Alibaba IPO signals global ambitions
It was a scene straight out of Silicon Valley — only it took place across the Pacific.
In 1999, Jack Ma gathered his wife and 17 friends in his small apartment in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou, about 100 miles from Shanghai.
They had pooled $60,000 to found Alibaba, a website for businesses to sell one another goods.
The dial-up connection was so slow that Ma took more than three hours to load half a Web page.
Undaunted, Ma roused friends with the first of many now iconic speeches, exhorting them to turn Alibaba into a global website that could take on Silicon Valley.
“All of our brains are just as good as theirs,” he said.
That year Beijing-based technology consultant Duncan Clark visited Hangzhou and found a dozen or so people crammed into the apartment, “as I could tell by the number of toothbrushes jammed into a mug in the bathroom and the unmistakable atmosphere of a start-up where people lived and worked on the project 24/7,” he said.
Fifteen years later, Alibaba is on the verge of an IPO that clinches its breathtaking rise from scrappy start-up to global powerhouse.
“The biggest IPO in America is going to be a Chinese company that is rising on the promise of the Chinese economy,” said Max Wolff, chief economist at Manhattan Venture Partners.
It’s playing catch-up on commerce on mobile devices in the world’s largest smartphone market. The most critical task Alibaba faces: Reaching the 500 million Chinese consumers who shop, chat, play games and basically run their entire digital lives on smartphones.
The challenge for Alibaba, says Clark, chairman of China tech advisory firm BDA: “Keeping the tremendous momentum they have achieved in their core consumer e-commerce offering while unlocking new growth drivers in areas such as media, financial products, entertainment, etc.”
Source: Usatoday
