The first moment I would highlight is the creation of the company. In the year 1999 Jack Ma, natural from Hengszhou, decided to reunite 17 of his friends in an apartment and start creating 'something'. That would be something very innovative. In 1995 he travelled to the United States and discovered that enormous world of new possibilites: the Internet. There he found out that when he was doing some research online, he could not find any result related to China. And he got inspired. If that new technology was enchanting the rest of the world, why not his own country? Was then when his 'something' was born. Alibaba was created as a place where the wholesalers could offer their products and people could get them through the Internet. Worldwide known companies such as Goldman Sacks and Softbank saw the future's perspective of Ma's idea and decided to invest on it. Although it was hard, the motivating leadership of Jack lead them to the success.
When Alibaba was growing and more people was using it, it became necessary to create a platform that would increase the reliability of the company in terms of payments. That lead to the creation of Alipay, a mainstay for the success of the Alibaba group. Now, all the consumers could buy with a feeling of security about their money. I would stress without a doubt, another key moment for the development of the company: it was the year 2005 when Yahoo! decided to invest 1 billion dollars in the organization, amount that would account for the 40% of the stocks of the company. This fact would have a relevant impact on the world market and would be a surprise for other companies that were into the selling-buying sector, such as eBay, in the United States. That could lead us to analyse which were the reasons why eBay did not manage to set foot on the Chinese Market. The first reason could be very obvious: eBay is an American company, and they do not have the know-how about the Chinese market. Thus, is understandable that they failed in the methods to reach the market; for example, the trading of second-hand goods was not a popular activity in the Asian country, so they could not get into the market. Related to this, was the language barrier. It made difficult the communication and the unification of both cultures. The internet servers were also a deterrent for the developmento of eBay in China. They were working with American servers, and in hindered the proper functioning of the website. Besides, in China already existed a market for C2C trades: TaoBao. The Chinese website, son of Alibaba, that was very popular thanks to their free-commision service; unlike eBay, that charged around and 8% of commission for the use of their web.
Now, to keep going, we could have a look to what extent social aspects and culture has affected successes or failures of Alibaba up until this day. The first years of Alibaba were tough. In China, people was not awared about what the Internet was or which possibilities could it bring, so it was difficult to reach a target market. They had to beget the usage of the online services; and it was not a tough task, because it opened a great world of opportunities for the Chinese sellers to promote their products, and also to the buyers to have easier access to them.
If we analise today's trends and future's perspective, as we can see in Ed Sander's chart above, a 37% of the Chinese population has access to the Internet and also are online shoppers. If we take into account how many people live in china, 1.3 billion people approximately, we can assure that is a great percentage. So the fact that nowadays a lot commerce is done through the Internet, we have to doubt that this is a boost for the whole Alibaba group. Thanks to that immersion of the e-commerce in the country, many people that lives in rural areas have nowadays access to products that they otherwise could not even imagine.
But... why Alibaba is stomping in the market getting positioned at the level of Amazon for example? We should wonder what are the differences from an organizational point of view that are between them. An essential difference is that Alibaba doesn't sell products itself. It is just a platform where all the buyers can expose their goods and the buyers have access to check them. On the contrary, Amazon besides having the same option (buyers offer their goods), also have their own storage of goods, usually related to well-known brands.
If you would ask me if I see Alibaba setting foot outside China, I would answer yes. They already are outside China. A proof that they do is that they are investing in a lot of enterprises outside their country, such as Lyft Inc. and Snapchat Inc. Also, Alibaba's IPO was the greatest of the history, getting a great amount of millions from investors in Wall Street. In Europe, maybe Alibaba is not the most known brand of the company, but to get into the Wester market they have AliExpress, brand that is getting into the market at a very interesting rate.
To finish, I would like to leave you with a video from the creator, Jack Ma, where he makes a short speech but filled with motivation and inspirational thoughts. That energy, is the difference between failure and success and is what lead him to be the #8 person richest in the World.
Sources:
'e-commerce', Ed Sander's Lecture
'Jack Ma: su inspiradora historia', https://www.gooali.com/blogs/aliexpress/82661636-jack-ma-su-inspiradora-historia
'The richest people in Tech', Forbes http://www.forbes.com/profile/jack-ma/
'La salida a bolsa de Alibaba ya es la mayor de la historia', expansion.com http://www.expansion.com/2014/09/22/mercados/1411383126.html
'Inversión en Startups ayuda a crecer a Alibaba fuera de China', gestion.pe http://gestion.pe/empresas/inversion-startups-ayuda-alibaba-crecer-fuera-china-2166063
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