It was getting dark. There was a lot of noise in the main stadium of Hangzhou Olympic Sports Expo Center last night. Alibaba's 20th anniversary annual meeting is about to begin. More than 50000 Alibaba employees in white shirts follow the rhythm of the host, wave their arms, cheer and scream. The scene is even more popular than the concert of the most popular star & hellip& hellip;
Over the past 20 years, Alibaba has grown from an unknown small company to a commercial beast with a market value of more than 460 billion US dollars. Its growth track has witnessed the rise of China's e-commerce. Notably, Ma Yun officially stepped down as chairman of Alibaba's board of directors last night, but he made it clear that this was not about to retire.
Yong Zhang
Not retirement, but system inheritance
Alibaba's 20th anniversary annual meeting has attracted much attention. In addition to the growth of the business empire in the early 20th, its founder Ma Yun handed over the post of chairman of the board of directors to the current Alibaba CEO Zhang Yong, which has also become a focus of attention.
At about 7:45 p.m., Ma Yun appeared in anticipation. After his debut, he said: "today is not Ma Yun's retirement, but the beginning of system inheritance." Next, like many times before, Ma Yun emphasized the importance of enterprise system and values: "all major decisions in Ali's history have nothing to do with money, but with values." Prior to that, he also said that Alibaba's greatest 20 years, not to make Taobao, Tmall, Alipay, Ali cloud, but adhere to the values of 20 years.
From the well-known vision of "no difficult business in the world" to the proposal of "becoming a company with sustained development for 102 years", Ali's values have indeed played a great role in the past 20 years.
At the important node of the 20th anniversary, the Ali values' new six pulse divine sword 'inherited and upgraded again was officially announced yesterday.
'new six pulse sword' includes: customers first, employees second and shareholders third; Simple because of trust; The only constant is change; The best performance today is the lowest requirement tomorrow; At this moment, it's up to me; Live seriously and work happily. These six simple words will push Ali forward.
Ali witnessed the rise of China's e-commerce
Ali's 20 years are the best footnote to the rise of China's e-commerce. In 1995, Ma Yun once went to the United States and came into contact with the magic of the Internet. He felt that 'this thing may have a play in the future.' After returning home, he first collected 20000 yuan to set up the "China Yellow Page". After his failure, in 1999, he established Alibaba at his home in the lakeside garden community on the outskirts of Hangzhou.
In what is considered the most critical battle in the 20 years since Ma Yun took the helm of Alibaba, Alibaba beat eBay, which was invested by American giant eBay at that time, by harvesting traffic for free. Taobao has thus become the overlord of China's C2C market. Subsequently, Ma Yun spun off the Taobao Mall on Taobao, developed independently, and renamed tmall mall, specializing in the B2C market. Alibaba group also has three business forms, B2B (Alibaba), B2C (Tmall shopping mall) and C2C (Taobao), covering the e-commerce market in all directions, supplemented by Alipay's financial tool, and the commercial empire has been built.
The birth of Ali empire is inseparable from the support of China's huge domestic demand and consumption upgrading. At the same time, Ali's growth also feeds back China's economic reconstruction. For six consecutive years, Alibaba has become the Internet enterprise with the largest tax payment in China. More importantly, in 2018, Alibaba retail platform created more than 40 million jobs.
The future journey is still full of challenges
After completing the system inheritance, Ali's future challenges are still not small.
Today, Alibaba's business territory has far exceeded the scope of e-commerce, but e-commerce is still the main battlefield of Alibaba's current revenue, with a revenue contribution of 60% to 70%. In the field of e-commerce, in addition to its old rival Jingdong, pinduoduo, which has risen rapidly in recent years, can not be underestimated. Three years after its establishment, pinduoduo quickly occupied the low-line market that had been neglected by Alibaba and JD for a long time through social fission, and the daily living users even surpassed JD. At the closing of US stocks on September 5, pinduoduo's market value broke through the $40 billion mark.
In recent years, the number of mobile Internet users has gradually peaked, making Internet giants begin to realize the importance of the low-line market. The first step of pinduoduo has gained a foothold in this field. Soon, Ali restarted poly cost-effective. In '618' this year, it took advantage of huge subsidies and customized popular goods relying on big data. In the past few days, poly cost-effective upgraded and launched the '99 cost-effective Festival', and the subsidy intensity benchmarked '618' and 'double 11', with the intention of creating the third online shopping festival of the year, so as to further compete for the low-line market.
Jumping away from the pattern of e-commerce, the Internet battlefield is more turbulent. The rise of rising stars such as Beijing and meituan. Ma Yun said in his speech: "with the advent of a new era, the technological revolution will exceed imagination." In the future, with the rise of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, 5g and the Internet of things, the Internet Jianghu will continue to be popular.