How Big is Alibaba? If you know Jack Ma from school teacher to billionaire
this video is brought to you by Skillshare one of the best ways to learn a new skill online hi welcome to another ColdFusion video when I say the word Alibaba you probably think of a multi-billion dollar company a company started by a successful individual surprisingly this pretty much couldn't be further from the truth in 1999 a 35-year-old former English teacher started his own company this man had failed repeatedly in his life but always found a way to persevere his name was Jack Ma the company he started would go on to revolutionize the e-commerce market Alibaba would become one of the most valuable companies in the world and it would make Jack Ma be worth over thirty-five billion dollars the company it would also create an additional ten billionaires and grow to over a hundred thousand staff but Jack Ma rise to the top wasn't easy or simple in this video we'll take a look at how Alibaba grew to the Goliath of e-commerce that we know today and answer the question just how big is Alibaba when you think of the founders of companies you think of geniuses he started young Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and started Microsoft to age 21 Mark Zuckerberg followed a similar path dropping out of Harvard and starting Facebook at age 20 Elon Musk sold his first company at 28 for over 300 million Jack Ma on the other hand applied for Harvard ten times he was rejected every single time after graduating from University he applied for over 30 jobs without getting a single one he said later in a famous interview that he applied for one job at KFC out of 24 applicants 23 were accepted and the future founder of Alibaba was that single one who missed out after this he ended up taking a job teaching English for $12 a month but he wasn't happy here his entrepreneurial spirit wouldn't see him stuck in a classroom for long in 1995 a student showed him the Internet if something interesting happened when you search for the word BR he only found beers from all over the world but nothing from China he quickly realized that China was disconnected from the internet and hence the rest of the world this inspired him to try and connect China with this new wonderful technology so he started an internet-based translation company however this fizzled out but Jack Ma interest in the internet didn't soon after he and a friend started china pages a yellow pages type website for Chinese businesses connecting them to international interests unfortunately this would also be a failure but for every failure and rejection Jack Ma faced in his life he seemed to have persevered through it with an undeterred spirit seven years later in 1999 Jack Ma would stand in front of 17 of his friends and students in the living room of his apartment he would speak about the internet connecting buyers and sellers before most people we even had an internet connection he spoke about how the Chinese mentality would beat out the Silicon Valley Giants in a Chinese market this inspiring speech was the first company meeting and after this Alibaba was born for six months after the inspiring speech from their leader the team worked hard on developing their product a business-to-business ecommerce platform no advertising no public announcements Jack Ma wanted the team to work without distraction after six months they had secured 25 million dollars of funding from Goldman Sachs and Softbank and the business was on Alibaba was aiming for an IPO in a couple of years but soon the company would face a problem outside of their control the internet stock crash had cast a shadow of doubt over many new startups in the internet space was the internet simply a fad investors began to withdraw their money and a lot of companies starve to death Alibaba however with Jack Meyer at the helm survived almost solely feeding off their founders sheer determination countless times Jack Ma told his team that they would struggle he's quoted as saying today is hard tomorrow is worse the day after there will be sunshine the team persevered through the crash and on bare bones made it out on the other side but rather than enjoy the sunshine Jack decided the company needed to struggle more tell us something we've never heard about the internet before we're fed up with hearing what it might do tell us something we haven't heard before well no they sure wherever you go on the street like in Shanghai Hong Kong and Beijing all the young people talk about internet and think about set up internet business so the fever of internet right now in nature is trying to catch up the u.s.
Milliner no no do you want to be fun well I hope if it could be a naturally if I can be and can you see why people think it's so much hotter you don't make any money you've got extraordinary claims and yet you make nothing that's into that yes but what the point while this is going on eBay had purchased a sizeable stake in each net which at the time was a leader in Chinese e-commerce and hence Alibaba speakers competitor Jack Ma declared war on the Silicon Valley giant this captured the media's attention with a David versus Goliath undertone eBay would soon completely buy out each net for 150 million US dollars and began to make changes to the website to integrate it into the eBay ecosystem this was a fatal mistake for eBay you see eBay didn't understand the Chinese market they removed features from each net which the Western executives thought were useless and too cute but little did they know that the Chinese users valued these features early Barbara on the other hand focused on making the experience uniquely Chinese they created early pay their version of PayPal to go along with their new Taobao marketplace Taobao will connect users directly to manufacturers within rural China Alibaba made Taobao free for three years to put pressure on eBay who on the other hand were looking to create returns for their investors as soon as possible the Alibaba tactic proved to be smart over the coming years alibaba's market share grew while eBay is declined Jack Ma famously said to his employees quote eBay is a shark in the ocean we are a crocodile in the Yangtze River if we fight in the ocean we will lose but if we fight in the river we will win in quote the stage was perhaps already set for a Chinese company to be strong in the e-commerce field China with his over 1 billion strong population was seeking to grow its economy back to its former glory Manufacturing pockets around the country dubbed Taobao villages became the heart and the soul of the Chinese economy the low labour cost made China the global leader in manufacturing although this was before alibaba's time Jack Ma and the company certainly profited from the rise of China in manufacturing the stage was set simply for Alibaba to introduce China to the world through the internet eBay would eventually cease Chinese operations succumbing to the realization that they couldn't fight any longer with Alibaba China was the crocodile's territory so the crocodile had won but the question must be asked just how big is Alibaba after the eBay war Alibaba had its IPO revisiting the dreams that had before the Internet crash when the company finally hit the New York Stock Exchange its IPO pulled in 25 billion US dollars this is the largest IPO in history at the time of this episode so how big is Alibaba well it's market cap sits at 440 yearly in u.s.
