BUSINESS ENGLISH—M1
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DR. BRAHIM BARHOUN IMRANI
PRE-READING: http://www.inc.com/jack-ma/alibaba-jack-ma-reveals-his-global-strategy.html

ALIBABA : THE EVERYTHING COMPANY
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.”
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. Today, Alibaba is more than just the “Amazon of China”—it’s the Dropbox, PayPal, Uber, Hulu, ING Direct, and more. Though Google has its fingers in a similarly high volume of pies, its enterprises, unlike Alibaba’s, are exclusively digital. Alibaba’s distinct businesses resemble more than a dozen major Western companies, by our count—a phenomenon we’ve sketched out in the graphic below.
Following the ambitious vision of founder and chairman Jack Ma, Alibaba has recently