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Alibaba is aiming for no less than one billion active consumers each year by the end of 2024. The Chinese retail group is expected to generate more than ten trillion Chinese yuan (approximately 1200 billion euros) in gross sales.
960 million Chinese customers
On its annual Investor Day, Alibaba presented its ambitious new financial targets: the retail giant’s five-year plan should enable the company to reach more than a billion active consumers per year by the end of the 2024 financial year. By that point, the Chinese group wants to achieve a gross turnover of ten trillion yuan.
By way of comparison, last year the company reached 730 million active consumers in its Chinese home market. The number of international consumers was around 130 million, while Alipay, the company’s payment system, had about 900 million active users in China last year. Together, Alibaba and the Ant Financial payment arm account for about 960 million Chinese users.
The new forecasts should bring Alibaba closer to its goal of serving two billion customers, supporting ten million profitable SMEs, and creating one hundred million jobs by the 2036 fiscal year.
Alibaba creates new, digital consumption needs
In the presence of more than 500 investors, CEO Daniel Zhang confirmed that the group’s consumer business is still primarily focused on the Chinese market. The focus will also remain the same in the near future, since the company wants to increasingly target consumers in the less-developed areas of China. In developed areas, 85% of Chinese consumers already shop through Alibaba, while in less-developed areas, the penetration is 40%, according to the successor of founder Jack Ma.
Zhang also wants to work on new services: “Today, we are creating and fulfilling new consumption needs with a view to focus on growing our digital consumer population as a whole.” The top executive sees enormous opportunities for synergy between the various consumer-facing businesses that form what he calls the Alibaba digital economy.
One important factor is the B2B tools of the ‘Alibaba Business Operating System’, which give brands and companies the tools they need in the Alibaba commerce ecosystem and the group’s cloud and data technology. “We believe in the marriage of commerce and technology. This has always been Alibaba’s unique value proposition”, he said.
