Alibaba

About

Alibaba is a Chinese multinational Internet e-commerce business made of several websites, payment services a search engine and cloud computing services.

History

In December 1998, Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma^[4] collaborated with 17 other co-founders to establish the online retail service “Alibaba Online.” According to Ma, he came up with the name for the site, "Alibaba," after the titular character from the well-known Arabic folk tale Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, while sitting at a coffee shop one day in San Francisco. In October 2005, Alibaba partnered with Yahoo! Inc to operate China Yahoo! Inc On May 10th, 2013, Ma stepped down as the Alibaba Group chief executive officer (CEO) to become executive chairman, being replaced by Jonathan Lu as the company’s new CEO.

IPO

On September 5th, 2014, Alibaba was priced at $60 to $66 per share for its initial public offering (IPO) in a regulatory filing by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. On the following day, Big News Network^[2] reported that the listing was expected to reach upwards of $20 billion on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to become the largest tech listing in U.S. history. On September 22nd, the Alibaba IPO was raised to $25 billion after Alibaba’s underwriters announced they would be selling investors more shares than originally planned. As of September 26th, Alibaba Group has a NYSE share price of $89.47 (shown below).

Services

Controversies

Gold Supplier Memberships

Alibaba.com provides "Gold Supplier" memberships to sellers that have been verified as authentic and reputable. In February 2011, the Alibaba Group announced that it had supplied 2,236 Gold Supplier memberships to sellers that subsequently defrauded customers.

Illegal Uranium Sale

In August 2013, Alibaba seller Patrick Campbell was arrested for attempting to export 1,000 tonnes of yellowcake uranium from Sierra Leone after an United States law enforcement agent posed as a broker seeking to purchase the radioactive material.

Sesame Credit

In June 2015, Alibaba ran a public beta for its "Sesame Credit score" in China, which uses loan records and other economic activity to give a credit rating to citizens. In addition, the system uses a person's hobbies, interactions with friends, shopping habits and other general lifestyle information to calculate their scores. On October 5th, the American Civil Liberties Union^[7] published an article titled "China's Nightmarish Citizen Scores Are a Warning For Americans," which argued that Sesame Credit was being built as a new way to foster political compliance. On December 16th, the Extra Credits YouTube channel uploaded a video about Sesame Credit, criticizing the system as "dystopian" (shown below). On December 21st, the news site Anti Media^[8] published an article about the program, which subsequently reached the front page of the /r/Futurology^[9] subreddit.

Traffic

According to the traffic analytics site Alexa,^[5] Alibaba.com has a global rank of 63 and a rank of 24 in China as of September 2014.

Search Interest

External References