So what? How many of their services is under China's regulation and how easy is it for the Western tech companies to get the permission to offer the same service?
All the Western companies you’d have to combine to get something like Alibaba
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Re: All the Western companies you’d have to combine to get something like Alibaba
#42Although Alibaba is a huge company that does a ton of different things, I feel like this article went out of the way to avoid mentioning that companies like Google and Amazon (as well as Microsoft and Apple to a lesser extent) come close to checking all of these boxes. The other thing to point out is that Alibaba owns stakes in many of these companies and doesn't really own them outright. As others have already point…
>The other thing to point out is that Alibaba owns stakes in many of these companies and doesn't really own them outright.
On that basis Yahoo's stake in Alibaba has got to be 18/18, plus content publishing, directories, email and search.
Re: All the Western companies you’d have to combine to get something like Alibaba
#43I love this article. Despite the multitudes of news sources telling us about how commerce is now global and business is no longer tied to a place and the internet is changing the world, there is still an ocean of enterprises of which we US-based-or-english-speaking technologists are ignorant. Take a moment to think about this: Alibaba is a huge company, growing in an absolutely enormous market, providing a pile of se…
>I hope this article opens peoples' eyes to the fact that the US-based-or-english-speaking countries are soon going to be a relatively small portion of the world. We need news sources like this to practice the globalization sermon they all preach. LOL. I don't get how your comment is at the top. People in technology field know about it. Your question should be how China is blocking out other tech companies unless the…
Despite this poster's argumentative tone, they speak the truth. The tech scene in China is pretty limited due to tremendous government influence / interference. Heck, step 1 of setting up a foreign company in China is to bribe local authorities to poke a hole in the Great Firewall so it stops throttling your new office's VPNs.
Re: All the Western companies you’d have to combine to get something like Alibaba
#44It is like the GE of chinese tech.
Re: All the Western companies you’d have to combine to get something like Alibaba
#45I love this article. Despite the multitudes of news sources telling us about how commerce is now global and business is no longer tied to a place and the internet is changing the world, there is still an ocean of enterprises of which we US-based-or-english-speaking technologists are ignorant. Take a moment to think about this: Alibaba is a huge company, growing in an absolutely enormous market, providing a pile of se…
> I hope this article opens peoples' eyes to the fact that the US-based-or-english-speaking countries are soon going to be a relatively small portion of the world. We need news sources like this to practice the globalization sermon they all preach. Agreed. It's not just in the tech sector, and not just in the commerce sector either. The US (and many English-speaking countries) tend to be incredibly US-centric and eur…
To be fair, most Indians - including highly educated middle class Indians - probably don't have a clue about which parties several hundred million Europeans are about to cast their votes for later this month[1], or who's winning the South African election right now.
[1]neither do several hundred million Europeans
Re: All the Western companies you’d have to combine to get something like Alibaba
#46I love this article. Despite the multitudes of news sources telling us about how commerce is now global and business is no longer tied to a place and the internet is changing the world, there is still an ocean of enterprises of which we US-based-or-english-speaking technologists are ignorant. Take a moment to think about this: Alibaba is a huge company, growing in an absolutely enormous market, providing a pile of se…
Ignorance isn't the problem. The problem is the Chinese government. The current reality of doing business in China: If you aren't Chinese, don't bother.
Re: All the Western companies you’d have to combine to get something like Alibaba
#47online payments ---- google wallet cloud services ---- google cloud platform mobile apps ---- google play mobile OS ---- android maps and nav ---- google maps physical retail ---- ? no google product shopping deals ---- google offers cloud storage ---- google drive instant messaging ---- google hangouts car service ---- uber (via google ventures) c2c ecommerce ---- ? no google product travel booking ---- google fligh…
It's also about the scale. Most of their services are top competitors in the market. For example, Alipay, or 支付宝, is the de facto online payment service in China. As far as I know, I cannot imagine another company which provides similar service in China. Part of the reason is the government regulation.
In fairness the scale goes the other way too - some of these are stated to be quite minor stakes in the article while Google fully own everything mentioned by the parent (except Uber, but Lyft is an example Alibaba don't own outright)
Re: All the Western companies you’d have to combine to get something like Alibaba
#48I love this article. Despite the multitudes of news sources telling us about how commerce is now global and business is no longer tied to a place and the internet is changing the world, there is still an ocean of enterprises of which we US-based-or-english-speaking technologists are ignorant. Take a moment to think about this: Alibaba is a huge company, growing in an absolutely enormous market, providing a pile of se…
>I hope this article opens peoples' eyes to the fact that the US-based-or-english-speaking countries are soon going to be a relatively small portion of the world. We need news sources like this to practice the globalization sermon they all preach. LOL. I don't get how your comment is at the top. People in technology field know about it. Your question should be how China is blocking out other tech companies unless the…
Your comment could be shortened to
Your question should be how China is blocking out other tech companies unless they are willing to share their user info or join a state-owned venture so they can learn your technology, process and know-how then push you out. You make it sound like no one from U.S. want China or other market.
The FACT TO THE MATTER is how other countries is either making it extremely difficult for U.S. tech company to enter or corrupted to hell that you have to pay out of your ass in each and every step of the way to do business with them.
and better fit the Hacker News guidelines, which strongly discourage personal insults and uncivil tone. P.S. In English, which is perhaps not your native language (in which case, welcome aboard, because we indeed need more participation here from outside the English-speaking world), the usual idiom is "the fact of the matter" rather than "the fact to the matter." And on Hacker News, we rarely use chat-speak abbreviations like "LOL" (I learned that years ago when one of my comments that used abbreviation was downvoted heavily, even though I was literally laughing out loud as I typed the comment) and we only rarely write in all-capitals for emphasis. But your point is well taken.
Re: All the Western companies you’d have to combine to get something like Alibaba
#49So who's buying the IPO? Seems much better investment than SV companies with little or no profit. I wonder how it will affect YHOO -- Probably worth buying Jan 2015 $40 calls since Yahoo owns 24% stake, maybe even short AMZN on day of IPO.
If you didn't catch Amazon short at, say, $390+ when it was obviously really crazy, why would you bother after they've already plunged? Don't bother at this point, it's down 30%, most of the gains are over on the Amazon short ride. There are still other excellent short candidates given the market is near an all time high.
Re: All the Western companies you’d have to combine to get something like Alibaba
#50I've seen a lot of articles talking about how huge Alibaba is, but they all seem to focus only on transaction volume, e.g 'Alibaba has more sales than Amazon and eBay combined!'. I was really surprised when I read their filing, $4.7B in total revenue last financial year, $5.7B in the first 9 months of this financial year. Amazon + eBay in 2013 pulled in $33B in revenue. They seem to be processing a lot of transaction…
I agree. Every article I've come across goes out of the way to avoid ever talking about Alibaba's actual revenue. It's clear there's an immense amount of pumping going on leading up to the IPO.
Fact is, Alibaba isn't all that large at all. And 57% revenue growth on ~$8 billion in annual sales, while excellent, is not earth shattering. A lot of US tech companies have pulled off that kind of growth, Amazon included.