Why you should care about Alibaba

This Chinese web giant is generating bigger revenues than Amazon and eBay put together

Jack Ma
(Image credit: (REUTERS/Jason Lee/Files))

Today, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group filed documents for an IPO seeking to raise capital in America. The details revealed in those documents illustrate why the IPO is now widely expected to be one of the biggest in history, possibly even eclipsing Facebook’s $18.4 billion public share sale.

Alibaba's original platform was Alibaba.com, a business-to-business portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers. Alibaba has since expanded to develop Taobao (a huge eBay-style consumer auction site now ranked in the top 10 most visited websites worldwide), Tmall (an Amazon-style internet retail portal now ranked in the top 30 most visited websites worldwide), eTao (a price comparison website), Alibaba Cloud Computing (a cloud computing platform), Yahoo China (a web portal which Alibaba purchased from Yahoo), and Laiwang (an instant messaging platform competing with WeChat and WhatsApp). Alibaba also developed AliPay, a PayPal-style online payments system which was spun off in 2011 and will not be part of the IPO.

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John Aziz is the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also an associate editor at Pieria.co.uk. Previously his work has appeared on Business Insider, Zero Hedge, and Noahpinion.