23/03/2013 |The Economist /观察者网譯
从某些数据来看，阿里巴巴已经是世界上最大的电子商务公司。去年，旗下的两家门户网站的交易额高达11000亿元人民币（约合1700亿美元），超过了eBay和亚马逊（Amazon）的总合。依照目前的发展趋势，阿里巴巴将成为世界首家电子商务交易额超过1万亿美元的公司。不过，虽然其成就非凡，但除了中国人以为，很少有人注意到这家庞大的私企。
情况将有所转变。公司创始人，曾当过英语老师的马云，宣布将于5月份把首席执行官的职位移交给陆兆禧。很快，该公司将宣布其上市的筹备细节。阿里巴巴的上市必将是继去年脸谱公司（Facebook）以来最大的上市公司，甚至可能超过脸谱的上市规模。脸谱上市时的估值是1040亿美元（其市值现已缩至630亿美元）。阿里巴巴的上市估值大约将是550亿美元至1200亿美元之间。
阿里巴巴的上市之举将吸引全世界的目光。这家公司还有其他可关注之处。首先是其发展潜力：如果它能避免脸谱式的市值跳水，那么，在未来数年，它有可能成为世界上市值最高的公司之一（目前最高的是苹果公司，市值4200亿美元，2009年时苹果的市值才900亿美元）。另一点是，随着阿里巴巴拓展市场，它将有能力改变中国。
长江里的巨鳄……
阿里巴巴的成功是中国创新与竞争的典型例子。“eBay也是是海洋里的鲨鱼。”马云曾说，“但我是长江里的鳄鱼。如果我们在海洋厮杀，肯定会输；但如果在长江厮杀，我们则会胜利。”马云于1999年创办Alibaba.com。这是一家联系中国小生产厂家与海外买家的商务门户网站，采用B2B模式（商家与商家）。他下一步创办了淘宝，该网站是消费者与消费者进行交易的平台，类似于eBay。淘宝有将近10亿种商品，是全球访问量最高的20家网站之一。天猫则是新近创办的B2C（商家与消费者）模式的网站，有点儿像亚马逊，帮助迪斯尼和李维斯等全球品牌卖给中国的中产阶级。
阿里巴巴的发展或可加速。到2020年，中国的电子商务市场预计将超过现在美国、英国、日本、德国和法国的总和。阿里巴巴无法撼动亚马逊在美国的地位，但放眼全球，阿里巴巴可以抓住海外华人的钱包，并开拓新兴市场。在这方面，支付宝为阿里巴巴提供了很多帮助。在法治较弱的社会中，支付宝的转帐机制有助于培育信任。
阿里巴巴最重要的潜在资源也许是消费者数据。它的几个网站创造了全中国逾60%的包裹快递业务。它比其他任何一个公司都更清楚中国中产阶级和商人的消费习惯和信用度。“钱掌柜”业务已经开始面向小型企业开展小额信贷，下一步则是面向普通消费者。实际上，这将有助于中国金融的自由化。中国的大型国有银行长期以来向国有企业输送廉价资本，却忽视了其他公司。该公司正在使用其在线平台出售保险，其他创新产品还在陆陆续续推出。
因此，阿里巴巴可谓是“竹子资本主义”（即所谓“中式资本主义”——观察者网译注）的典型代表。阿里巴巴的网站上有600百万零售商。该公司盘活了中国的零售和物流行业，并把经济模式从投资转到消费驱动。
……危险重重
就像濒临灭绝的扬子鳄一样，阿里巴巴的未来并没有保障。以下列举三点：
最明显的一点是，它扩张太快，可能操之过急。盘子做大以后，再想要进行调整就难了。根据中国的低标准，阿里巴巴的治理颇受好评，除了一件事：外界对马云几年前将支付宝移出母公司的方式有所怀疑。如果上市，阿里巴巴免不了要接受批评。其产品也要加强透明度。根据中国的标准，阿里巴巴已经下了很大力气打击盗版，美国政府最近对其也予以肯定。但是，在它的网站上，还是很容易找到假货。
理顺这些事务并非易事。这关系到第二个风险：外国政府可能会打击阿里巴巴。中国公司在海外广受质疑：国企在非洲遭到批评；在美国上市的中企因审计丑闻而遭到处罚；华为则被一位美国国会议员称为“国家公敌”。如果像阿里巴巴这样与中国政府关系不大的公司都遭受指责，那将十分令人遗憾。
但最大的威胁来自国内。和亚马逊、eBay一样，阿里巴巴需要面对反垄断调查。但中国的时局尤其有风险。大银行已经在游说政府，管制阿里巴巴的金融业务。政府亦将对其掌握这么多中国公民的数据有所敏感。政府不应无故束缚阿里巴巴的手脚。阿里巴巴有潜力成为全球市值最高的公司，它的成长有助于中国的进步。
China’s e-commerce giant could generate
enormous wealth—provided the country’s rulers leave it alone
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.
