[HYSTA] The Alibaba Story — John Wu, CTO of Alibaba.com
HYSTA (Hua Yuan Science and Technology Association), the leading association for aspiring Chinese professionals, has a highly attended Distinguished Speaker Series. In June 7th, the speaker was John Wu, CTO of Alibaba. Here is a brief introduction of the company.
in 1999 as a B2B trading company, Alibaba survived the Internet dark age, and becomes a leading Internet player in the world. In 2003, Alibaba launched consumer ecommerce site Taobao, which eventually became the dominant C2C platform in 2005, surpassing eBay China. In August 2005, Yahoo! Inc. paid $1 billion in cash for a 40 percent stake in Alibaba, along with its China assets. In 2007, Alibaba entered business software service area by announcing Alisoft.
John Wu, full of wit and humors, gave us a deep inside look at Alibaba’s successes.
- Be cost conscience: Alibaba was among the earliest to cut cost in 2000 with the bubble bust on the horizon. Being local, they started to leverage Chinese high-tech workforce long before outsourcing became a hot topic in Wall Street.
- Be adaptive: Localization is the key to the success of international companies while, most of the time, it is easy to say than get done correctly. It is fatal to be ideological. The success of Alibaba’s B2B and C2C platforms are deeply rooted in its understanding of Chinese culture.
- Think out of box: When Alibaba entered C2C market in 2003, Eachnet (or eBay China) conquered more than 90% of the market. Out of the box, there were more Chinese who wanted to trade via some Internet C2C platform and who were not on Eachnet yet.
- Stay paranoid: In IT industry, only paranoids could survive. It is important to stay ahead of competitors. Through the Yahoo-Alibaba deal, Alibaba could leverage Yahoo’s technologies to support its further growth.
- Catch the China wave: Given its population and growth rate, China’s potential is still not fully fledged. A rich China means more ecommerce. There are bigger waves coming.
