Before establishing Alibaba, Ma Yun worked as an English teacher in Hangzhou Institute of Electronic Technology 1988- 1995, during which he founded Haibo translation agency (1994). From 65438 to 0995, Ma Yun resigned from Hangzhou Institute of Electronic Technology, and raised 20,000 yuan with his partners to set up Haibo Network Company, operating "China Yellow Pages", which is considered as the first Internet business website in China, mainly focusing on web design. At that time, the Internet craze had just begun to appear in China. "China Yellow Pages" was subsequently acquired by the local telecommunications bureau. Ma Yun and the entrepreneurial team left because of their disagreement with the new owner's business philosophy, and the first venture came to an end.
1At the end of 1997, Ma Yun and his team were invited to assist MOFTEC in establishing a series of websites, including the online Canton Fair and China Commodity Exchange Market. The main mode of the website is to move the enterprise's information and goods to the online display, and use the new tools on the Internet to provide publicity and promotion services. These websites have begun to take shape of B2B model.
The website created by Ma Yun's team has been sought after by many enterprises, realizing "creating in that year and making profits in that year". This experience made the whole team aware of the huge business opportunities hidden in the information service of SMEs. 1999 Alibaba was formally established in Hangzhou. When it was founded, 18 employees were called Ali's "eighteen arhats".
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2. In the early days of Ali's business, the B2B model gradually took shape.
Before Alibaba was founded, the only way for small and medium-sized enterprises in China to do foreign trade was the Canton Fair (China Import and Export Fair). Following the experience of China Yellow Pages and the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, Alibaba has positioned itself as a "trade service provider for small and medium-sized enterprises in China" after its establishment, providing "website design+promotion" services for small and medium-sized enterprises, that is, creating a "network Yiwu" model. The business model of "Internet Yiwu" requires that there are enough suppliers, and then the suppliers attract buyers, so the transaction information is gradually enriched. 65438+1February, 1999, Alibaba's website was launched, with 38,000 members in July. In September, the number of members increased to 80,000, and 200,000 pieces of inventory transaction information and 800 pieces of new information were added every day. By the end of 1999, the number of Alibaba members had exceeded 65,438+10,000.
After two rounds of financing, the well-funded Alibaba began to expand overseas crazily in 2000. We have set up a corporate headquarters in Hong Kong, an office in Britain, a research and development center in Silicon Valley of the United States, and joint ventures in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan Province Province and other places to introduce talents with high salaries. The most prominent example is that Alibaba's team of more than 20 people in Silicon Valley was several times higher than that in Hangzhou. In September 2000, Alibaba held the famous "West Lake on Sword" in China's Internet history. Jack Ma, Sina Wang Zhidong, Sohu Zhang Chaoyang, Netease Ding Lei and other network leaders gathered in Hangzhou, and Alibaba's popularity quickly rose to the same height as the three major portals.
The rapid expansion directly brought high costs to Alibaba, and the company's operating costs suddenly rose. By the end of 2000, the remaining funds in Ali's account were only enough to maintain the operation of the whole company for half a year. At this time, the global Internet bubble burst, and the winter of network economy came instantly. June 5438+October 2000 10, in order to correct the problems caused by the initial high-speed overseas expansion, the "West Lake Conference" held within Alibaba proposed three B2C strategic shifts-back to China and Back To Coast. To put it simply, returning to China is to shrink the front line in an all-round way, withdraw from the station and lay off employees; Back To Coast concentrates its business in six coastal provinces; Back to the center means back to Hangzhou headquarters.
In addition to reducing costs, after the West Lake Conference, China suppliers and Cheng Xintong started to provide additional online and offline services for suppliers, collect membership fees and explore profit models. In 2002, Alibaba launched the "keyword" service, which was the first profit in the same year. Since then, the B2B road of Alibaba's "membership fee+value-added service" model has become clear.
