At the conclusion of its fiscal year ending in March of this year, Chinese online retailer Alibaba declared this week that it has officially become the world’s largest online retail platform with trading volume exceeding 3 trillion yuan ($475.9 billion) according to a report from China Daily.
While the online retailer apparently did not formally disclose what is termed as total gross merchandise value (GMV) for the recently completed fiscal year, it did reveal that its online retail marketplace platforms have already surpassed the 3 trillion yuan milestone.
The report makes a comparison to Wal-Mart’s $482 billion in total retail revenues for its latest fiscal year, and that in 13 years, Alibaba has demonstrated that world’s largest retail marketplace has shifted from physical brick and mortar (offline) to online.
Just for comparison sake, Amazon’s 2015 revenues amounted to $107 billion.
Whether readers agree or disagree with this comparison, the report does provide a sobering indication of the scale of China’s online marketplaces in 2016.
Alibaba has set its sights to be a business platform serving 2 billion consumers by 2024, not to mention demonstrating leading-edge big-data and predictive analytics capabilities.
They are an online provider to be watched and admired and one that will continue to make news in the months to come.