The IPO will turn
global attention to Alibaba’s remarkable rise. And there are other reasons to
watch the company closely. One is its future growth potential: if it avoids a
Facebook-like fumble, in a few years’ time it could be among the world’s most
valuable companies (the current global leader, Apple, now worth around $420
billion, was only valued at $90 billion in 2009). Another is that, as Alibaba
expands and moves into new markets, it has the capacity to change China.
The crocodile of
the Yangzi…
Alibaba’s story so
far has been one of canny innovation and a clear focus on how to win
competitive advantage in China. “EBay may be a shark in the ocean,” Mr Ma once
said, “but I am a crocodile in the Yangzi river. If we fight in the ocean, we
lose; but if we fight in the river, we win.” The crocodile of the Yangzi, as he
became known, started the company in 1999 with Alibaba.com, a
business-to-business portal connecting small Chinese manufacturers with buyers
overseas. Its next invention, Taobao, a consumer-to-consumer portal not unlike
eBay, features nearly a billion products and is one of the 20 most-visited
websites globally. Tmall, a newish business-to-consumer portal that is a bit
like Amazon, helps global brands such as Disney and Levi’s reach China’s middle
classes.
Alibaba could grow
even faster. By 2020 China’s e-commerce market is forecast to be bigger than
the existing markets in America, Britain, Japan, Germany and France combined.
And although it is not about to challenge Amazon in America, Alibaba is
expanding globally by capturing the spending of Chinese overseas and by moving
into emerging economies. In this the firm is helped by Alipay, its novel
online-payments system that relies on escrow (releasing money to sellers only
once their buyers are happy with the goods received). This builds trust in
societies where the rule of law is weak.
Perhaps Alibaba’s
greatest untapped resource is its customer data. Its sites account for over 60%
of the parcels delivered in China. It knows more than anyone about the spending
habits and creditworthiness of the Chinese middle class, plus millions of
Chinese merchants. Alifinance is already a big microlender to small firms; it
now plans to expand lending to ordinary consumers. In effect, it is helping
liberalise Chinese finance. China’s big state banks, which channel cheap
capital to state-owned enterprises, have long neglected everyone else. The firm
is using its online platforms to deliver insurance products too, and more such
innovations are on the way.
Alibaba thus sits
at the heart of “bamboo capitalism”—the sprawling tangle of private-sector
firms that are more efficient than China’s state-owned enterprises. Some 6m
vendors are listed with its sites. The firm’s efforts are boosting productivity
in China’s woefully inefficient retail and logistics sectors. And, more than
any other company, it is speeding up the country’s much-needed shift away from
an investment-heavy model of growth towards one that is driven by consumption.
… is now in
dangerous waters
All very promising
but like the Yangzi alligator, which is now endangered, there is nothing
inevitable about Alibaba’s future fortunes. Three things could yet throw the
firm off-course.
The most obvious
is that it could overreach—and stumble. Coping with the stepping aside of a
formidable founder is rarely easy. By China’s low standards, Alibaba generally
gets good marks for governance, with one caveat: observers have doubts about
the murky way in which Mr Ma spun out Alipay from the parent company a few
years ago. It will not be able to get away with that as a public company. The
same transparency is needed with its products. By Chinese standards it has done
a lot to fight fakes, so much so that the American government recently gave
Taobao its official blessing. Yet it is still too easy to find knock-offs on
that site.
Tidying up these
things is not just good management. It ties into the second risk—that foreign
governments will clamp down on Alibaba. China’s companies are viewed with
suspicion abroad: its resource-hungry state enterprises have suffered a
backlash in Africa (see article);
its firms listed on North American stock exchanges have been punished in the
wake of accounting scandals; and Huawei, a telecoms giant, has been branded an
enemy of the state by American congressmen. It would be sad if Alibaba, which
seems to have far fewer ties to the Chinese state, was tarred with the same
brush.
But the greatest
threat to the company’s future will be at home. Like Amazon or eBay, Alibaba
needs to be monitored by antitrust regulators. But the politics of China pose a
particular risk. Big banks are already lobbying against its financial arm. The
Communist Party is bound to be jealous of an outfit that has so much data on
Chinese citizens. For the government to clip Alibaba’s wings without a good
cause would be wrong. Alibaba has the potential to become the world’s most
valuable company, and in the process help create a better China.
