Alibaba vs. Silicon Valley
Alibaba's IPO is unlike anything investors have ever seen and could threaten other online retailers. Maggie Lake reports.

Forget Twitter and Facebook. Alibaba’s IPO is unlike anything investors have seen before. It’s really like 12 companies. It’s the Ebay, Amazon, Paypal, pretty easy, but it’s a Netflix, it’s Groupon. They have a money market fund businesses. You are buyers and salers to just park their cash, they have a hundred billion US in their money fund business. So overall it’s a ecosystem of its own. The number swilling around this ecosystem are huge, even by Silicon Valley standards. Alibaba’s profit for the second quarter jumped 179% to 2 billion dollars. Revenue increased by 46%, double that of US online retailer Amazon. Mobile user growth has jumped 10 fold. And last year the company delivered 6 billion packages, more than global delivery giant UPS. Those stats are enough to put even the most confident CEOs down edge.
We should be afraid of them, if anyone? Who are we gonna compare to?
But they are gonna be a big competitor, I think to a lot of other countries trying to have own e-commerce. So to be honest I don’t see Alibaba bumping Ebay or Amazon out of their place in the United States. But as Ebay and Amazon try to become global in more and more markets, they are gonna fight heavily and trenched Alibaba. That’s working really hard to get into those markets.
The financials were backed up by some serious sizzle. Charismatic founder Jack Ma has a stage present to rival many tech icons. And he’s followed the tech world’s preference for structuring the stock sale to make sure control stakes in management hands. But Alibaba is still young and analysts say it won’t be easy to knocks the likes of Amazon and Ebay from their purch.
They are kind world garden and they are not the cheapest dealer in the world. It forces you to use Alipay. It’s not that cheap. And they don’t have as global a mix of world premium brands because they had a counterfeiting problem. On Tmall which is fairly extreme. So in a few times if you check on Tmall which is the brands. Maybe half or more some of the ready content was knock-offs.
Maintaining momentum after the listing will be a challenge but the windfall from the IPO means Alibaba has the cash to spend on winning over skeptics.
Maggly, CNN, New York.