Smart Business

APPENDIX A

ALIBABA AND ITS AFFILIATED BUSINESSES

The Founding of Alibaba

Alibaba was launched onto the world stage by its explosive IPO in 2014, more than a decade after Jack Ma founded the company. (See figure A-1 for Alibaba’s history at a glance.) Considering that China is now the world’s second-largest economy, observers may have a hard time recalling how far and how quickly the country has come since its economic reforms in the 1970s. Before then, China’s government centrally planned the country’s socialist economy, orchestrating the work of millions of communes across the vast Chinese countryside. With Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms, China did an about-face, embracing capital markets and free enterprise with a fervor. Yet it was not until ...