The world’s greatest bazaar

IN 1999 Trudy Dai used to spend all night sending e-mails from her friend Jack Ma’s apartment, trying to answer queries from American customers without letting on that she was Chinese. Ms Dai was one of the first dozen employees of Alibaba, an online listings service Mr Ma, a teacher, had just started. It was already having some success connecting small Chinese manufacturers to potential customers, including the overseas ones Ms Dai was reassuring over e-mail. But the friends and students who made up the workforce were earning just 550 yuan (then $66) a month.

Mr Ma, though, already had big dreams. That year he said: “Americans are strong at hardware and systems, but on information and software, all of our brains are just as good…Yahoo’s stock will fall and eBay’s stock will rise. And maybe after eBay’s stock rises, Alibaba’s stock will rise.”

Since then, Alibaba has come to dominate internet retailing in China, which will soon be the biggest e-commerce market in the world. It has moved beyond its original remit of connecting businesses to each other to ventures that let companies sell directly to the public (Tmall) and enable members of the public to sell to each other (Taobao). Between them, Taobao and Tmall processed 1.1 trillion yuan ($170 billion) in transactions last year, more goods than passed through Amazon and eBay combined (see table 1).

The company that started in Mr Ma’s apartment now employs 24,000 workers at its headquarters in Hangzhou and elsewhere; Ms Dai is president of human resources. A few years ago Alibaba began to turn a profit; in the year to September 2012 it made $485m on revenues of $4.1 billion (see chart 2). Following a recent reorganisation it has 25 separate business units, and on May 10th it will have a new chief executive, Jonathan Lu; Mr Ma will stay on as executive chairman.

The rules of the market

In one respect things are as they were in 1999: Alibaba is privately owned. But this will not remain the case for long. The reorganisation into 25 business units is widely seen as preparation for an initial public offering (IPO) that would take most of them public. A deal with Yahoo, which once owned 40% of Alibaba, means that the IPO, if done soon, would allow Alibaba to buy back its shares and end the often stormy relationship. Asked about the IPO, Mr Ma says “We are ready.”

Analysts predict that the IPO will value the company somewhere between $55 billion and more than $120 billion. Tencent, a Chinese gaming and social-media firm now getting into e-commerce, has a market capitalisation of $62 billion, just shy of Facebook’s current valuation. Mark Natkin of Marbridge, a Beijing-based technology consultancy, thinks Alibaba could easily be worth more than Tencent, given that “there is so much room to grow its businesses in China”.

The top-end estimates would imply a remarkably high ratio of value to profits. But such a ratio might make sense to investors if they think that the company is investing in yet more growth to come. Amazon, in some ways a similar company, supports a market value of $117 billion with no profits to speak of. And Alibaba will provide an attractive platform for investors trying to profit from China’s booming internet economy.

There will be some caution. Part of Alibaba floated on the Hong Kong exchange in 2007, but the shares ended up being bought back by the company after losing much of their value. The experience with Facebook’s IPO suggests a certain wariness about internet stocks is wise. But many think it will be different with Alibaba this time. “This will be bigger than Facebook,” predicts Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based technology expert. Mr Ma seems to agree. Though he will say only that the IPO will be “very very big”, asked about Facebook he cannot help but smile and say “Our revenues and profits speak for themselves.” (In the last quarter of 2012 Facebook’s revenues were $1.6 billion.)

Gordon Orr, a senior partner at McKinsey, thinks a healthy IPO valuation could be just the beginning. He says that if Alibaba can sustain its leadership in its current market and expand strongly into finance, the management of the supply chain and other services, “it could become one of the world’s most valuable companies five years from now, with potentially more than $1 trillion of sales passing through its platforms each year.”

Those are sales through Alibaba, not by Alibaba. In America 76% of online retailing involves people buying from individual merchants, according to a new report by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), a think-tank. In China, in 2011, that figure was 10%. The other 90% was sold through marketplaces that simply allow buyers and sellers to find each other. Alibaba has grown so big because early on Mr Ma had two insights into what could make such marketplaces work.

The first was that many Chinese are tight-fisted. So Alibaba made all the basic services it offers free to both buyers and sellers. It earns money through online advertisements and extra services it offers clients, such as website design. With 6m vendors Taobao is a cluttered-up cyberspace. Many sellers think it worthwhile to pay for fancy storefronts and online advertisements to help them stand out.