3. From B2B to C2C: Layout Taobao and Alipay
At the beginning of 2003, after the profit of Alibaba's B2B core business was stable, Ma Yun began a trip to Japan to find new growth points. According to "Ten Years of Ma Yun", Masayoshi Son told the Ma Yun team who came to learn from the past about the business model of Yahoo Japan and why Yahoo Japan defeated Yi Bei Japan. Masayoshi Son said that since Yahoo Japan can win the C2C market in Japan with localization strategy, Alibaba can also succeed in China. The trip to Japan strengthened Ma Yun's determination to launch C2C business, and in his view, the launch of C2C is also the need to "attack and defend".
In May 2003, Taobao was successfully launched. In July, Alibaba announced that it would invest 1 billion yuan in Taobao. 65,438+065,438+0, the online real-time communication software Tradelink (now Ali Want Want) was launched. At that time, Taobao's main competitor in the C2C market was Yi Bei, Yi Bei. In 2003, Yi Bei's share in C2C market was as high as 90%, and it signed an exclusive advertising agreement with mainstream portals in China. However, this did not stop the development of Taobao. With the introduction of "free mode" and the attention and promotion of user experience, Taobao quickly gathered popularity. On June 5438+ 10, 2005, Alibaba announced that it would invest another 65438+ billion RMB in Taobao, and Taobao would continue to be free for three years. In terms of market share (according to Analysys International), at the end of 2005, the market share of Taobao C2C was 57.74%, that of Yi Bei Yi Bei was 3 1.46%, and that of Paipai.com was 3.76%. By the end of 2008, the market share of Taobao C2C was 86%, that of Paipai.com was 7.2% and that of Yi Bei was 6.6%.
With the rapid development of Taobao, the credit and security problems in online shopping payment have become more and more prominent, and Alibaba has begun to seek to build its own payment model. In June 2003, Alipay was launched. Alipay adopts the mode of secured transaction. The buyer pays the money to Alipay first, and after receiving the shopping supplies and checking them correctly, informs Alipay to pay the seller. Guaranteed transactions completely dispel the concerns of online shopping users and make shopping simple and efficient. Alipay was very popular after it went online. From June 5438 to February 2004, Alibaba established Alipay Company, and Alipay website was launched and operated independently. According to the data of iResearch, as of 20 10 and 12, the number of registered users of Alipay exceeded 550 million, and the number of daily transactions reached 8.5 million.
4.2005 Alibaba Keywords: acquisition of Yahoo China.
In August 2005, Yahoo exchanged $654.38 billion plus all the assets of Yahoo China for 39% common stock of Alibaba Group (fully diluted) and gained 35% voting rights. Yahoo China's assets include: Yahoo portal, search, IM products, 372 1, etc. Through this transaction, Alibaba's business covers e-commerce, search, portal and instant messaging, which is the most extensive business coverage among Internet companies at that time. Ma Yun explained the reasons for Yaba's strategic cooperation, saying that "the main purpose of cooperation is for e-commerce and search engines. The future e-commerce can't be separated from the search engine, and the whole right gained today makes us regard Yahoo as a powerful rear R&D center. Alibaba's main business is B2B and C2C e-commerce, while Yahoo China's main business is portal and search. Search and portal can provide traffic for Alibaba's main business e-commerce, and there is synergy between them, which is the original intention of Alibaba's "merger".
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However, the beautiful vision of "synergy effect" soon encountered the reality of failure. Due to unclear strategic development direction and cultural conflicts, after Alibaba took over, Yahoo China began to close a large number of businesses, among which 372 1 Internet assistant was transformed into a new Yahoo assistant, and Yahoo China focused on search. Since then, Alibaba has carried out a large-scale advertising promotion to "revive" Yahoo's Chinese search, but the effect is average.
In August 2006, Ma Yun admitted the failure of the "Yaba Marriage" for the first time.
On June 5438+ 10, 2009, Yahoo China (Yahoo China was renamed Yahoo China in 2007) officially abandoned the business of developing 372 1 and Yahoo Assistant, and said that the core business of Yahoo China would turn to e-commerce of life service, and the search business of Yahoo China was completely diluted.
