Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

Alibaba Group, set up in 1999, is China's largest electronic commerce company. Its head office is in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. Having grown into an enterprise handling a wide variety of businesses ranging from cloud services and finance to media, besides e-commerce, the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange last year.

Founder Jack Ma, who first used the Internet in the U.S. in the mid-1990s, created in 1999 a website to support e-commerce. His company had initially focused on business-to-business transactions, before opening the Taobao online shopping site for individual users in 2003.

Thanks to the rapid spread of the Internet and expanding consumer spending in China, the users of Taobao soared at a fast pace. Today, Taobao.com for consumer-to-consumer deals and Tmall for business-to-consumer are two pillars of Alibaba's operations. The number of annual active buyers on Alibaba sites has reached 350 million.

Increasingly, more online shoppers are shifting to smartphones. Alibaba is been pushing ahead with efforts to attract smartphone users primarily by improving the convenience of the AliPay online payment system. As a result, the mobile monthly active users of its sites have reached close to 300 million in number. The company intends to enhance its financial business with Alipay at the center as well as to step up its cloud, information technology and big data businesses.

The company raised around $20 billion through its initial public offering in New York in 2014. It is acquiring other companies with the money raised. In August this year, Alibaba bought the majority of new shares issued by China's second biggest retailer, Suning Commerce Group, for 28.3 billion yuan, becoming the second largest shareholder in Suning. In China, Tencent and other local rivals are reinforcing strategies to erode Alibaba's dominance in e-commerce.

After failing to pass university entrance exams twice, Jack Ma once gave up going higher education and worked as a driver. A self-made man, he enjoys strong popularity among Chinese.