Alibaba Group

Sector

E-commerce and cloud

Chinese name

阿里巴巴

Programme

Day 4 · 14 Oct 2026 · Hangzhou

Alibaba (阿里巴巴) started in 1999 as a website where Chinese manufacturers found foreign buyers. Today, besides being the group behind Taobao and Tmall, it is China's largest cloud provider and the maker of the world's most downloaded open AI models. Alibaba is betting everything on AI, and that costs money: in the quarter to June 2026 capital spending rose 75 per cent and net profit fell 75 per cent. For Europe, Alibaba is an online shop, a sourcing channel, a cloud supplier and a company under close scrutiny. The delegation had Alibaba on the programme for day 4 of the China Business Mission 2026.

How a flat in Hangzhou became a conglomerate

On 21 February 1999 Jack Ma, then an English teacher, and seventeen others met in his flat in Hangzhou. Their first product was Alibaba.com, a B2B platform where small businesses could find foreign customers. In 2003 came Taobao, a consumer marketplace that was free for sellers and drove eBay out of China. Ma compared himself at the time to a crocodile in the Yangtze that beats the shark from the ocean in the river. In 2014 Alibaba raised 25 billion dollars in its New York listing, then a world record.

A hard fall followed. In November 2020 the listing of sister company Ant Group was halted two days before it was due, shortly after a critical speech by Ma about China's financial regulators. In April 2021 Alibaba received an antitrust fine of 18.2 billion yuan. Since September 2023 two men from the early days have led the group: chairman Joe Tsai and CEO Eddie Wu, one of the eighteen founders. What the founder does today is covered in our article on the Jack Ma Foundation.

What was missing, Alibaba built itself

Anyone trying to understand Alibaba sees a recurring pattern. Whenever something was missing to make online trade work, the company built it itself.

It started with trust. In 2003 Chinese buyers and sellers did not know each other and hardly anyone had a credit card. Alipay therefore held the money until the buyer confirmed delivery. Alipay now belongs to Ant Group, a separate company of which Alibaba owns about a third. Since 2013 logistics company Cainiao has linked the data of shops, couriers and warehouses, and the supermarket chain Hema turned the shop into a warehouse for home delivery.

In 2009 Alibaba started building its own cloud, because expensive American servers and software could not cope with peak days. Today Alibaba Cloud holds 37 per cent of China's cloud infrastructure market, against 17 per cent for Huawei and 10 per cent for Tencent, according to Omdia for the fourth quarter of 2025. Because the most powerful Nvidia chips no longer reach China, chip division T-Head designs its own AI chips. The newest, the Zhenwu V900, enters mass production in the first quarter of 2027, according to Alibaba.

The latest link is Qwen, the family of AI language models. Alibaba publishes many of them as open weights that anyone can download and run. According to Hugging Face's count, Qwen models were downloaded more than 2 billion times in 2026 and there are more than 150,000 derivative models, The Next Web wrote.

All in on AI, and what it costs

In February 2025 Alibaba pledged to invest at least 380 billion yuan in AI and cloud over three years. The figures for the April to June 2026 quarter show what that means. Revenue grew 9 per cent to 269 billion yuan. Cloud grew 45 per cent, as did quick delivery of meals and groceries, where Alibaba is fighting a price war with Meituan and JD.com. Traditional e-commerce in China shrank by 8 per cent.

The bill is visible. Capital spending rose to 67.7 billion yuan, free cash flow was 44.7 billion yuan negative and net profit fell to 10.4 billion. The new AI segment, with the Qwen models and the Qwen app, posted a loss of 13.9 billion yuan, mainly due to the app's computing costs. On the other side is AI revenue that has more than doubled for twelve quarters in a row.

At the Apsara conference in Hangzhou in late September, Alibaba announced that Qwen 4 is in training and that Alibaba Cloud aims to operate more than 20 gigawatts of data centre capacity by 2032. The Qwen app now works as a shopping assistant: since May 2026 it searches the entire Taobao and Tmall catalogue, compares prices and places orders. For this year's Singles' Day, with pre-sales from 15 October, Tmall expected a record one million brands, KrASIA reported.

Alibaba in Europe

Most Europeans know Alibaba as AliExpress. Alibaba.com is also a sourcing channel for European companies, with the AI agent Accio, launched in late 2024, which finds and compares suppliers. Alibaba Cloud has regions in Frankfurt, London and, since 2026, Paris, and in September announced new regions in the Netherlands, Finland and Turkey within twelve months.

Europe is also a strict regulator. On 20 July 2026 the European Commission fined AliExpress 550 million euros because the platform had failed to properly assess and tackle the risks of illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products, according to the Commission. Since 1 July 2026 low-value parcels from outside the EU have also been subject to a flat customs duty per item, where they used to be exempt.

Belgium, the first European partner

In December 2018 Belgium became the first European country to sign an agreement with Alibaba under the eWTP, Jack Ma's initiative to make it easier for small businesses to trade internationally. The tangible result was Cainiao's eHub at Liège Airport, officially opened in November 2021. It stayed smaller than promised. In October 2025 Cainiao cancelled the second and third phases. The hub employs 276 people, against the 900 direct jobs held out when it was announced. Walloon economy minister Pierre-Yves Jeholet still calls Cainiao a strategic partner of the airport. Since 2023 Belgium's State Security service has been monitoring the hub over possible espionage, Fortune reported, which Alibaba denies.

A shopping street that became a computing centre

Alibaba grew big by building infrastructure others did not yet have, and earned its money through trade. Now the order is reversing: trade has to pay for AI, and AI has to renew trade. For a European company this means three possible relationships with one group: selling to Chinese consumers through Tmall Global, sourcing through Alibaba.com, and buying AI or cloud services. Each relationship raises its own questions about data, European rules and dependence. More background can be found on our page on doing business in China and in our article on Hangzhou, the city Alibaba still calls home.