The second is that many Chinese are reluctant to trust strangers. So Alibaba has provided tools to build trust. One is an independent verification service through which third parties vet the claims made by sellers; the sellers pay for the process. Another is the Alipay payments system. Unlike PayPal, used by many Western internet companies, Alipay takes money up front and puts it in an escrow account. Vendors can be sure that payments made through it will be honoured. Alipay—a source of much bad blood with Yahoo, which felt Mr Ma seized control of it illegitimately, something Alibaba strongly denies—has roughly half of China’s online-payments market. The vast majority of Alipay transactions are for deals made through Alibaba, but the firm says that use elsewhere is growing fast.

Alibaba also now has the advantages that come with dominating its domain. In the West, shoppers often search for items on Google, and then follow a link, possibly one in an ad, to a retailer’s website or to Amazon; the ads are what make Google its money. In China Taobao’s scale means it can afford to block the “spiders” that search engines like Google, or its local equivalent, Baidu, use to find out what is on a site. It can do this because shoppers more or less have to come to it anyway. This makes adverts on Taobao more valuable; it gets a fair whack of the revenue that would otherwise go to the search engines.

This is just one way that the marketplace model works better the bigger a firm gets. The more buyers come, the more sellers need to; the more sellers come, the more buyers want to. As a result, domestic and foreign rivals are having a hard time. This goes for purely online firms like DangDang (which resembles Amazon) and 360buy (in which Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia recently invested) and for high-street retailers fighting defensive battles online like Suning and Gome, two appliance giants.

The founders of 7gege.com (translated as seven princesses), a women’s fashion firm, tried the bricks-and-mortar route but flopped. They turned to Alibaba’s web portals and found eventual success. The firm now spends up to 100,000 yuan a day on banner ads with Alibaba, as well as money on search optimisation and special promotion days; last year, its online shops on Alibaba earned over 350m yuan.

A torrent of customers

International brands like Adidas and Samsung are still pouring money into Tmall. Some use Tmall as the exclusive channel for online purchases in China; others are experimenting with having both their own site and a Tmall storefront. Günther Hake of Disney says his firm has had good experiences advertising and selling on Tmall. With a new Shanghai theme park opening in two years, he expects to sell ten times more merchandise in greater China. Tmall will see a lot of that action.

But Alibaba will not necessarily get things all its own way. Tencent has set up a stand-alone e-commerce division; it runs Paipai, a Taobao competitor, and recently bought 51buy.com, which competes with Tmall. Tencent is a potent rival, says Marbridge’s Mr Natkin, because other businesses such as gaming give it a lot of cash. Alibaba will probably need to invest heavily to maintain its lead. That helps explain the $8 billion in loans and other outside financing the company is pursuing. Most of the money will go to refinance older loans at better rates, says Joseph Tsai, the group’s chief financial officer. But some $3 billion might be used for acquisitions.

What of the company’s prospects? To some extent they are good simply because of where it is. China’s e-commerce market has grown by 120% a year since 2003, says MGI. This year it is set to surpass America’s, with a total value of $283 billion—7% of retail sales—according to Morgan Stanley (see chart 3). The number of Chinese online shoppers has surged to 250m, more than doubling in three years. And there is a lot of room for growth. Online penetration in China was 43% in 2012, well below the 70% or higher seen in developed economies. And fewer Chinese internet users shop online than in other markets.

With more non-shoppers starting to shop and the rest of China’s population getting online, MGI predicts the market will be between $420 billion and $650 billion in 2020. Mr Ma says that the rudimentary nature of much Chinese offline retailing will allow e-commerce to grow faster and further in China than in the developed world; in rich countries, he says, e-commerce is just “the dessert”. In China it’s the main course. This may be particularly true in smaller cities where consumer spending power is outgrowing the shops available.

The changing nature of China’s growth offers new possibilities to the company. Peter Williamson of Cambridge University’s Judge Business School argues that a big reason Alibaba’s original business-to-business platform thrived is that by helping buyers and sellers overcome a lack of information and high search costs it was perfectly placed to help and profit from the first wave of China’s integration into the global economy. Now Alibaba is well positioned for the next wave. “The rise of Chinese consumers, Chinese tourists, Chinese companies going global and so on [will offer] lots of new opportunities,” he says.

But the company plans to do more than simply ride the waves of China’s growth. One of its strategies will be to use the data it gets from e-commerce to expand into new areas. “We have the best data mindset in the world,” boasts Wang Jian, Alibaba’s chief technology officer. Zeng Ming, the company’s chief strategy officer, points to finance as a way its data can give the company an edge in new markets.

