Alibaba Targets 1B Chinese Customers Under Zhang
The company’s chief laid out new plans for the digital giant.
Jack Ma might have stepped aside, but Alibaba Group is still thinking big.
The digital giant said it plans to have over one billion annual active shoppers, driving gross merchandise volume of over 10 trillion yuan, or $1.4 trillion, in its consumer business in China by 2024.
Executive chairman and chief executive officer Daniel Zhang, who just this month accepted full control of the company from founder Ma, gave investors an update Tuesday that illustrated how big Alibaba is and just where it’s headed.
Zhang said that, for the year ended
June 30, Alibaba had 730 million annual active customers in China (as well as another 130 million abroad).
Eighty-five percent of the Chinese in developed areas are linked into the company’s marketplace, but only 40 percent of those in less-developed areas are connected, serving up an opportunity for domestic growth.
And to take advantage of it, the ceo is sticking to Alibaba’s original mission.
“Our customers need to be empowered by digital technologies to easily do business anywhere,” Zhang said. “So this is my message to the entire Alibaba team. I always said to them that after 20 years of development, actually today, in this digital era, our mission — our path to fulfill our mission is so clear and so straightforward. So let’s do it.”
Although Alibaba is in the e-commerce business, it also has some techie aspirations for the brick-and-mortar world, what it refers to as “New Retail.”
“In recent years, we made continuous efforts in New Retail,” Zhang said. “We want to broaden these efforts, we want to expand the addressable market of Alibaba. We are trying to help the entire retail consumption in China — which the size of this is 38 trillion renminbi — to go digital.
“We strongly believe in this digital era; there is no distinction between online and offline,” he said. “Online [and] offline cannot be distinguished by web page or location. Actually, instead, they are distinguished by do they digitalize their business or capture the business data, or not?
“So that’s our strong view, and we work with many retail partners in different sectors. Starting with helping them to digitalize their existing business, then empower them with digital technology,” he said.