Alibaba

Alibaba Group Holding Limited, publicly known as Alibaba.com is China-based, a multinational technology company. The company specializes in e-commerce, retail, Internet as well as technology. Alibaba’s main focus is e-commerce, which includes consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer, and business-to-business sales services. The company also offers electronic payment services, shopping search engines, and cloud computing services.

The company was founded by Jack Ma with 17 friends and students on 28th June 1999. The whole company consisted of just Alibaba.com, which was simply a Chinese business-to-business e-commerce website. The company received a huge $25 million from Goldman Sachs and SoftBank in a few months that accelerating the growth of the company. The investors were expecting Alibaba to provide infrastructure for small and medium-sized Chinese enterprises to export goods to the global market. In 2003, the company became profitable for the first time.

The company separates e-commerce into three different platforms. While Alibaba.com focuses on international B2B trades, Aliexpress.com handles smaller trades for smaller customers. Alibaba also owns 1688.com, a non-international B2B trading platform in China.

Alibaba Cloud, the companies cloud computing service platform was launched in September 2009. The service focuses on e-commerce data mining and processing. Alibaba Cloud division released AliOS, a Linux distribution for mobile devices as well as AliGenie, an open-platform personal assistant. The company also developed a 64-bit processor called XuanTie-910 that has 16 cores. The Huanguang AI accelerator chip was built by Alibaba’s research arm DAMO Academy with a 12 nm process.

Alipay, Alibaba Group’s payment platform was launched in 2004. The company also entered the live entertainment business with its Digital Media and Entertainment Group. In March 2014, the company acquired a controlling stake in ChinaVision Media Group. In March 2015, AliMusic was launched with two music streaming apps: Xiami Music and Tiantian Music.

Alibaba became the second Asian company that broke the $500 billion valuation mark. Alibaba has the sixth-highest global brand valuation as of 2020.