Tag Archives: Alibaba

Paper, gunpowder, the compass – China has a history of disruption that extends back thousands of years. In the digital age, however, the Middle Kingdom’s technology startups gained a reputation for quickly copying their Western peers, rather than coming up with their own world-changing ideas. All that is changing, though, and in 2016, innovation itself is increasingly being “Made in China”. China’s Internet giants are coming up with ingenious homegrown products, services, and business models,...

Online sales juggernaut Amazon has a toe in the Internet finance business, processing payments and offering loans to the site’s merchants. What about its Chinese counterpart, Alibaba? It does those things, too. It also facilitates peer-to-peer lending, sells mutual funds and insurance policies, and has formed a private bank to lend to consumers. Who’s leading the Internet revolution now?   From a modest start in processing online payments, Alibaba, online media and entertainment firm...

It’s been decades since conglomerates were the toast of American commerce. Many that formed in the 1960s and 70s broke up in the decades that followed, as the trend of diversification gave way to specialization. But in China in 2016, enthusiasm for the conglomerate form is at an all-time high, particularly among Internet companies. Last year, web titans Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent invested a total of $29 billion in 134 businesses.   Alibaba has been the most aggressive of the...