China’s largest e-commerce company Alibaba Group on Thursday held its Investor Day 2017 at its headquarters in Hangzhou. Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang spoke to around 350 investors and analysts from world leading organizations. Alibaba founder Jack Ma is scheduled to deliver a speech tomorrow.
Zhang spoke on the upgrade of Alibaba’s e-commerce platform Tmall, with the emergence of “New Retail”. First coined by Jack Ma in October 2016, New Retail refers to new retail business models that industry players create to improve the way they run their companies through the Internet, big data, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“New retail is Alibaba’s strategic blueprint for the future and it will be an integration of online and offline commerce, driven by big data,” said Zhang at the event.
According to Zhang, every single part along the new retail industry chain will be digitized. This will include product planning, R&D, logistics, marketing, and so on.
“Alibaba’s entire ecology is a vital support for Tmall,” said Zhang, “Alibaba consists of e-commerce, local services, digital media, and data technology. These are interconnected with each other.”
So far, there are more than 12,000 international brands on the Tmall platform, and 80 percent of all valuable brands on Forbes’ world most valuable consumer brand list have already opened their online stores on Tmall.
“Alibaba’s mid-term objective is to reach USD 1 trillion in gross merchandise volume by 2020, and its long-term objective is to attract 2 billion consumers by 2036,” said Zhang.
Alibaba CFO Maggie Wu also spoke at this event and said that the company predicts its revenue for the next fiscal year in 2018 will increase from 45 to 49 percent, and received applause from its investors, as it is 10 percent higher than what Wall Street predicted. Alibaba’s e-commerce arm saw its revenue grew 56 percent year-on-year, as of the end of its fiscal year in March. Alibaba held its first Investor Day last June.
(Top photo from Baidu Images)