Twenty years ago when Jack Ma taught English and started a website for Alibaba he wouldn’t have guessed that he was actually building the world’s largest internet company with a future market cap of $380 billion, which now has cloud technologies in its crosshairs.
After Jack Ma announced that he would step down and leave his position to Daniel Zhang, the latter said in an interview to CNBC that every business in the future would be powered by the cloud and it would be the main business of Alibaba.
Zhang is also the brain force behind Alibaba’s annual shopping festival which is set for the singles day, every November eleven: ‘double eleven’. In 2017 merchants and shoppers participated in the record sale amounting to $25 billion.
Zhang explains that while Jack Ma is a very visionary person who has a lot of business ideas he likes to stress the seriousness of some ideas by repeating them three times.
Alibaba is not unfamiliar with could technologies. Last month Alibaba’s cloud computing department expanded major markets, apparently to establish the foundations for future plans, transiting from a global e-commerce company to a global cloud technologies one.
"Alibaba is investing at a tremendous rate to build up its cloud services. It has become one of the world's hyperscale cloud players, catching up with Amazon, Microsoft and Google," said Martin Garner, senior vice president at CCS Insight, a U.K.-based analyst firm.
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