Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma, who helped launch China’s online retailing boom, stepped down as chairman of the world’s biggest e-commerce company Tuesday at a time when its fast-changing industry faces uncertainty amid a U.S.-Chinese tariff war.
Alibaba says its revenue rose 42 per cent over a year earlier in the quarter ending in June to $16.7 billion and profit rose 145 per cent to $3.1 billion. Still, that was off slightly from 2018’s full-year revenue growth of 51 per cent. Alibaba is one of a group of companies including Tencent Holding Ltd., a games and social media giant, search engine Baidu.com Inc. and e-commerce rival JD.com that have revolutionized shopping, entertainment and consumer services in China.Alibaba was founded at a time when few Chinese were online. As internet use spread, the company expanded into consumer-focused retailing and services. Few Chinese used credit cards, so Alibaba created the Alipay online payments system.
Alipay became a freestanding financial company, Ant Financial, in 2014. Alibaba also set up its own film studio and invested in logistics and delivery services.
globebusiness Haha this is definitely after Elon Musk just showed how stupid this guy was in that debate on stage!! 'Humans are smarter than computers and AI, always will be'...