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  • Alibaba Unites Food Delivery and Travel Divisions to Propel ‘Instant Retail’ Initiative Forward

    Alibaba Unites Food Delivery and Travel Divisions to Propel ‘Instant Retail’ Initiative Forward

    In a significant shift within its operational strategy, Alibaba Group has announced plans to merge its food delivery service Ele.me and online travel platform Fliggy into its China e-commerce business segment. This development, revealed by CEO Eddie Wu in an internal letter to employees on Monday, reflects a rollback of the company’s previously ambitious restructuring initiatives, signaling a keen focus on enhancing the efficiency of order fulfillment.

    A Strategic Upgrade in Focus

    “This marks a strategic upgrade as we transition from an e-commerce platform to a broader consumer platform,” Wu articulated, as reported by Nikkei Asia. This pivot is aligned with the e-commerce giant’s commitment to streamline operations and adapt to rapidly changing market dynamics. The integration of Ele.me and Fliggy into the core e-commerce unit is expected to foster a more cohesive approach to consumer services, tapping into the growing demand for integrated shopping experiences among Chinese consumers.

    Wu’s announcement comes as Alibaba navigates a competitive landscape marked by shifting consumer behaviors and economic uncertainties. The decision to streamline operations comes not just as an internal strategy, but as a necessary move to remain agile in a sector that demands quick adaptations and seamless customer service.

    The Bigger Picture of Consumer Demand

    As the company looks to redefine its role in the marketplace, the consolidation of these platforms underscores Alibaba’s recognition of the evolving consumer landscape. In recent years, the appetite for quick delivery and comprehensive service options has surged, making it essential for the e-commerce behemoth to integrate more responsive solutions into its repertoire.

    In a retail universe where customer expectations are as high as a skyscraper and competition often feels like a sprint, Alibaba is positioning itself to not just keep pace, but to set the tempo.

    Questions & Answers

    What prompted Alibaba to merge Ele.me and Fliggy?
    The decision stems from a strategic shift aimed at enhancing efficiency and better responding to the changing dynamics of consumer demand in the e-commerce market.

    How does this merger align with Alibaba’s broader goals?
    This merger reflects Alibaba’s transition from a traditional e-commerce platform to a more comprehensive consumer service provider, reinforcing its commitment to seamless customer experiences.

    What impact could this merger have on consumers?
    Consumers can expect a more integrated service offering from Alibaba, with improved order fulfillment and a potentially wider range of services available at their fingertips.

  • Capvis Lures Investment from Chinese Giant Alibaba.com

    Capvis Lures Investment from Chinese Giant Alibaba.com

    Funds belonging to the Zug-based private equity specialist sell a stake to Alibaba.com. The China-based B2B platform intends to use it to expand and grow in Europe.

    Capvis has managed a coup. The Baar based private equity specialist has completed the sale of its majority stake in B2B platform operator Visable, an announcement sent by the company on Tuesday indicates.

    The sales price is not being disclosed.  Capvis bought a stake in Visable in 2017 and has developed into the European market leader for e-commerce platforms with the international marketplace europages based in Paris.

    Alibaba.com is a subsidiary of Chinese internet giant Alibaba International Digital Commerce.With this step, Capvis cements its position internationally. It was founded in 1990 and it is now, with the significantly larger Partners Group, one of the last independent pioneer private equity firms in Switzerland as former competitors such as Zurmont and Adveq have been sold to competitors in the meantime.

    Since its founding, Capvis has concluded 62 transitions corresponding to total capital of around 4 billion euros, with ten companies concluding successful IPOs.

  • China’s Alibaba pledges carbon neutrality by 2030

    China’s Alibaba pledges carbon neutrality by 2030

    Alibaba Group will aim to achieve carbon neutrality in its own operations and slash emissions across its supply chains and transportation networks by the end of the decade, the Chinese e-commerce giant pledged on Friday.

    Alibaba promised to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030 in its own direct emissions – known as “scope 1” – as well as its indirect “scope 2” emissions – derived from the consumption of electricity or heating.