作者： 2013年3月23日The Economist
IN 1999 Trudy Dai used to spend all night
sending e-mails from her friend Jack Ma’s apartment, trying to answer queries
from American customers without letting on that she was Chinese. Ms Dai was one
of the first dozen employees of Alibaba, an online listings service Mr Ma, a
teacher, had just started. It was already having some success connecting small
Chinese manufacturers to potential customers, including the overseas ones Ms
Dai was reassuring over e-mail. But the friends and students who made up the
workforce were earning just 550 yuan (then $66) a month.
Mr Ma, though, already had big dreams. That
year he said: “Americans are strong at hardware and systems, but on information
and software, all of our brains are just as good…Yahoo’s stock will fall and
eBay’s stock will rise. And maybe after eBay’s stock rises, Alibaba’s stock
will rise.”
Since then, Alibaba has come to dominate internet retailing in China, which will soon be the biggest e-commerce market in the world. It has moved beyond its original remit of connecting businesses to each other to ventures that let companies sell directly to the public (Tmall) and enable members of the public to sell to each other (Taobao). Between them, Taobao and Tmall processed 1.1 trillion yuan ($170 billion) in transactions last year, more goods than passed through Amazon and eBay combined (see table 1).
The company that started in Mr Ma’s apartment now employs 24,000 workers at its headquarters in Hangzhou and elsewhere; Ms Dai is president of human resources. A few years ago Alibaba began to turn a profit; in the year to September 2012 it made $485m on revenues of $4.1 billion (see chart 2). Following a recent reorganisation it has 25 separate business units, and on May 10th it will have a new chief executive, Jonathan Lu; Mr Ma will stay on as executive chairman.
The rules of the market
In one respect things are as they were in 1999: Alibaba is privately owned. But this will not remain the case for long. The reorganisation into 25 business units is widely seen as preparation for an initial public offering (IPO) that would take most of them public. A deal with Yahoo, which once owned 40% of Alibaba, means that the IPO, if done soon, would allow Alibaba to buy back its shares and end the often stormy relationship. Asked about the IPO, Mr Ma says “We are ready.”
Analysts predict that the IPO will value the company somewhere between $55 billion and more than $120 billion. Tencent, a Chinese gaming and social-media firm now getting into e-commerce, has a market capitalisation of $62 billion, just shy of Facebook’s current valuation. Mark Natkin of Marbridge, a Beijing-based technology consultancy, thinks Alibaba could easily be worth more than Tencent, given that “there is so much room to grow its businesses in China”.
The top-end estimates would imply a remarkably high ratio of value to profits. But such a ratio might make sense to investors if they think that the company is investing in yet more growth to come. Amazon, in some ways a similar company, supports a market value of $117 billion with no profits to speak of. And Alibaba will provide an attractive platform for investors trying to profit from China’s booming internet economy.
There will be some caution. Part of Alibaba floated on the Hong Kong exchange in 2007, but the shares ended up being bought back by the company after losing much of their value. The experience with Facebook’s IPO suggests a certain wariness about internet stocks is wise. But many think it will be different with Alibaba this time. “This will be bigger than Facebook,” predicts Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based technology expert. Mr Ma seems to agree. Though he will say only that the IPO will be “very very big”, asked about Facebook he cannot help but smile and say “Our revenues and profits speak for themselves.” (In the last quarter of 2012 Facebook’s revenues were $1.6 billion.)
Gordon Orr, a senior partner at McKinsey, thinks a healthy IPO valuation could be just the beginning. He says that if Alibaba can sustain its leadership in its current market and expand strongly into finance, the management of the supply chain and other services, “it could become one of the world’s most valuable companies five years from now, with potentially more than $1 trillion of sales passing through its platforms each year.”
Those are sales through Alibaba, not by Alibaba. In America 76% of online retailing involves people buying from individual merchants, according to a new report by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), a think-tank. In China, in 2011, that figure was 10%. The other 90% was sold through marketplaces that simply allow buyers and sellers to find each other. Alibaba has grown so big because early on Mr Ma had two insights into what could make such marketplaces work.
The first was that many Chinese are tight-fisted. So Alibaba made all the basic services it offers free to both buyers and sellers. It earns money through online advertisements and extra services it offers clients, such as website design. With 6m vendors Taobao is a cluttered-up cyberspace. Many sellers think it worthwhile to pay for fancy storefronts and online advertisements to help them stand out.