5.2006 -2009: Diversified expansion around core business.
Word of mouth network. On June 5438+ 10, 2006, Alibaba announced the completion of the acquisition of word of mouth, thus entering the field of classified information. Founded in 2004, Word of Mouth mainly provides life yellow pages, classified information and multiple vertical searches. It is a localized "eat, live and play" life community website.
In June 2008, Yahoo China and Word of Mouth established Yahoo Word of Mouth Company. Alibaba hopes to expand its word-of-mouth nationwide with the help of Yahoo China's platform, and make Yahoo's word-of-mouth a platform for life information. In August 2009, Alibaba announced that under the strategy of "Big Taobao", WOM was injected into Taobao, and its positioning changed from life information to information service platform of e-commerce. In just three years, the strategic direction of word-of-mouth network has changed again and again.
Ali, mom. Ali Mama was born in 2007, and its business model can be simply summarized as "small and medium-sized webmasters put advertising spaces on Ali Mama and sell them like commodities", that is, advertisements = commodities. Ali's mother's mission is to "make the world get rid of difficult advertisements". In September 2008, Taobao merged with Ali Mama. Alibaba Group hopes to provide remote promotion services for Taobao sellers through the traffic covered by Ali Mama, and Taobao's huge transaction volume can also deliver traffic value to Ali Mama and build a larger e-commerce ecosystem. When the merger happened, Ali's mother had gathered 3 billion traffic from 400,000 websites, covering more than 80 million people every day. At the beginning of 20 10, Ali Mama changed its name to Taobao Alliance.
Ali Software and Alibaba Cloud. In 2004, Alibaba invested 300 million yuan to establish Ali (China) Software R&D Center. In June 2007, Alibaba Software Company was incorporated in Shanghai and entered the field of enterprise business software. Ali Software Positioning adopts a brand-new SaaS(software as a service) model, providing full-life software services for small and medium-sized enterprises to meet their needs in e-commerce and enterprise management. Ma Yun expressed this as "Alibaba's mission is to make the world have no difficult business, and the goal of Ali Software is to make the world have no difficult business". In August 2009, Alibaba Group injected the management software business of Ali Software into Ali B2B Commercial Company at a price of 208 million yuan. The remaining assets of Alibaba Software, including core technologies unrelated to management software, continue to be owned by Alibaba Group.
In September 2009, Alibaba Group announced the establishment of "Alibaba Cloud". Alibaba Cloud consists of former Alibaba Software, R&D Institute of Alibaba Group, and the underlying technical teams of B2B and Taobao. The goal is to build an advanced data-centric cloud computing service platform. According to Alibaba official website's data, Alibaba Cloud will devote itself to providing complete Internet computing services, including e-commerce data collection, rapid processing of massive e-commerce data and customized e-commerce data services, thus helping Alibaba Group and the entire e-commerce ecosystem grow. Recently, Alibaba's Alibaba Cloud OS system and Alibaba Cloud mobile phone with integrated e-commerce services were launched.
Ali Finance. In June 2007, Alibaba and China Construction Bank and ICBC jointly launched SME loans (mainly for online merchants). During the execution of the loan project, Alibaba established a credit evaluation system and a credit database with the bank * * *, which on the one hand reduced the exposure risk, on the other hand helped enterprises lower the loan threshold and continued Alibaba's role as a basic service of e-commerce.
On June 20 10, Alibaba Group, Fosun Group, Yintai Group and Wanxiang Group jointly initiated the establishment of a microfinance company (Zhejiang Alibaba Microfinance Co., Ltd.) and obtained the first business license of a microfinance company in the field of e-commerce in China. In June, 20001,Chongqing Alibaba Microfinance Co., Ltd. was established with a registered capital of 200 million RMB, with Alibaba accounting for 70% of the shares. This is the second microfinance company jointly established by Alibaba.
