Alibaba

Alibaba Group Holding Limited is a Chinese multinational conglomerate holding company specialising in e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology. Founded in 1999 by Jack Ma and a team of 17 friends and students, the company provides consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B) sales services via web portals, as well as electronic payment services, shopping search engines and cloud computing services. 

Alibaba is the world's largest retailer and e-commerce company, one of the largest Internet and AI companies, one of the biggest venture capital firms, and one of the biggest investment corporations in the world. The company hosts the largest B2B (Alibaba.com), C2C (Taobao), and B2C (Tmall) marketplaces in the world. Its online sales and profits surpassed all US retailers (including Walmart, Amazon, and eBay) combined since 2015. It also sets the record on the 2019 edition of China's Singles' Day, the world's biggest online and offline shopping day, with gross merchandise volume hitting $38.4bn, up around 26% compared to the previous year.

In the fiscal year ended March 31 2019, Alibaba's revenue was US$56,152m, an increase of 51% YoY. Annual active consumers on its China retail marketplaces reached 721m, an increase of over 100m compared to that of March 2018.

At closing time on the date of its initial public offering (IPO) – US$25 billion – the world's highest in history, 19 September 2014, Alibaba's market value was US$231 billion. As of 19 December 2018, Alibaba's market cap stood at US$352.28 billion. It is one of the top 10 most valuable and biggest companies in the world. In January 2018, Alibaba became the second Asian company to break the US$500 billion valuation mark, after its competitor Tencent.

In September 2018, Jack Ma, the main founder of Alibaba, announced that he would step down as Chairman in a year's time so he could focus on philanthropy. He was replaced as Chairman by Daniel Zhang in 2019.

As of August 2019, 59% of all listed companies in China are Alibaba Cloud customers.

In 2019 Alibaba filed confidentially for a Hong Kong IPO. Initially planned for August, the company delayed the IPO until November due to protests happening in Hong Kong. It raised at least HK$88bn ($11.3bn), with the potential to reach $12.9bn depending on whether an over-allotment option is used.

In November 2020, Alibaba's Ant Group's IPO was cancelled, one day after Chinese regulators summoned Founder Jack Ma and other executives.