1.0 Introduction
1.1 Overview of Alibaba
In year 1999, Jack Ma who was a former teacher and his 18 friend in his Hangzhou apartment built up Alibaba group. At first, Alibaba working for the small manufacturers set up a B2B (business to business) website. But then Alibaba group was quickly expanded until seven different group, for example, Alibaba International Business Operations, Alibaba Small Business Operations, Tmall, Taobao, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Juhuasuan and Etao.
Alibaba is the largest leading e-commerce companies of B2B online retailer in China and it is giving a trading platform that associates worldwide purchasers to huge number of small medium enterprises to conduct business in their network. The market operate by Alibaba
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Expansion of employee could indicate Alibaba group has created numerous of job opportunity and increase economic growth rate in China.
3.0 Reason for success
Business Model
The business model of Alibaba is pretty simple, it acts a middleman by connecting merchants meet buyers on a worldwide scale centered on the principle offering point of selling china items and services to enhance their business growth and trading abilities worldwide. The Alibaba expand on supply chain advantages that wipe out intermediation costs that are common in the traditional retailing trade model.
Profit model
Alibaba’s most important profits mainly originated from advertisements costs and second originated from clients with value-added services in order to attract more potential clients. Alibaba is enabling sellers to register for free and there were no posting or transaction fees.
Credit Model : Third Party Payment platform of online
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Alibaba currently operate mobile and online commercial center in the form of wholesale trade and retail trade, cloud computing and other information technology services, for example, Taobao, Tmall, Juhuasuan, Aliyun, Ant Financial Services Group, Cainiao Logistics, AliExpress, Alibaba.com, 1688.com and Alimama.
4.0 Analysis of Alibaba’s Strategic Capabilities
In this following section aims to analysis how Alibaba build its competitive advantage. Alibaba will be analyzing using value chain and then carried out VRIN evaluation.
4.1 Value Chain
Value chain is an approach to know how an item or activities create value for consumers. The most of value provides to consumers, the most of competitive advantage an organization build. In this analysis, value chain model has separated into primary and support activities. Primary activities are included in the physical creation of the item and service. On the other hand, support activities give the inputs and infrastructure that enable the primary activities to happen. This value chain model can be refer to below figure 5.
Figure 5: Michael Porter’s Value
Alibaba is China's largest global marketplace for online sourcing and shopping. With over 2 million supplier storefronts and an e-commerce platform similar to eBay and Amazon in the US, Alibaba offers safe and simple trade solutions and easy access to verified suppliers.
Value chain analysis looks at every step a business goes through, from raw materials to the eventual end-user. The goal is to deliver maximum value for the least possible total cost. It is a systematic approach to examining the development of competitive advantage. The most basic breakdown of primary functions includes inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, sales and marketing and service. People should use the other models and frameworks within this software to further differentiate between, and add to, these domains. Product Innovation is one area that is not normally included in the de jure model but is often included in the de facto model. Value Chain Analysis describes the activities that take place in
Many market opportunities have helped the Alibaba Group thrive in the recent years. The location is the first advantage because China has over 560 million users of internet spending over 20 hours online a week. China is the biggest internet market globally (Bhasin, 2016). This is twice the size of internet users in United States of America. China is gradually shifting the traditional retailing in favor of latest trend of e-tailing. The good relationship with the government of China has enabled it to carry its operations so well in the market. For example, Alibaba Group was among the companies selected by the government of China to join the Internet banking. This is a huge opportunity especially where banks are state owned (Shiying & Avery, 2009). The cost cutting associated with the huge volume of sales. For example, Tmall and Taobao accounted for over 50 percent of all the Chinese delivered parcels. Tmall’s and Taobao’s combined transaction volume in 2012 was about one trillion yuan. This figure was more than eBay and Amazon transaction volumes combined.
Alibaba serves as a middleman. It’s the platform where sellers go to sell things and buyers go to buy things. It runs websites where millions of merchants sell their products. Products are sold through Alibaba, not by Alibaba. It makes money on e-commerce services by taking the commission on sales, by advertising on its site. It is into B2B, B2c, and C2C.