Alibaba Microfinance Company mainly operates on Alibaba B2B business, Taobao and other platforms, with a maximum loan amount of 500,000 yuan. Faced with the problem of risk control, Alibaba said that "Ali adopts the whole process of Internet monitoring in terms of customer access, customer credit reporting and risk tracking, and the external part is supervised by the local local government". Up to the establishment of Chongqing Company, Alibaba Microfinance Company has granted loans to 40,000 micro-enterprises with a total amount of 2.8 billion yuan, with a NPL ratio of 1.94% (the national average NPL ratio of financial institutions is 2.6 1%).
6. Core business fission: Taobao Mall and Yitao.com.
With the rapid development of online shopping in China, the B2C mode of e-commerce has gradually emerged, and a number of B2C e-commerce companies such as JD.COM Mall, Newegg and Red Kids have risen rapidly. According to iResearch data, the online shopping market in China accounted for 6.8% in 2008, and it is expected that the proportion will rise to at least 30% in 20 13. In April 2008, Taobao launched Taobao Mall, announcing that Taobao had officially entered the B2C field. At the beginning of 20 10, the development of Taobao Mall accelerated, and vertical malls such as Taobao Electric Appliance City and Taobao Famous Shoes Hall were launched one after another. On 20 10 1 1, Taobao Mall launched an independent domain name, tmal.com, and began to advertise on a large scale.
In addition to B2C business, Alibaba's vertical commodity search business is also gradually taking shape on 20 10. On June 20 10 10, Alibaba launched a Taobao. Ceramic art Com is a commodity base based on Taobao, which builds an independent shopping search engine for the whole e-commerce network in China.
2011June16th, Taobao, a subsidiary of Alibaba group, was split into three independent companies: C2C Taobao, B2C Taobao Mall and search engine ceramics. Before the split, Taobao Mall had more than 400 million buyers, 40,000 merchants and 70,000 brands. Yitao.com has more than 600 million items, thousands of B2C merchants (including Taobao.com, Taobao Mall, JD.COM Mall, Dangdang.com, Joyo Amazon and Vanke Eslite), and more than 200 million related shopping information.
On 20 11September 19, Taobao Mall announced the strategy of opening the B2C platform, and at the same time, it announced the strategic cooperation with 38 well-known domestic vertical B2C enterprises such as Store1,Letao, Newegg and Yintai. At this point, the platform strategy of Taobao Mall is clearer.
7. New strategic trend: from big Taobao to big Ali.
In September 2008, Alibaba launched the "Big Taobao" strategy, and Alibaba Group announced that it would invest 5 billion RMB to support the "Big Taobao" plan. Ma Yun interprets the strategy of Big Taobao as "Big Taobao is to be the basic service provider of e-commerce, so that users can smoothly solve technical problems such as payment, marketing and logistics on the platform of Big Taobao". Shortly after the announcement of the "Big Taobao" strategy, Ali's mother merged into Taobao, and Ali launched an unknown product (through B2B and Taobao platforms), forming an e-commerce ecological chain of B2B2C.
On June 20 10, Taobao officially launched the "Taobao Grand Logistics Plan". 2011/in June, 2008, Alibaba announced the strategy of upgrading logistics, and jointly invested 1000 billion yuan with its partners to build a national logistics system, promote the construction of socialized logistics platforms, and solve the logistics bottleneck of e-commerce development in China.
On June 20 1 1, the strategy of "big Taobao" was upgraded to "big Ali". Alibaba Group said, "Big Ali will fully share all the resources of Alibaba Group with all participants in e-commerce, including the consumer groups, businesses and manufacturing industry chains it serves, integrate information flow, logistics, payment and wireless, and provide cloud computing services centered on data sharing, thus providing better and more comprehensive basic services for the development of e-commerce in China."
In addition, it is worth mentioning that Ma Yun said at the beginning of 20 1 1 that the first major event of Taobao this year is to do SNS. In May, Lu Zhaoxi, CEO of Taobao, further emphasized that the SNS of Taobao is to be closer to users, build a network for users and strengthen the relationship between users. Accurately speaking, Taobao SNS is not a new SNS community product, but a relationship to strengthen the sharing of shopping experience in the station.
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