Case 1 EMERGING MARKET: The Rise of Alibaba Founded in 1999 by a former English teacher Jack Ma, Alibaba has risen to become the largest e-commerce firm not only in China, but also in the world—the value of goods sold on is platform (US$170 billion in 2013) are more than Amazon and eBay combined. Alibaba started as a business-to-business (B2B) portal connecting overseas buyers and small Chinese manufactures. Inspired by eBay, Alibaba next launched Taobao, a consumer-toconsumer (C2C) portal that now features nearly a billion products and is the one of the 20 most-visited websites worldwide. Finally, with Tmall, Alibaba offers Amazon-like businessto-consumer (B2C) portal that assists global brands such as Levi’s and Disney to reach the middle class in China. The rise of Alibaba has been breathtaking. As China becomes the largest e-commerce market (already bigger than the United State), Alibaba controls four-fifths of all e-commerce in China. In 2013, on Singles’s Day (November 11, a marketing invention created to encourage singles to "be nice" to themselves), Alibaba sold more than US$5.7 billion. Preparing to initiate an initial public offering (IPO) in New York, Alibaba has been predicted by the Economist to have the potential "to be among the world’s most valuable companies".
