How Alibaba become an $800 Billion company in 20 years

This episode is a discussion with Maggie Zhou - Managing Director at Alibaba Australian & New Zealand. We talk about how Alibaba went from a small business in Jack Ma’s apartment in Hangzhou to the $800 billion conglomerate it is today, plus we talk about how Australian and New Zealand businesses can expand into China using Alibaba’s tmall global service (which I highly recommend you check out).

SHOW NOTES

00:00:28 Maggie Zhou’s introduction to the Growth Manifesto Podcast
00:01:21 Maggie talks about her 21 year journey in Alibaba along with the company’s growth & changes throughout the years
00:05:39 How it was like in the beginning of Alibaba and the origin of the “Alibaba” name
00:08:41 How hard was it to grow Alibaba in the beginning?
00:11:46 Maggie explains how Alibaba had different goals at different stages in the business and how that helped their growth and profitability despite many challenges
00:17:32 Maggie tells stories about Alibaba filing for its IPOs plus experiencing the global economic crisis and how Jack Ma was able to inspire them through those challenging times
00:22:19 Maggie talks about how Alibaba is a dream-driven company and how its value system was able to create a good company culture across a huge amount of staff
00:25:47 Why did Alibaba’s vision change from “making it easy to do business anywhere” to “being a good company that will last for 102 years”?
00:27:22 What has changed in the company since you changed the vision?
00:32:49 What led to you becoming one of the co-founders of Alibaba’s C2C-focused business, Taobao?
00:39:27 How Taobao eventually led to the creation of Alipay
00:41:06 How long did it take until Taobao eventually caught up to eBay and how did you actually beat eBay?
00:45:47 What was it like to work so closely with Jack Ma?
00:49:35 What were some of the biggest things you’ve learned from Jack Ma?
00:52:06 What do you think it was about Jack Ma that led him to grow Alibaba to nearly 1 trillion dollars in value from a small apartment in Hangzhou?
00:56:34 What’s Alibaba’s goal in Australia?
00:59:45 How do you help companies sell their products to China through TMall?
01:07:19 Can Alibaba Australia also help with production as well or is it just mainly through selling?
01:09:33 Maggie and Alex talk about how Alibaba’s values lead to its success

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LINKS
Maggi Zhou on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/maggie-zhou-周岚-5a4582128/
Alibaba Made Easy https://alibabamadeeasy.com.au/
Alibaba https://www.alibaba.com/
Taobao https://world.taobao.com/
Alipay https://intl.alipay.com/
TMall https://www.tmall.com/
Crocodile in the Yangtze https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkVJNOQ7B74

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The Growth Manifesto Podcast is brought to you by Webprofits. We interview business leaders, marketers, and entrepreneurs to share inspiring stories of real people who have succeeded in the business world.