Alibaba Group

Alibaba Group Holding Limited is a publicly traded technology group whose principal businesses include online commerce, cloud computing, logistics, local services, digital media, and artificial intelligence. Its holding company is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, while the principal offices of its major businesses are in Hangzhou, China. The company was founded on June 28, 1999, by 18 people led by Jack Ma. It began with Alibaba.com, an English-language business-to-business marketplace intended to connect mainly Chinese exporters with buyers outside China.^[1][3]

Alibaba is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under BABA and is dual-primary-listed in Hong Kong under 9988 for its Hong Kong dollar counter and 89988 for its renminbi counter.^[1][4][5][6] Joe Tsai has served as chairman and Eddie Wu as chief executive officer since September 10, 2023.^[8] For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2026, Alibaba reported revenue of RMB 1.02367 trillion, net income of RMB 102.127 billion, and 131,462 full-time employees.^[1][2]

The group describes its current strategic priorities as consumption and AI plus cloud. Its principal AI assets include the Qwen family of open-weight large language models, Alibaba Cloud, Model Studio for hosted models, and the ModelScope model community. Alibaba also applies machine learning within its commerce, advertising, logistics, and other services.^[1][2]

Current organization and businesses

Alibaba reported four business segments for fiscal 2026. This structure replaced the seven-part presentation used after its 2023 reorganization. During fiscal 2026, the company combined Taobao and Tmall Group, Ele.me, and Fliggy into Alibaba China E-commerce Group. It also moved Cainiao, Amap, and Hujing Digital Media and Entertainment Group into the All others segment.^[1]

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The segment figures are before unallocated revenue and inter-segment eliminations, so they do not sum to consolidated revenue. Alibaba China E-commerce Group was the largest segment by revenue in fiscal 2026. Its revenue came principally from customer-management services, direct sales and related services, quick commerce, and domestic wholesale commerce. International commerce revenue came from retail platforms such as AliExpress, Lazada, and Trendyol and from Alibaba.com's wholesale services. Cloud Intelligence Group sells public-cloud infrastructure, data and database services, model training and inference, and other enterprise services.^[1][2]

The All others segment is economically diverse. It includes logistics through Cainiao, physical and online retail through Freshippo, health services, maps, entertainment, workplace software, and the consumer Qwen business. Alibaba completed the sale of Sun Art during fiscal 2025 and the sale of Intime during fiscal 2026. Those disposals make year-over-year comparisons for the All others segment and consolidated revenue less direct; Alibaba reported that fiscal 2026 consolidated revenue would have grown 11% on a like-for-like basis if revenue from the disposed businesses were excluded, compared with reported growth of 3%.^[1][2]

History

Formation and early platforms

Alibaba's 18 founders gathered in Jack Ma's apartment in Hangzhou in 1999. They launched Alibaba.com for international wholesale trade and a Chinese-language marketplace that later became 1688.com. In 2000, a group of investors led by SoftBank invested US$20 million. Yahoo made a strategic investment in 2005 that included US$1 billion in cash and the contribution of Yahoo China; Yahoo held about 40% of Alibaba on a fully diluted basis immediately after that transaction.^[3]

The group launched Taobao Marketplace in 2003 as a free consumer marketplace. It established Alipay in 2004 to address the problem of trust between buyers and sellers by providing an escrow service. Tmall began in 2008 as a marketplace for brands. Alibaba established its cloud-computing business in 2009, initially to support the scale and data needs of its own marketplaces, and launched AliExpress in 2010 for cross-border retail transactions.^[3]

Alibaba no longer controlled or owned Alipay after a 2011 restructuring. Agreements negotiated among Alibaba, Alipay, Yahoo, SoftBank, Jack Ma, and Joe Tsai governed the continuing commercial relationship. A further restructuring in 2014 and an equity issuance completed in 2019 gave Alibaba a 33% equity interest in Ant Group, Alipay's parent. The relationship is described more fully below.^[1][3]

Public listings and expansion

Alibaba priced its New York initial public offering on September 18, 2014, at US$68 per American depositary share. The initial offering comprised 320,106,100 ADSs and had an announced size of approximately US$21.77 billion before any exercise of the underwriters' option. Trading began on the New York Stock Exchange the next day.^[4]

The company subsequently expanded through both internally developed services and acquisitions. Material businesses added during the 2010s included the Cainiao logistics network, mapping provider AutoNavi, browser developer UCWeb, video platform Youku Tudou, Southeast Asian marketplace Lazada, and South Asian marketplace Daraz. The present article treats these as components of Alibaba's business portfolio rather than maintaining a transaction-by-transaction acquisition catalog, because their ownership, segment placement, and strategic importance have changed over time.^[1]