    It also said it would reduce carbon intensity – the amount of carbon per unit of revenue – from the “scope 3” emissions – produced across its wider value chain in areas such as transportation, purchased goods and services, and waste – by 50% by 2030.

    The company also pledged to cut overall CO2 across all its businesses by 1.5 gigatonnes by 2035.

    To achieve its goals, Alibaba plans to deploy new energy-saving, high-efficiency technologies, make further use of renewables and also explore “carbon removal initiatives” that could extract climate-warming greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

    Daniel Zhang, the company’s chief executive, said the company also sought to “mobilize actions and behavioral changes among consumers, merchants and partners in China and around the world”.

    President Xi Jinping announced last year that China would aim to become carbon neutral by around 2060, putting the country’s giant corporations under pressure to draw up their own roadmaps to reach “net-zero”.

    But China’s giant tech firms remain hugely dependent on the country’s coal-dominated energy system, with only a small number so far committed to switching to renewable sources of electricity.

    In a report published earlier this year, environment group Greenpeace ranked Tencent Holdings as the best-performing Chinese cloud service provider in terms of procuring renewable energy and cutting emissions. Huawei Technologies came second, Baidu Inc third and Alibaba fourth.

  • Alibaba Cloud Doubles Growth for Cloud-native Database Products

    Alibaba Cloud Doubles Growth for Cloud-native Database Products

    Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intellectual backbone of Alibaba Group, has seen the demand for its database family of products doubles year-over-year. The increment was fueled by industries’ growing needs to move their operation online given the lasting impacts of COVID-19. Alibaba Cloud is the third largest cloud computing company in the world, and its database technologies currently serve more than 100,000 companies globally.

    Mr Erwin Foo, Group Chief Technology Officer of PrestoMall said: “As one of the leading e-commerce players in Malaysia, we are constantly looking to adopt future proof and affordable solutions to enhance our platform and provide a more unique and remarkable experience for our customer. Due to the complexity of the e-commerce platforms, we need a reliable, robust, and scalable database that can enable the growth of our dynamic business without worrying too much about the infrastructure and support needed.”

    To support customers’ digital transformation journey, at the Apsara Conference 2020, Alibaba Cloud database team launched a series of new product and feature upgrades, which include a family of cloud-native database products covering OLTP, OLAP, NoSQL, tools and utility, and self-driving database platform. These products will provide a rich solution portfolio within the database eco-system for the complete cycle of data processing, storage, management, and analytics.

    Lindorm, the cloud-native multi-model database that used to support the Alibaba Group ecosystem, is first introduced to the market in order to benefit the wider Alibaba Cloud ecosystem and public customers. Lindorm is a cloud-native database, with affordable storage and flexible processing characteristics. It is suitable to be used by applications with massive processing requirements for a mixture of unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data. The application of Lindorm for enterprises is able to reduce the storage cost by 80% as compared with using conventional databases, with an availability guarantee of at least 99.99%.

    Alibaba Cloud’s self-proprietary cloud-native distributed database product PolarDB-X is upgraded with hybrid transaction/analytical processing and global secondary index for distributed data features. With the new upgrades, it is able to carry out high concurrent, massive online transaction requests, and at the same time, help online business to accelerate the complex analysis with efficient processing by 5 to 10 times. Companies that require extremely fast data and transaction processing functionalities such as the logistics platform is able to deploy PolarDB-X to meet its instant needs.

    Based on the storage and computing decoupled architecture, AnalyticDB (ADB) creates an automatic, flexible cloud-native data warehouse that is able to integrate online interactive analytics and offline computation operations. In addition, AnalyticDB MySQL (ADB MySQL) can meet the resource requirement of users’ workloads with its elasticity on time consumption, data storage, and group isolation to reduce cost and increase operational stability. With its multi-master and high concurrency “Laser” engine, ADB MySQL is able to power real-time computation needs with enterprise cost reduced by 50-80%.

    Cloud-native Data Lake Analytics (DLA) released upgraded features with its Serverless Spark to pull up 300 knots within 1 minute.  With serverless Presto and Spark computation engine, it provides enterprises with a one-stop (serverless) data lake platform that is efficient and easy to use with features such as one-click lake formation, metadata discovery, and management, and delta lake management. Both ADB and DLA have been successfully deployed in various industries including finance, manufacturing, retail, aviation, and logistics to help their digital transformation processes.

