[vc_row full_width=”” parallax=”” parallax_image=””][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text css_animation=””]“I’ve been thinking about the next five or ten years and how I can make sure these shareholders be happy. The very important thing is to make these guys happy. If they are successful, we’ll all be happy. That’s what I believe.”
Those words were uttered by Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma on Sept. 19, 2014 — the day Alibaba posted its record-breaking $25 billion debut into the world of publicly traded companies.
At $68/share, Alibaba was the new, shiny penny on Wall Street. Everyone wanted a piece of the eCommerce giant, and those who didn’t see the value in Alibaba pre-IPO were probably kicking themselves at the time.
What a difference a year can make.
Make no mistake, Alibaba is still very much an eCommerce powerhouse, enjoys a massive mobile commerce boost quarter after quarter, has expanded cross-border commerce in a way no other company has and has continued to make a name for itself as an investment giant for companies and products that touch nearly everything in the commerce, tech, payments — and even entertainment — industries.
But, there’s a “but” – as is often the case with massively growing eCommerce giants. Its successes have been muddled by a year accompanied by critics, regulatory woes and many analysts who’ve been quick to throw daggers at any misstep Alibaba made.
While some of the criticism must be taken with a grain of salt, its stock price tells a different story. The IPO price was $68/share and peaked at $119.15 on Nov. 10, 2014. Last week, it dipped to $60/share and has been teetering in the $65–67/share range for most of the week.
Now, we’re not going to get into stock analysis, since there’s plenty of other analysts in the market that have made their perspectives known. Instead, PYMNTS decided to take a look back into the past year and focus on Alibaba’s highs, and its lows, to more fully illustrate the power of the Alibaba ecosystem and how that has changed in its first year of being a public company on the Street.
We can’t talk the best of Alibaba without reiterating Alibaba’s record-setting $25 billion IPO. On Sept. 20, the day after Ma celebrated his successful debut into Wall Street, PYMNTS reported that the influx of new capital gave the China-based eCommerce specialist a $247 billion market valuation. By comparison, Amazon at the time was valued at $150 billion. Alibaba’s stock closed its first week at $93.89/share.
Alibaba hit 307 million monthly active users in this year’s Q1 alone on its mobile commerce apps. To put that into perspective, that’s an 18 million user increase from Alibaba’s March quarter and a whopping 63 percent year-over-year increase. Mobile revenue also hit another noteworthy increase, soaring to roughly $1.25 billion (RMB 8 billion), or a 225 percent increase, YOY. Mobile revenue accounted for 51 percent of Alibaba’s China commerce retail revenue in the quarter, and the mobile monetization rate jumped 2.16 percent in the quarter. Mobile GMV hit $60 billion and now accounts for 55 percent of total GMV. Alibaba’s financial arm, Alipay, has also seen strong growth. In fact, 78 percent of transactions on Alibaba’s China commerce retail marketplace are paid through Alipay.
In March 2014 — before Alibaba was a publicly traded company — the eCommerce giant put its big toe in the U.S. eCommerce market waters with the rollout of 11 Main. Less than a year and a half later, Alibaba folded its U.S.-based Amazon competitor into a New York-based social shopping site called OpenSky. The deal involved folding 11 Main into OpenSky and parts of Auctiva, Vendio and SingleFeed — other Alibaba-owned U.S. companies. This leaves 11 Main closing up its virtual doors as a standalone site. While Alibaba kicked off its IPO with conversations about U.S. expansion plans, it was quickly realized that that ambition may have been too far-fetched — even for the rate of Alibaba’s growth at the time.
In January, Alibaba found its name and one its executive’s names in headlines about bribery accusations that may very well have nothing to do with Alibaba. Either way, it wasn’t good for public image. In early January, Chinese authorities arrested half a dozen former employees of Tencent and an Alibaba executive who was detained on charges of corruption and bribery. The alleged misconduct occurred when current Alibaba executive Patrick Liu headed Tencent’s online video unit. Liu, along with the other former Tencent employees, left the company in 2013. Alibaba denied any connection to the case, but having to defend its executive didn’t exactly help its crusade against the other bribery and counterfeit accusations.
[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image=”167093″ alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_shadow_3d” border_color=”grey” img_link_large=”” img_link_target=”_self” img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row]