The Alibaba phenomenon

ON ITS way to becoming the world’s biggest economy, China is passing another landmark. Its e-commerce market is overtaking America’s. And one giant firm dominates the market: Alibaba, by some measures already the world’s largest e-commerce company. Last year two of Alibaba’s portals together handled 1.1 trillion yuan ($170 billion) in sales, more than eBay and Amazon combined. Alibaba is on track to become the world’s first e-commerce firm to handle $1 trillion a year in transactions (see article). Yet despite such extraordinary success, many people outside China have barely noticed the rise of this privately held behemoth.

That is about to change. The firm’s founder, a former English teacher called Jack Ma, has just announced that he will hand over the chief-executive job to a trusted insider, Jonathan Lu, in May. Soon afterwards, the firm is expected to announce details of its initial public offering (IPO), sure to be the most trumpeted since Facebook’s listing last year—and possibly even bigger, too. Facebook’s IPO valued the company at $104 billion (its market capitalisation has since slipped back to $63 billion). Estimates of the likely valuation of Alibaba range from $55 billion to more than $120 billion.