Dollars making it the seventh largest publicly listed company in the world it boasts over 100,000 employees and has a list of subsidiaries to merit their size ecommerce is the main core of business Alibaba against a bow as mentioned earlier but also Aliexpress as well as Alibaba calm the company has branched out into supermarkets delivering food to consumers as well as partnering with hotel chains to enter and dominate the travel consumer market fifth partially acquired competitors such as lazada the Singaporean ecommerce company and this isn't to mention their takeover of Yahoo China in 2009 they launched Ali Baba cloud a cloud computing platform focused on the e-commerce market they also acquired hi China China's largest web hosting site and built it into the Alibaba cloud service Alibaba cloud also works in the hardware space developing cutting-edge processors as well as AI accelerators which are used to accelerate the hardware performance of AI programs in 2019 the company unveiled their own AI chip for cloud computing it's said to complete some machine learning tasks which traditionally took an hour in just five minutes most of the processors will be available to be rented out through Alibaba cloud and cloud computing in its own riot is an interesting space for the company to branch into as internet speeds increase personal devices who have less emphasis on hardware and more on renting hardware processes through the internet not only this but the company also dominates the financial tech mucket the subsidiary company and financial gives financial services to small and micro businesses and financial is actually the world's most valuable unicorn with a value of 150 billion a unicorn is a company that reaches a valuation of over a billion dollars while still being privately held early pay the company mentioned earlier is a subsidiary of and financial and facilitates mobile payments to a billion people Alibaba has also ventured into entertainment launching a division which has several arms and content creation ticketing and live entertainment to name a few in 2014 the company acquired a majority share in China vision Media Group for over a hundred million dollars after this it was renamed to Alibaba Pictures group after this they launched early music which in partnership with ten cent music streams music from Sony and Universal among other big labels all of this isn't to mention other areas like Ally health and Ally Sports which are big players in their own right in 2015 Alibaba acquired the South China Morning Post though over one century old media company headquartered off the mainland in Hong Kong along with all of these ventures Alibaba currently invests in startups across China and acquires new companies regularly in 2019 they also announced pledges to help technology drive philanthropic and humanitarian challenges in September 2019 Jack Ma would step down as CEO some speculated that the Chinese government put pressure on him but he denies this saying that his focus is now to help others also in 2019 he started some initiatives one initiative grants ten African entrepreneurs one million dollars each for new and promising ideas every year the other initiative is a fund with over 14 million dollars to help develop education in Tibet many years ago the people say Jack no Bill Gates I said well I can have a beer as rich as Bill Gates but one thing I can do better than him I can retire early to him right I can do something that is from education field I can do unique different as something in my JAC mais mind so I would learn from a Bill Gates Warren Buffett a lot of great journalists in the world but I want to do something using my own way the story of Alibaba like Jack Ma came from humble beginnings the company is undoubtedly full of bright people but their culture of sheer determination to succeed instilled in by their leader is perhaps the greatest reason for their success as humble and as earnest as the company may have been there's no denying that the Alibaba we see today is a Goliath the company's acquisitions and positioning for the future would be frightening to their competitors perhaps if the company was American they would be facing some antitrust lawsuits but I guess in China the rules are different for the Chinese would alibaba's fingers in so many pots it's hard to see a future without them the one small start-up that had its humble beginnings in an apartment the brainchild of an English teacher who had failed over and over again in his life yet still believed that he could take on the Silicon Valley Giants and eventually did so making himself 35 billion dollars in the process is quite the amazing story it kind of does go to show no matter what disappointments the pastures brought you if you have the right vision and work hard you can make it. If you're looking to start something in this world then learning a new skill is usually the best place to start Skillshare has more than 25,000 classes on anything from business and entrepreneurship to web development and video editing for example I found this marketing course by Gary Vaynerchuk social media strategy in the noisy world pretty interesting as well as this storytelling for leaders class by Keith Yamashita lessons like this are important if you want to stand out in a world that's a lot noisier than the one in which Jack Ma rose to prominent today Skillshare is giving away a free two month unlimited access trial to ColdFusion subscribers who click the link in the description below and after this period is only about ten dollars a month so that wraps up this video I hope you enjoyed it this has been to gogo and you've been watching ColdFusion feel free to subscribe if you're new here and I'll catch you again soon for the next video cheers guys have a good one Oh.
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