Figure shows growth in domestic consumption: vice chairman
Internet titan Alibaba Group announced Monday that the transaction volume on its Taobao online platform in the fiscal year ending March 2016 hit 3 trillion yuan ($464 billion), with 10 days of the fiscal year remaining, according to a press release the company sent to the Global Times.
The e-commerce giant's gross merchandise volume (GMV) so far this fiscal year has tripled the figure for the whole of the 2012 fiscal year, raising the possibility that it could overtake Wal-Mart Stores Inc to become the largest retailer in the world, the press release noted.
It has taken the company 13 years to reach this position, with its online shopping platform Taobao having been launched in 2003, Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma Yun was quoted as saying in the press release.
Experts described the 3 trillion yuan GMV as a business milestone.
"Alibaba has achieved incredible scale, but this was not merely thanks to its 8,000 staff," said Li Dongcheng, an independent analyst in Beijing.
Li told the Global Times on Monday that a network of 8 million vendors on Taobao and 3 million delivery men have also supported the e-commerce platform's growth.
'Internet Plus' assistance
Alibaba will make more efforts to boost domestic demand and offer more employment, as well as shouldering greater social responsibilities by supporting economic development in the country's rural areas, CEO Zhang Yong was quoted as saying in the press release.
As the country is stepping up efforts to advance supply-side reforms, domestic Internet companies including Alibaba will promote the "Internet Plus" initiative by cooperating with traditional industries, the company said.
The next goal is to become the first platform in the world to achieve a GMV of 6 trillion yuan in 2020, and the company aims to serve 2 billion consumers and tens of millions of enterprises by 2024, it said.
However, the Internet giant will face challenges in helping traditional firms to make profits, and it also needs to improve service for its own consumers, Li said.
Consumption boost
The company's achievement reflects the growth of consumption and job creation in the services sector, Alibaba Vice Chairman Joseph Tsai said in a post Monday on Alizila, a blog run by Alibaba.
Consumption accounted for about 66 percent of the country's GDP growth in 2015, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics in January.
The shift toward consumption and services is a massive transformation that will drive the new Chinese economy for years to come, Tsai noted.
"We have turned our focus to quality growth and broadening domestic consumption," he said.
The company also reached a record 91.2 billion yuan in sales during its annual Singles' Day shopping festival on November 11, 2015.
As well as driving domestic online business growth, Alibaba is also advancing the development of plenty of offline industries, which plays a vital role in promoting the development of the real economy, Liu Dingding, an industry analyst with Beijing-based market consultancy Sootoo, told the Global Times Monday.
E-commerce is still relatively new in China, and it is expected to be integrated more with traditional industries amid the country's economic structural transformation, Liu noted.
Instead of offline business being replaced by e-commerce in the future, the two will combine and support each other, Liu said, noting that offline business is still the basis for e-commerce transactions.
"Traditional industries should be more open to the online business model and should make good use of this channel to boost their development," he said.