For three years Alibaba has been making small loans (average size $8,000) to merchants trading on its platforms, using the data it holds on them to guide its decisions. Mr Tsai says its loan book was $600m in 2012, and that by the end of this year it should top $2 billion; the non-performing-loan ratio is below 2%. “The people we are focusing on are completely below the radar screen for the big banks,” he points out. The company turns the loans into products that can be sold to investors. The firm is expanding into loans to individuals, and into insurance, where it has announced a joint venture with Tencent and Ping An, a Chinese insurer. The financial division is likely to be spun out soon, and run at arm’s length rather as Alipay is today. Regulators would probably not allow foreigners to hold a big stake in a financial firm—and any Alibaba IPO would bring in lots of foreign investors.

Another growth opportunity is that China is now the world’s biggest market for smartphones. Purchases on mobile phones leapt from 2 billion yuan in 2010 to 53 billion yuan last year, 4% or so of total e-commerce. A company dedicated to serving this market might be a serious competitor. Mr Ma recently ordered a large number of engineers to be shifted to the firm’s mobile division. Mr Wang acknowledges that “mobile is a new game where we don’t have the edge yet”—but he reckons nobody else does either.

Then there are the opportunities (and risks) of going global. Alibaba makes no secret of its global aspirations, but some of the things that make it a success at home may not transfer well. Alipay, for example, may offer few advantages in markets which are better supplied with banking and credit services. The marketplace approach that lets the company do without warehouses and other tangible assets has not proved the winning business model around the world that it has in China.

Its most promising overseas markets will be low-trust, underbanked emerging economies—the markets in Africa, Latin America and Asia where other Chinese pioneers leaving the home market, such as Huawei, a telecoms giant, cut their teeth. Being a platform for retail, rather than a retailer itself, may be a winning proposition in those countries too; but it is not a sure thing. And outside China there are serious competitors in the form of Amazon and a resurgent eBay.

Among the advantages those competitors might have is that the goods they offer are highly likely to be kosher. This has not always been the case with Alibaba. China has a history of making and consuming counterfeit goods, and vendors on Taobao have not been a notable exception.

Up until the end of last year, Taobao was on the American government’s list of “notorious markets”. Its removal reflects the effort the firm has put into cracking down on fakes by working with multinationals and lobbies like the Motion Picture Association of America. But managers of Western brands sold through Tmall grumble that fakes are still too readily available on Taobao. Judging by the $12 Manolo Blahniks found in a quick browse they have a point. McKinsey’s Mr Orr tells of a Chinese shoe manufacturer selling through a number of stores on Taobao and Tmall competing with several thousand dodgy operators peddling unauthorised or counterfeit goods, many sourced from within the company’s own supply chain. “Taobao has not yet changed the culture of counterfeiting in China,” he concludes. If it is to become a global giant, it must do more to clean things up.

As well as an old problem to overcome, there is also a new one: the sharing of power at the top. Mr Ma is not leaving the firm; he is staying on as executive chairman. But his stepping aside as chief executive clearly changes things. Microsoft, to take the obvious example, was already a global giant and successful public firm when Bill Gates made a similar move. Few people outside China know Alibaba well, and what they know centres on its dynamic founder.

The change has been long planned inside the company, though. In a little discussed move three years ago Alibaba reorganised its top brass into a partnership structure. Mr Tsai says this was explicitly designed to ensure continuity at the top and a smooth transition from boss to boss. Pressed on whether such a cabal could continue to run things once the firm goes public, he immediately points to Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, as an example of a publicly traded company with a close-knit partnership structure. Edward Tse of Booz & Company, a consultancy, observes that such partnerships (his firm is one too) cannot rely on rules and top-down control to make quick decisions. Shared values are much more important.

Change China, change the world

Alibaba seems to take its culture seriously. Assessment on key values, which include integrity and teamwork, make up half of performance reviews, and Mr Ma spends a third of his time teaching such values—which, as one of China’s few revered entrepreneurs, he promotes far beyond the bounds of the company. He claims Alibaba is about improving people’s lives—going beyond Google’s “Don’t be evil” to “Do good”. When corruption was uncovered in the Alibaba.com business a few years ago, Mr Ma showed the division’s high-flying boss, and a lot of other people, the door.

Thus Alibaba may continue to grow. Even if it does not its legacy of creating trust, encouraging a shift to consumption, and increasing the overall productivity of the retail sector will persist, to the benefit of the country as a whole. Any company that surpasses it will do so by building on those gains, not reversing them. That is why Harvard’s William Kirby, an expert on Chinese business, calls Alibaba a transformative firm—“a private company that has done more for China’s national economy than most state-owned enterprises.”