Alibaba started as a B2B marketplace connecting Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers, and it snowballed into one of the most valuable companies on Earth. Jack Ma founded it in his Hangzhou apartment in 1999, and within two decades it was processing more transaction volume than Amazon and eBay combined.
The ecosystem is massive. Alibaba.com handles wholesale trade. Taobao is the consumer-to-consumer marketplace (think Chinese eBay). Tmall hosts branded storefronts for companies wanting to sell directly to Chinese consumers. AliExpress serves international buyers looking for cheap direct-from-China goods. Together, these platforms serve over a billion annual active consumers.
Beyond e-commerce, Alibaba built Alipay (now Ant Group), which processes trillions in payments annually. Their cloud division, Alibaba Cloud, is the largest cloud provider in Asia. The company’s logistics arm, Cainiao, coordinates deliveries across China with next-day shipping to most addresses.
The past few years haven’t been easy. Chinese regulators hit Alibaba with a record $2.8 billion antitrust fine in 2021, and the company restructured into six business groups. Competition from Pinduoduo and Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese version) has eaten into market share. But Alibaba’s infrastructure — the payment rails, cloud services, and logistics network — gives it staying power that pure marketplaces can’t match.