Alibaba's shares began trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on November 26, 2019. The Hong Kong-listed ordinary shares were made fungible with the company's New York-listed ADSs.^[5] On August 28, 2024, the Hong Kong listing changed from a secondary listing to a primary listing, making Alibaba dual-primary-listed in Hong Kong and New York. The change did not itself create a new class of shares.^[6]

Reorganization and strategic refocusing

In March 2023, Alibaba announced a holding-company reorganization under which six major business groups would have their own boards and chief executives and could seek outside financing or listings. The six groups were Cloud Intelligence, Taobao Tmall Commerce, International Digital Commerce, Local Services, Cainiao, and Digital Media and Entertainment.^[7]

The initial plan was subsequently revised. In November 2023, Alibaba said it would not pursue the full spin-off of Cloud Intelligence Group, citing uncertainty created by expanded United States restrictions on exports of advanced computing chips to China. It also put the planned Freshippo listing on hold.^[9] In March 2024, Cainiao withdrew its Hong Kong listing application. Alibaba simultaneously offered minority shareholders an opportunity to sell their Cainiao shares for up to US$3.75 billion in total consideration.^[10]

The leadership transition announced during the reorganization took effect on September 10, 2023. Joe Tsai succeeded Daniel Zhang as chairman, and Eddie Wu succeeded Zhang as group chief executive. Wu is one of Alibaba's original founders and held early technical roles at Alibaba and Alipay before later leading Taobao and Tmall Group.^[8] By fiscal 2026, the company's external reporting had been consolidated into the four segments shown above.^[1]

Artificial intelligence and research

Research before large language models

Alibaba's use of machine learning predates the current generative AI cycle. In 2017, the company announced DAMO Academy as a global research program covering fields including machine learning, natural language processing, visual computing, network security, quantum computing, and human-computer interaction. Alibaba said at launch that it expected to invest more than US$15 billion in research and development over three years and initially planned seven laboratories.^[12]

Research papers from Alibaba teams document how machine learning was deployed in commerce systems. A paper accepted at KDD 2018 introduced Deep Interest Network for click-through-rate prediction and reported its deployment in Alibaba's display-advertising system.^[17] A 2019 paper described Behavior Sequence Transformer, which used the Transformer architecture to model user behavior sequences for recommendation within Alibaba.^[18] These systems are examples of production recommendation research rather than general-purpose language models.

Alibaba launched ModelScope in November 2022 as an open-source model-as-a-service platform. At launch, the company said the platform contained more than 300 ready-to-deploy models spanning computer vision, natural language processing, audio, and multimodal tasks. ModelScope allows users to test, fine-tune, and deploy models through Alibaba Cloud or other environments.^[13]

Qwen model family

The Qwen team published its first technical report in September 2023. That report described a family containing base pretrained language models, instruction-tuned chat models, and specialized coding and mathematics models. It also described reinforcement learning from human feedback and tool-use capabilities, while reporting benchmark results produced by the model developers.^[14]

The 2025 Qwen3 technical report described six dense models and two mixture-of-experts models, ranging from 0.6 billion to 235 billion total parameters. The report said Qwen3 combined a deliberative mode and a direct-response mode in the same models and introduced a configurable reasoning-token budget. It reported training on approximately 36 trillion tokens across 119 languages and dialects. The Qwen3 weights were released under the Apache License 2.0, but the technical report described the training corpus by categories rather than publishing the corpus itself.^[15]

It is more precise to call these releases open-weight than to imply that every part of their development was open source. A December 2025 issue brief from Stanford HAI and DigiChina described Qwen as a prominent and widely used Chinese open-weight model family and distinguished the release of weights, architecture information, and code from full disclosure of training data. The same brief noted that benchmark values in developer reports are self-reported and should be interpreted accordingly.^[16]

Cloud infrastructure and commercialization

Alibaba's AI strategy links models to its cloud business. The group's infrastructure includes computing, networking, database, storage, and model-serving services. A peer-reviewed FAST 2023 paper from Alibaba and university researchers documented Pangu, the distributed storage system developed and deployed from 2009 for Alibaba Group and Alibaba Cloud. The paper described its evolution from hard-disk and TCP-based infrastructure toward SSD, RDMA, and user-space storage designs.^[19]

In February 2025, Alibaba announced a plan to invest at least RMB 380 billion over the following three years in AI and cloud infrastructure. This was an announced capital program, not a statement that the full amount had already been spent.^[11] Alibaba's fiscal 2026 filing also described a vertically integrated stack that included Alibaba Cloud, Qwen models, model-as-a-service products, and proprietary T-Head inference chips.^[1]