    “In the latest Gartner magic quadrant report, Gartner merged DMSA (Data Management Solution for Analytics) and OPDBMS (Operational DBMS) magic quadrants into a single Cloud DBMS magic quadrant, and this indicates where the future lies for database technology,” said Dr Feifei Li, President of Alibaba Cloud Database Products Business. “We want our customers to ride on the future trend, and we will continue to innovate and provide our customers with the best database technology so that together, we can build a solid foundation in their digital transformation process.”

    According to Gartner, cloud database would prevail in the near future and by 2023, 75% of all databases will be on a cloud platform. In its recent report entitled 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems, Alibaba Cloud Database was recognized as a player in the “Challengers” quadrant.

    Lees ook:

  • Alibaba’s Ma steps down as chairman after reflection

    Alibaba’s Ma steps down as chairman after reflection

    Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma, who helped launch China’s online retailing boom, has stepped down as chairman of the world’s biggest e-commerce company as its fast-changing industry faces uncertainty amid a US-Chinese tariff war.

    Ma, one of China’s wealthiest and best-known entrepreneurs, gave up his post on his 55th birthday as part of a succession announced a year ago.

    He will stay on as a member of the Alibaba Partnership, a 36-member group with the right to nominate a majority of the company’s board of directors.

    Ma, a former English teacher, founded Alibaba in 1999 to connect Chinese exporters to American retailers.

    The company has shifted focus to serving China’s growing consumer market and expanded into online banking, entertainment and cloud computing. Domestic businesses accounted for 66 per cent of its $US16.7 billion in revenue in the quarter ending in June.

    Chinese retailing faces uncertainty amid a tariff war that has raised the cost of US imports.

    Growth in online sales decelerated to 17.8 per cent in the first half of 2019 amid slowing Chinese economic growth, down from 2018’s full-year rate of 23.9 per cent.

    Alibaba says its revenue rose 42 percent over a year earlier in the quarter ending in June to $16.7 billion and profit rose 145 per cent to $US3.1 billion. Still, that was off slightly from 2018’s full-year revenue growth of 51 percent.

    The total amount of goods sold across Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms rose 25 percent last year to $US853 billion. By comparison, the biggest US e-commerce company, Amazon.com Inc., reported total sales of $US277 billion.

    Alibaba’s deputy chairman, Joe Tsai, told reporters in May the company is “on the right side” of issues in US-Chinese trade talks. Tsai said Alibaba stands to benefit from Beijing’s promise to increase imports and a growing consumer market.

    Alibaba was founded at a time when few Chinese were online. As internet use spread, the company expanded into consumer-focused retailing and services. Few Chinese used credit cards, so Alibaba created the Alipay online payments system.

    Ma, known in Chinese as Ma Yun, appears regularly on television. He pokes fun at his own appearance, saying his oversize head and angular features make him look like the alien in director Steven Spielberg’s movie “E.T. The Extraterrestrial.”

    The company’s $US25 billion initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014 was the biggest to date by a Chinese company.

    The Hurun Report, which follows China’s wealth, estimates Ma’s fortune at $US38 billion.

    Ma’s successor as chairman is CEO Daniel Zhang, a former accountant and 12-year veteran of Alibaba.

    Alibaba’s e-commerce business spans platforms including business-to-business Alibaba.com, which links foreign buyers with Chinese suppliers of goods from furniture to medical technology, and Tmall, with online shops for popular brands.

    Ma faced controversy when it disclosed in 2011 that Alibaba transferred control over Alipay to a company he controlled without immediately informing shareholders including Yahoo Inc. and Japan’s Softback.

    Alibaba said the move was required to comply with Chinese regulations, but some financial analysts said the company was paid too little for a valuable asset. The dispute was later resolved by Alibaba, Yahoo and Softbank.

    Corporate governance specialists have questioned the Alibaba Partnership, which gives Ma and a group of executives more control over the company than shareholders.

    Ma has said that ensures Alibaba focuses on long-term development instead of responding to pressure from financial markets.