At least 122 million out of the total 415 million jobs, or nearly 30 percent of jobs available in China's digital economy in 2035, will be produced by Alibaba, according to a new report from management advisory firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
An article published by alizila.com cited a recent study, "Year 2035: 400 Million Job Opportunities in the Digital Age," which said that Alibaba economy will generate jobs as it further expands into cloud computing, media and entertainment, and financial technology.
"If Alibaba-generated employment has the same share of China's digital economy in 2035 as in 2015, the platform will create 112 million jobs," BCG said in its report. "If Alibaba's emerging businesses, such as cloud computing and digital entertainment, play a strong future role as well, we can expect another 10 million jobs by 2035-for a total of 122 million jobs."
In 2016 alone, Alibaba's e-commerce platform has generated about 31 million jobs, which includes not only the company staff, BCG said. Most of the jobs created were from new online businesses that used Alibaba's platform and other additional businesses that grew around it, including logistics services.
In addition to Alibaba's focus on consumers, the report also noted specific areas where Alibaba had created jobs. In the rural areas, more than 1,300 Taobao Villages became the centers of e-commerce while about 15,000 "Tao Factories" gave merchants access to small manufacturers. About 1.2 million jobs were created by Alibaba Cloud's IT infrastructure, BCG said.
According to the study, digital economy will make up 48 percent of China's total economy by 2035, which will account for about $16 trillion in spending, compared to only 13 percent and $1.4 trillion in 2015.
Changes in retail, finance and manufacturing industries, which Alibaba had foreseen, will set new trends and drive growth.
The merger of online and offline commerce into a single channel, dubbed by Alibaba as "New Retail," will provide new growth opportunities. This will involve the use of the Internet, technology and data to attract consumers. This new way of doing business would be "the most important opportunity on the horizon," Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang told shareholders last year.
Another change would be the use of "New Finance," which is the integration of the Internet, cloud and data technology to deliver financial services. BCG said that Alipay has expanded its services from being an online payments hub to a platform that provides "routine tasks, social life and services for 450 million users."
"New Manufacturing" is also expected to make the production process more efficient by making use of real-time consumer data to help manufacturers to become more responsive to purchasing trends as well as the flow of products from business to consumer (B2C) and from consumer to business (C2B).
BCG further said that entertainment would also become a growth area in the digital economy. Tao Piao Piao, Alibaba Pictures' ticketing app, is already gathering information from Alibaba's businesses to make movie sales forecast and personalize the apps for moviegoers.