For fiscal 2026, Cloud Intelligence Group reported revenue of RMB 158.132 billion, up 34% from fiscal 2025. Revenue from external cloud customers increased 33% for the year. In the quarter ended March 31, 2026, the segment reported RMB 41.626 billion in revenue; external-customer revenue grew 40%, and AI-related product revenue was RMB 8.971 billion. These figures are company-reported financial and operating measures and should not be treated as estimates of the total market for AI or cloud services.^[2]

Corporate structure and governance

Holding company and variable interest entities

Alibaba Group Holding Limited is a Cayman Islands holding company. It conducts business through subsidiaries and through variable interest entities, or VIEs, for activities in China in which foreign ownership is restricted or prohibited. The VIEs are owned by Chinese citizens or Chinese entities, not by the Cayman holding company. Holders of Alibaba ADSs or ordinary shares therefore own securities in the Cayman company rather than direct equity in the VIEs.^[1]

Alibaba consolidates the VIEs for accounting purposes through contractual arrangements. The company warns that these contracts have not been tested in a court of law and may provide less direct control than equity ownership. It also states that an adverse interpretation of Chinese foreign-investment rules could result in penalties or loss of the ability to benefit from VIE operations. These are structural risks disclosed by the company, not a finding that the arrangements are currently invalid.^[1]

Board nominations and leadership

Alibaba has one class of ordinary shares, with one vote per share. However, the Alibaba Partnership has the exclusive right to nominate, or in limited circumstances appoint, up to a simple majority of the board. Shareholders vote on partnership nominees at annual general meetings, and the partnership may appoint an interim replacement if one of its nominees is not elected or leaves the board. Hong Kong listing rules classify these nomination rights as a weighted-voting-rights structure.^[1]

The partnership is composed of senior figures from Alibaba and related organizations. Its nomination rights are distinct from direct share ownership. As of the fiscal 2026 annual report, Alibaba's ten-member board included four partnership nominees and six independent directors nominated by the board's nominating and corporate-governance committee.^[1]

Relationship with Ant Group

Alibaba held 33% of Ant Group as of March 31, 2026. Two employee partnership entities held about 32% and 22%, and other shareholders held the balance. Voting changes completed in December 2023 ended Jack Ma's previous control over the voting interests held by those employee partnerships. Alibaba states that neither it nor another single shareholder controls Ant Group.^[1]

Alibaba and Ant maintain commercial, intellectual-property, payment-services, and other arrangements. Their current data-sharing arrangements are negotiated case by case and are subject to applicable law. The companies have overlapping commercial histories, but Ant Group is an equity-method investee rather than an Alibaba business segment.^[1] Ant's planned Shanghai and Hong Kong listings were suspended in November 2020 after regulatory interviews and changes in the regulatory environment.^[23]

Financial profile

Alibaba's fiscal year ends on March 31. The table below uses the audited measures in its fiscal 2026 annual report. United States dollar conversions are shown only where Alibaba supplied them for fiscal 2026.^[1]

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Fiscal 2026 revenue grew 3%, while net income fell 19%. Alibaba attributed the lower operating income in part to investment in quick commerce, user experience, and technology businesses, together with higher goodwill impairment. Reported free cash flow, a non-GAAP liquidity measure, was an outflow of RMB 46.609 billion for fiscal 2026, compared with an inflow of RMB 73.870 billion in fiscal 2025; Alibaba attributed the decrease mainly to quick-commerce investment and higher cloud-infrastructure expenditure.^[1][2]

Regulatory and workplace issues

Chinese antitrust enforcement

On April 10, 2021, China's State Administration for Market Regulation found that Alibaba had abused a dominant position in the domestic online retail-platform services market by requiring merchants to choose Alibaba rather than competing platforms. The regulator ordered Alibaba to stop the conduct and imposed a fine of RMB 18.228 billion, equal to 4% of its 2019 domestic sales. It also required three years of self-examination and compliance reporting.^[20]

Counterfeit and unsafe products

The Office of the United States Trade Representative included Taobao in its 2025 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy. The report recorded both sides of the enforcement record: some stakeholders recognized Alibaba's engagement with rights holders, government agencies, and anti-counterfeiting tools, while others continued to report high volumes of counterfeit or pirated goods and difficulties with takedown requirements. The list is an enforcement-policy report based partly on stakeholder submissions, not a judicial determination about every listing on the marketplace.^[21]

AliExpress has also faced European Union enforcement. On July 20, 2026, the European Commission fined AliExpress EUR 550 million under the Digital Services Act. The Commission found that the platform had failed to assess and mitigate adequately the risks of illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products and ordered it to take corrective action. The decision concerned AliExpress, an international-commerce business within Alibaba, rather than every Alibaba service.^[22]

Working-hours controversy

Alibaba became part of a wider debate over the technology industry's so-called 996 schedule, meaning work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. In April 2019, Jack Ma publicly defended the practice and described the opportunity to work such hours as a blessing, prompting public criticism. He later wrote that no company should force employees to work that schedule and called prolonged compulsory 996 inhumane, unhealthy, and unsustainable. His remarks reflected his stated views during the controversy; they were not a legal definition of Alibaba's employment terms for every worker.^[24]