The second is that many Chinese are reluctant to trust strangers. So Alibaba has provided tools to build trust. One is an independent verification service through which third parties vet the claims made by sellers; the sellers pay for the process. Another is the Alipay payments system. Unlike PayPal, used by many Western internet companies, Alipay takes money up front and puts it in an escrow account. Vendors can be sure that payments made through it will be honoured. Alipay—a source of much bad blood with Yahoo, which felt Mr Ma seized control of it illegitimately, something Alibaba strongly denies—has roughly half of China’s online-payments market. The vast majority of Alipay transactions are for deals made through Alibaba, but the firm says that use elsewhere is growing fast.
Alibaba also now has the advantages that come with dominating its domain. In the West, shoppers often search for items on Google, and then follow a link, possibly one in an ad, to a retailer’s website or to Amazon; the ads are what make Google its money. In China Taobao’s scale means it can afford to block the “spiders” that search engines like Google, or its local equivalent, Baidu, use to find out what is on a site. It can do this because shoppers more or less have to come to it anyway. This makes adverts on Taobao more valuable; it gets a fair whack of the revenue that would otherwise go to the search engines.
This is just one way that the marketplace model works better the bigger a firm gets. The more buyers come, the more sellers need to; the more sellers come, the more buyers want to. As a result, domestic and foreign rivals are having a hard time. This goes for purely online firms like DangDang (which resembles Amazon) and 360buy (in which Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia recently invested) and for high-street retailers fighting defensive battles online like Suning and Gome, two appliance giants.
The founders of 7gege.com (translated as seven princesses), a women’s fashion firm, tried the bricks-and-mortar route but flopped. They turned to Alibaba’s web portals and found eventual success. The firm now spends up to 100,000 yuan a day on banner ads with Alibaba, as well as money on search optimisation and special promotion days; last year, its online shops on Alibaba earned over 350m yuan.
A torrent of customers
International brands like Adidas and Samsung are still pouring money into Tmall. Some use Tmall as the exclusive channel for online purchases in China; others are experimenting with having both their own site and a Tmall storefront. Günther Hake of Disney says his firm has had good experiences advertising and selling on Tmall. With a new Shanghai theme park opening in two years, he expects to sell ten times more merchandise in greater China. Tmall will see a lot of that action.
But Alibaba will not necessarily get things all its own way. Tencent has set up a stand-alone e-commerce division; it runs Paipai, a Taobao competitor, and recently bought 51buy.com, which competes with Tmall. Tencent is a potent rival, says Marbridge’s Mr Natkin, because other businesses such as gaming give it a lot of cash. Alibaba will probably need to invest heavily to maintain its lead. That helps explain the $8 billion in loans and other outside financing the company is pursuing. Most of the money will go to refinance older loans at better rates, says Joseph Tsai, the group’s chief financial officer. But some $3 billion might be used for acquisitions.
What of the company’s prospects? To some extent they are good simply because of where it is. China’s e-commerce market has grown by 120% a year since 2003, says MGI. This year it is set to surpass America’s, with a total value of $283 billion—7% of retail sales—according to Morgan Stanley (see chart 3). The number of Chinese online shoppers has surged to 250m, more than doubling in three years. And there is a lot of room for growth. Online penetration in China was 43% in 2012, well below the 70% or higher seen in developed economies. And fewer Chinese internet users shop online than in other markets.
With more non-shoppers starting to shop and the rest of China’s population getting online, MGI predicts the market will be between $420 billion and $650 billion in 2020. Mr Ma says that the rudimentary nature of much Chinese offline retailing will allow e-commerce to grow faster and further in China than in the developed world; in rich countries, he says, e-commerce is just “the dessert”. In China it’s the main course. This may be particularly true in smaller cities where consumer spending power is outgrowing the shops available.
The changing nature of China’s growth offers new possibilities to the company. Peter Williamson of Cambridge University’s Judge Business School argues that a big reason Alibaba’s original business-to-business platform thrived is that by helping buyers and sellers overcome a lack of information and high search costs it was perfectly placed to help and profit from the first wave of China’s integration into the global economy. Now Alibaba is well positioned for the next wave. “The rise of Chinese consumers, Chinese tourists, Chinese companies going global and so on [will offer] lots of new opportunities,” he says.
But the company plans to do more than simply ride the waves of China’s growth. One of its strategies will be to use the data it gets from e-commerce to expand into new areas. “We have the best data mindset in the world,” boasts Wang Jian, Alibaba’s chief technology officer. Zeng Ming, the company’s chief strategy officer, points to finance as a way its data can give the company an edge in new markets.