One day I was in San Francisco in a coffee shop, and I was thinking Alibaba is a good name. And then a waitress came, and I said, "Do you know about Alibaba?" And she said yes. I said, "What do you know about ?", and she said, "Open Sesame". And I said, "Yes, this is the name!" Then I went onto the street and found 30 people and asked them, "Do you know Alibaba?" People from India, people from Germany, people from Tokyo and China … they all knew about Alibaba. Alibaba – open sesame. Alibaba is a kind, smart business person, and he helped the village. So … easy to spell, and globally known. Alibaba opens sesame for small- to medium-sized companies. We also registered the name "Alimama", in case someone
Also again Ma decided to build a loyal customer base before really attempting to make a profit; he did this by offering free listings as opposed to eBay, which charged for listings (Deresky, 2010).
The value chain shows the internal steps a company or organization takes to transform inputs into outputs (Jurevicius, 2013). As the products pass through each stage or activity, value is added until they ultimately are ready to reach the consumer. Value chain analysis a process where a firm identifies its primary and support activities that add value to its final product and then analyze these activities to reduce costs or increase differentiation (Jurevicius, 2013). The use of value chain analysis differs from small companies to large corporations. Ultimately, value chains are examined to increase performance of the company, whether it be with respect to cost, or productivity.
Alibaba.com has 1.7 million users worldwide, the value provided by Alibaba.com for customers is by a click, customer will find many suppliers in China and find a large variety of products such as computers, electronics, etc. Alibaba provides its customers with a large base of suppliers and most of the sectors are included on one site. Alibaba provides customer with the companies' information section, 27 industrial categories, and 700 products with sub categories. So we notice that Alibaba customers can buy and trade whatever they want and need on one site. (essay, 2003-2015) www.ukessays.com
Alibaba Group is a Cinese E-commerce company which was founded in 1999. In the past 16 years, Alibaba gradually grew into the biggest E-commerce company in the world. According to the report of Alibaba (2015), by 2015 there are 350 million active buyers in Alibaba’ s platform which is 100 million higher than 2014. The gross merchandise volume of Alibaba is 2,444 billion Chinese Yuan. In 2013, the number was only 1,077 Chinese Yuan. It increased almost 250% in 2 years. Alibaba benefit by the huge growth of online retail market. The total revenue in 2015 is 76.2 billion Chinese Yuan. It is worth noting that in Chinese retail market, mobile penetration is 50.6 percent and mobile users create 6,430 million RMB revenue which is a new record in the world.
Convenience: Through the internet, Alibaba has connected the buyers and suppliers around the world without having to leave their countries of
Utilize the network resources more effectively. Although Alibaba provides a desirable platform of B2B and allows businesses to trade directly, it can be difficult for businesses to market new products on a B2B platform. In order to make information flow more smoothly between businesses and customers, Alibaba can cooperate with other shopping websites, such as JingDong and Amazon and share more information on how to provide better service and business information for
Alibaba focused on SME’s and became its WTO to help small and medium Enterprises grow. Because the internet was getting well liked by the people of china, Alibaba became known to be the largest online business to business trading platform for the small businesses. Their products and services included electronics, apparel, auto and transportation 's, electronic payment services, logistics operations, etc. 1688.com, was their chinese portal that offered domestic business to business trade internally in China. AliExpress.com, was their transaction based reati website that gave buyers the opportunities to buy small goods at a wholesale prices.. With their operations based in China, although it has grown to be a global organizational platform, it focused on china as their main target.
Alibaba provides both business clients and individual clients with an all-included service. It integrates all the separate procedures of purchase, payment, logistics, information release, deal negotiation and order signing. Thus reinforce the competition ability of its service. This all-included service is like an “ecosystem” which ensure all the participants can help and work well in this system. Nowadays, Alibaba group control the business information(alibaba, taobao), payment service(Alipay), search engine(Yahoochina)
Alibaba Group, recent sensation in Internet world for the world’s largest IPO is a Chinese ecommerce company famous for its business to business sales service. It introduced Chinese manufacturers to online buyers across the globe.
Introduction: Alibaba Group Holding Limited is a Chinese e-commerce company that provides consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer and business-to-businesssales services via web portals. It also provides electronic payment services, a shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services. The group began in 1999 when Jack Ma founded the website Alibaba.com, a business-to-business portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers. In 2012, two of Alibaba’s portals handled 1.1 trillion yuan ($170 billion) in sales. The company primarily operates in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and at closing time, on the date of its initial public offering (IPO), 19 September 2014, Alibaba 's market value was measured as US$231 billion. However, the stock has traded down and market cap was $145 billion at the end of September 2015.