Chinese e-commerce giant continues to break records in the financial world, this time hitting the 3 trillion yuan ($464 billion) mark for its transaction volume. The figure represents total value of third-party sellers’ transactions on Alibaba’s platforms.
Reckoned since 2012, the 3 trillion yuan is thrice the gross merchandise volume (GMV) of the company founded by former school teacher Jack Ma, now China’s richest person. From 2013, it is double the GMV, reported Technology News China.
Joe Tasi, executive vice chairman of Alibaba, posted about the record-breaker on the company’s news site. He compared it to a Chinese province, saying that Alibaba is now the sixth largest provincial economy in China.
In 2013, Ma said the goal of Alibaba is to overtake Wal-Mart as the biggest retail network in the world. However, it has a different business model because Alibaba is built on hosting of third-party sellers instead of running physical stores like Wal-Mart.
But because the Chinese currency, yuan, was depreciated, the company had some difficulty overtaking Wal-Mart which posted revenue of $482.1 billion and net sales of $478.6 billion for the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31.
Because of its large size, Alibaba continues to be hounded by problems of fake products being sold as well as fake transactions which places in question mark the accuracy of the firm’s GMV. But Tsai said that the real measure of Alibaba’s success is not a simple growth in GMV but quality and sustainable growth.
The GMV was achieved through more than 400 million active buyers. Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba Group, added that by 2020, Alibaba aims to reach a GMV of 6 trillion yuan, reported Forbes.