For three years Alibaba has been making small loans (average size $8,000) to merchants trading on its platforms, using the data it holds on them to guide its decisions. Mr Tsai says its loan book was $600m in 2012, and that by the end of this year it should top $2 billion; the non-performing-loan ratio is below 2%. “The people we are focusing on are completely below the radar screen for the big banks,” he points out. The company turns the loans into products that can be sold to investors. The firm is expanding into loans to individuals, and into insurance, where it has announced a joint venture with Tencent and Ping An, a Chinese insurer. The financial division is likely to be spun out soon, and run at arm’s length rather as Alipay is today. Regulators would probably not allow foreigners to hold a big stake in a financial firm—and any Alibaba IPO would bring in lots of foreign investors.
Another growth opportunity is that China is now the world’s biggest market for smartphones. Purchases on mobile phones leapt from 2 billion yuan in 2010 to 53 billion yuan last year, 4% or so of total e-commerce. A company dedicated to serving this market might be a serious competitor. Mr Ma recently ordered a large number of engineers to be shifted to the firm’s mobile division. Mr Wang acknowledges that “mobile is a new game where we don’t have the edge yet”—but he reckons nobody else does either.
Then there are the opportunities (and risks) of going global. Alibaba makes no secret of its global aspirations, but some of the things that make it a success at home may not transfer well. Alipay, for example, may offer few advantages in markets which are better supplied with banking and credit services. The marketplace approach that lets the company do without warehouses and other tangible assets has not proved the winning business model around the world that it has in China.
Its most promising overseas markets will be low-trust, underbanked emerging economies—the markets in Africa, Latin America and Asia where other Chinese pioneers leaving the home market, such as Huawei, a telecoms giant, cut their teeth. Being a platform for retail, rather than a retailer itself, may be a winning proposition in those countries too; but it is not a sure thing. And outside China there are serious competitors in the form of Amazon and a resurgent eBay.
Among the advantages those competitors might have is that the goods they offer are highly likely to be kosher. This has not always been the case with Alibaba. China has a history of making and consuming counterfeit goods, and vendors on Taobao have not been a notable exception.
Up until the end of last year, Taobao was on the American government’s list of “notorious markets”. Its removal reflects the effort the firm has put into cracking down on fakes by working with multinationals and lobbies like the Motion Picture Association of America. But managers of Western brands sold through Tmall grumble that fakes are still too readily available on Taobao. Judging by the $12 Manolo Blahniks found in a quick browse they have a point. McKinsey’s Mr Orr tells of a Chinese shoe manufacturer selling through a number of stores on Taobao and Tmall competing with several thousand dodgy operators peddling unauthorised or counterfeit goods, many sourced from within the company’s own supply chain. “Taobao has not yet changed the culture of counterfeiting in China,” he concludes. If it is to become a global giant, it must do more to clean things up.
As well as an old problem to overcome, there is also a new one: the sharing of power at the top. Mr Ma is not leaving the firm; he is staying on as executive chairman. But his stepping aside as chief executive clearly changes things. Microsoft, to take the obvious example, was already a global giant and successful public firm when Bill Gates made a similar move. Few people outside China know Alibaba well, and what they know centres on its dynamic founder.
The change has been long planned inside the company, though. In a little discussed move three years ago Alibaba reorganised its top brass into a partnership structure. Mr Tsai says this was explicitly designed to ensure continuity at the top and a smooth transition from boss to boss. Pressed on whether such a cabal could continue to run things once the firm goes public, he immediately points to Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, as an example of a publicly traded company with a close-knit partnership structure. Edward Tse of Booz & Company, a consultancy, observes that such partnerships (his firm is one too) cannot rely on rules and top-down control to make quick decisions. Shared values are much more important.
Change China, change the world
Alibaba seems to take its culture seriously. Assessment on key values, which include integrity and teamwork, make up half of performance reviews, and Mr Ma spends a third of his time teaching such values—which, as one of China’s few revered entrepreneurs, he promotes far beyond the bounds of the company. He claims Alibaba is about improving people’s lives—going beyond Google’s “Don’t be evil” to “Do good”. When corruption was uncovered in the Alibaba.com business a few years ago, Mr Ma showed the division’s high-flying boss, and a lot of other people, the door.
Thus Alibaba may continue to grow. Even if it does not its legacy of creating trust, encouraging a shift to consumption, and increasing the overall productivity of the retail sector will persist, to the benefit of the country as a whole. Any company that surpasses it will do so by building on those gains, not reversing them. That is why Harvard’s William Kirby, an expert on Chinese business, calls Alibaba a transformative firm—“a private company that has done more for China’s national economy than most state-owned enterprises.”
