Jack Ma’s Alibaba – once called the “Amazon of China” – has pushed aside Amazon to be crowned once again as the world’s largest e-commerce company.
In the New York morning session on Tuesday, the stock price of Alibaba rose 1.3 percent to $184.46, pushing up its market value to $472.4 billion, surpassing Amazon’s value of $470 billion – though briefly, as the market value of the two companies at the end of the day closed at $469 billion and $474.2 billion, respectively.
The intraday high price put Alibaba on the fifth ranking of the world’s IT companies, followed by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.
The Chinese company held the top spot for nine and a half months after its initial public offering in 2014. The Tuesday stock price hike marked the second surpassing of Amazon after 831 days, Bloomberg reported.
The competition between the two e-commerce giants has been fierce and analysts believe that the two will soon take their battle to Southeast Asia and India. The two are also treading into new industries, such as filming, to join the $500 billion club.
Jack Ma has said that Alibaba is not the “Amazon of China.” “We’re not an e-commerce company. We’re an e-commerce infrastructure company,” Ma was quoted as saying by Financial Post. “We are not interested in doing local business. We are interested in bringing the local businesses to China.”
This fourth quarter, Alibaba yielded a revenue of 38.5 billion yuan, up 60 percent year on year. It also set the record high revenue increase of a company after its IPO launch. In the fiscal year of 2017, Alibaba gained 158.2 billion yuan as business income, up 56 percent, with a net margin of 41.2 billion yuan.
Source: en.people.cn, ExpatLife
