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What are Alibaba Group’s core businesses?

Alibaba has two core businesses: e-commerce and cloud computing.

For more information on our key offerings, please visit the Our Businesses page.

Who are Alibaba Group's customers?

Our customers include both buyers and sellers on our marketplaces, and they discover, select and transact with each other on our platform. Buyers access our marketplaces free of charge. Buyers include consumers who come to our retail marketplaces to shop for anything anytime anywhere, as well as business buyers who use our wholesale marketplaces to source products for use in their own business or for resale. Sellers use our marketplaces to establish a presence on the Internet and market products and services to hundreds of millions of consumers and other businesses. Sellers include brands, retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers. We also provide cloud computing services to a wide range of customers including merchants doing business on our marketplaces, systems integrators, mobile app developers and digital entertainment companies.

What do you mean when you refer to the “Alibaba Ecosystem”?

An ecosystem has developed around our platforms and businesses, consisting of consumers, merchants, brands, retailers, third-party service providers, strategic alliance partners and other businesses. At the nexus of this ecosystem are our technology platform, our marketplace rules and the role we play in connecting these participants to make it possible for them to discover, engage and transact with each other and manage their businesses anytime and anywhere. Much of our effort, time and energy is spent on initiatives that are for the greater good of the ecosystem and on balancing the interests of its participants. We feel a strong responsibility for the continued development of the ecosystem and we take ownership in this development. Accordingly, we refer to this as “our ecosystem.” Our ecosystem has strong self-reinforcing network effects benefiting its various participants, who are in turn invested in our ecosystem’s growth and success.

How does Alibaba Group grow its business?

With our environmental, social and governance responsibilities (ESG) as the foundation of our long-term strategy, we choose to stay focused on strengthening our leadership and building core capabilities in three strategic areas: consumption, cloud, and globalization.

ESG: ESG not only provides a framework for solving a series of global challenges, but is also the bridge to carry Alibaba to 102 years. We believe we can only create and sustain a profitable and prosperous business by bringing positive change to the society. We are committed to assuming greater responsibility while pursuing business excellence as the operator of a platform economy.
Consumption: In China, we aim to capture opportunities in wallet share expansion by serving the diversified needs of different consumer segments in accordance with their consumption power and mindset. We offer a multidimensional matrix of consumer apps with clearly differentiated value propositions that aim to meet the various consumer demands across metropolitan and less-developed regions, across differing time sensitivities, and across different income levels and consumption models.
Cloud: In order to capture the tremendous opportunities of enterprise digitalization, we will continue to strengthen our market leadership as a global cloud service provider, and focus on high-quality growth through improving operating efficiency, enhancing core products and technologies and advancing our Cloud-DingTalk integration strategy.
Globalization: We strive to make diversified offerings available to our users worldwide by empowering our local merchants and partners,supported by our supply chain advantages in China and cross-border capabilities. In addition, as the largest IaaS service provider in Asia Pacific, we continue to expand our international cloud infrastructure and strengthen local cloud service capabilities, especially in Southeast Asia.