See also

• Alibaba Cloud
• Qwen
• ModelScope
• Ant Group
• E-Commerce
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cloud computing

References

1. ^Alibaba Group Holding Limited, Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2026, filed May 20, 2026. sec.gov/...baba-20260331
2. ^Alibaba Group Holding Limited, "Alibaba Group Announces March Quarter 2026 and Fiscal Year 2026 Results," May 13, 2026. home.alibabagroup.com/...ument-1991237455038119936
3. ^Alibaba Group Holding Limited, Amendment No. 2 to Form F-1, filed June 26, 2014. sec.gov/...d709111df1a
4. ^Alibaba Group Holding Limited, "Alibaba Group Announces Pricing of Initial Public Offering," September 18, 2014. alibabagroup.com/...document-1490841477796855808
5. ^Alibaba Group Holding Limited, "Alibaba Group Listed on Main Board of HKEX," November 26, 2019. alibabagroup.com/...document-1491198532105797632
6. ^Alibaba Group Holding Limited, "Voluntary Conversion to Dual Primary Listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange," August 23, 2024. www1.hkexnews.hk/...2024082300161.pdf
7. ^Alibaba Group Holding Limited, "Alibaba Reorganizes To Unlock Value," March 28, 2023. alibabagroup.com/...document-1577510043060797440
8. ^Alibaba Group Holding Limited, "Alibaba Group Announces Chairman and CEO Succession Plan," June 20, 2023. alibabagroup.com/...document-1607836456397570048
9. ^Alibaba Group Holding Limited, "Alibaba's First Dividend and Solid Q2 Results; New Management Team Commits to Investing for Growth," November 16, 2023. alibabagroup.com/...document-1663636438236790784
10. ^Alibaba Group Holding Limited, "Alibaba Group Announces Withdrawal of Cainiao IPO Application and Proposal to Acquire All Outstanding Shares from Cainiao Minority Shareholders," March 26, 2024. alibabagroup.com/...document-1709401084725821440
11. ^Alibaba Group Holding Limited, "Alibaba to Invest RMB380 Billion in AI and Cloud Infrastructure Over Next Three Years," February 24, 2025. alibabagroup.com/...document-1830678592242057216
12. ^Alibaba Group Holding Limited, "Alibaba Launches Global Research Program for Cutting-edge Technology Development," October 11, 2017. alibabagroup.com/...document-1491841175609409536
13. ^Alibaba Group Holding Limited, "Alibaba Cloud Launches ModelScope Platform and New Solutions to Lower the Threshold for Materializing Business Innovation," November 3, 2022. alibabagroup.com/...document-1525026652642344960
14. ^Jinze Bai et al., "Qwen Technical Report," arXiv:2309.16609, September 2023. arxiv.org/...2309.16609
15. ^An Yang et al., "Qwen3 Technical Report," arXiv:2505.09388, May 2025. arxiv.org/...2505.09388
16. ^Caroline Meinhardt et al., "Beyond DeepSeek: China's Diverse Open-Weight AI Ecosystem and Its Policy Implications," Stanford HAI and DigiChina, December 16, 2025. hai.stanford.edu/...system-policy-implications.pdf
17. ^Guorui Zhou et al., "Deep Interest Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction," Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2018. kdd.org/...twork-for-click-through-rate-prediction
18. ^Qiwei Chen et al., "Behavior Sequence Transformer for E-commerce Recommendation in Alibaba," arXiv:1905.06874, May 2019. arxiv.org/...1905.06874
19. ^Qiang Li et al., "More Than Capacity: Performance-oriented Evolution of Pangu in Alibaba," 21st USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2023. usenix.org/...li-qiang-deployed
20. ^State Administration for Market Regulation, administrative penalty announcement concerning Alibaba Group Holding Limited, April 10, 2021. samr.gov.cn/...art_a10f74fa09cd49ee8db7804ba834db2a
21. ^Office of the United States Trade Representative, "2025 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy," 2026. ustr.gov/...ous%20Markets%20List%20%28final%29.pdf
22. ^European Commission, "Commission fines AliExpress EUR550 million for breaching the Digital Services Act," July 20, 2026. digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/...ital-services-act
23. ^Shanghai Stock Exchange, "Q&A on the Suspension of IPO by Ant Group Co., Ltd.," November 2020. star.sse.com.cn/...c_20210114_5301887.shtml
24. ^Australian Broadcasting Corporation, "Alibaba founder Jack Ma says staff should work 12 hours a day, six days a week," April 16, 2019. abc.net.au/...11021610