentation by explaining the companies that make up the Alibaba group of companies. These include Alibaba.com - a B2B ecommerce site, Tabao.com – a C2C ecommerce site, Alipay – China's leading online payment service, Yahoo! Kobei - an online search engine and Alisoft – internet-based business software.
We learnt that Alibaba success has come from employing a word of mouth strategy i.e providing exceptional services to their customers and relying on them to market Alibaba to their networks.
After Brian's presentation, we were fortunate enough to be taken on the tour of the Alibaba workplace by Sophia Xin (Manager, Corporate Affairs Dept).
Overall, the visit to Alibaba was extremely interesting and very insightful. It gave us an opportunity to learn about the integrated online business model of Alibaba and about how Alibaba has become a huge success in China. The experience was invaluable and we thank both Brian and Sophia for their time.
