What is Alibaba Group’s core business?
Alibaba Group provides the technology infrastructure and marketing reach to help merchants, brands and other businesses to leverage the power of new technology to engage with their users and customers and operate in a more efficient way. Our businesses are comprised of core commerce, cloud computing, digital media and entertainment, and innovation initiatives. For more information on our key offerings, please visit the
Our Businesses page.
Who are Alibaba Group's customers?
Our customers include both buyers and sellers on our marketplaces, and they discover, select and transact with each other on our platform. Buyers access our marketplaces free of charge. Buyers include consumers who come to our retail marketplaces to shop for anything anytime anywhere, as well as business buyers who use our wholesale marketplaces to source products for use in their own business or for resale. Sellers use our marketplaces to establish a presence on the Internet and market products and services to hundreds of millions of consumers and other businesses. Sellers include brands, retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers. We also provide cloud computing services to a wide range of customers including merchants doing business on our marketplaces, systems integrators, mobile app developers and digital entertainment companies.
What do you mean when you refer to the "Alibaba ecosystem"?
Given the scale we have been able to achieve, an ecosystem has developed around our platforms and businesses that consists of consumers, merchants, brands, other enterprises, third-party service providers and strategic alliance partners. At the nexus of this ecosystem are our technology platform, our marketplace rules and the role we play in connecting these participants to make it possible for them to discover, engage and transact with each other and manage their businesses anytime and anywhere. Much of our effort, time and energy is spent on initiatives that are for the greater good of the ecosystem and on balancing the interests of its participants. We feel a strong responsibility for the continued development of the ecosystem and we take ownership in this development. Accordingly, we refer to this as "our ecosystem."
How does Alibaba Group grow its business?
We aim to strengthen and expand our ecosystem in order to achieve long-term growth by:
- increasing active consumers and improving consumer experience and our wallet share through geographic expansion, new product and service categories, as well as by leveraging our data capabilities to better identify, analyze and serve their needs through personalization across channel;
- expanding product and service offerings to consumers beyond physical goods, including entertainment, healthcare, travel and local services;
- reinventing our platforms as go-to destinations for brands to lift awareness and affinity, manage and engage with customers, expand channels and innovate on products;
- applying data and cloud computing technologies in everything we do for our customers and for ourselves and creating value for merchants, brands, retail operators and other businesses in our ecosystem through online and offline integration, marketing and distribution, retail space reinvention and operational efficiency improvement driven by big data and world-class technology; and
- continuing to be an innovator in products and technology as well as an enabler of new business models and more efficient value chains for traditional industries that are facing challenges from digital disruption.
What is Alibaba Group’s long-term strategic goal?
Our long-term strategic goal is to serve two billion consumers around the world and support 10 million businesses to operate profitably on our platforms. We have embarked on three key initiatives to achieve this strategic goal: globalization, rural expansion and big data and cloud computing.
