Thank you, professor.
It's my great honor to be here. So when I listen to the introduction, I'm a little bit confused whether it's talking to the most powerful people, influential people.
And first let me introduce myself. I'm 100% made in China, and I learn my English by myself when I was a kid from most of the American tourists when they visited my city called Hangzhou. So in the early 1970s, when a lot of foreign visitors visited the city, so every morning I got up early and become the tour guide for them for 9 years. Three guy, they told me English and I show them around. And I learn about the language; I learn the culture. And I learn how to think differently because everything I learn from my schools when I was a kid was different from the things I learn from foreign tourists. Cause my father and my school teachers told me that China was the richest country in the world, and we're going to liberate the world, just like today's North Korea. And later I find out that was not true. So since then I'm a little bit different from most of the Chinese. People say, Jack, you're different from the Chinese. But the American people look at me like a very typical Chinese. Chinese look at me like American people because I understand the culture here. So I've never even one day train in the states, but I learn a lot. I got my Internet concept from the States.
Well first let me introduce a little bit about Alibaba Group. Alibaba was founded in 1999, 18 founders in my apartment. And we just have an idea we believe Internet is going to change China. Internet is going to booming. So nobody believed us. Everybody say, well, you know, how can you do Internet in China because Chinese government censorship is decent.
There's no reason for us to survive. And today people say, Jack, you're visionary; how could you tell e-commerce Internet 10 years ago. And I said… I think we're like a blind man riding on the back of blind tigers. Just by accident. We focused, we make the thing happen and today from 18 people now today we have more than 20,000 people. And we grow from one company to 5 companies right now.
The first company is called Alibaba.com and it focuses on small and medium-sized companies. Helping small and medium-sized companies, we have all 37 or 38 million register SMEs in China using our services. Outside China we have more than 12 million SMEs using our services. So, well, our business model's very simple. One side is China side, is a domestic trading. Anything you want to buy, anything you want to sell, you can use the website in China. It's like a market place, like E-bay. But E-bay is C2C; we are B2B. The Alibaba B2B: one is China domestic trading; the other is import and export. It's a marketplace for global purchasing, global buying. It grows probably we listed 3 years ago in the HK market, and we were very lucky because the day we listed; the market was good. So our stock price grows from $ to $40 without doing anything good. Just go up. And three months later, our stock from $40 to $3 without doing anything bad. Just, you know, just up and down. And there was the rock and roll. And now they have like 100% growth in the past 7 years. And we will keep it 100% this year.
And the third company we have is called Alipays, like a PayPal. It's a very stupid model. 5 years ago, I found that it's so difficult to do transactions on line because people don't trust each other. The banking system is so bad. The infrastructure of finance is also bad. So I was worried about what I'm going to do. The bank has the license to do this. We know how to do business, but we don't have the license. So in the end, people say, Jack, don't touch that area.
If you touch the area, you will be in prison because financial sector is very risky in China. And I say put me in the prison; let's do it. And we do transparently, we do everything clear in order to make sure that the government is happy, people are happy. So we work with the banks, you know, close to 70 banks in China. Today we have 400 million register users and we are the largest on-line third party payment without any business model.
We just want to help people. That makes the banks very unhappy because we distract the business model. In the world, for a good bank, about 60 or 70% of the revenues are from the services. But in China, about 60 or 70 or 80% of revenues come from the loaning. So we go inside, go into the service.
The forth company is called Aliclub computing which we just founded 2 years ago. Because we have the data from small and medium-sized companies, because we have the data from Taobao consumers and we have the data from Alipays, the data we collected become so influential that we want all the consumers to share, to understand the data from SME and let the consumers understand SME data. So we've been focusing on clock computing.
And the 5th company we have is called Yahoo China which we were quite familiar with 5 years ago. So these are the group and Alibaba is listed. The other four are private. It's pretty good. We're lucky in China that we combine, you know, like Emerson, E-bay, PayPal and altogether in a same group. 70% market share in China is E-commerce and it is still keep on going very fast.
What are the reasons people say why you survived in China, why you succeeded, I think, one of the key reasons we survive is that we always believe: customer , employee , shareholder, and this is the first philosophy and to now we still trust it truly because it's the customer that stays with us. It's the customer we create. Because in Internet in China in the pasting years, there are three main businesses: one is focusing on proto sides like Yahoo and today we have Sina, Sohu and Netease. They focus on the news and I think it's so difficult to do the news in China unless you are in Beijing. And you know the government, you know the policy and we will never understand what the government policy is.
And we say, OK, let's stay away from the proto sides. The second business which in China is very popular and which probably is the most unique business in the world is on-line gaming.
And I don't believe that model and I don't like that because in China in one family, if all the kids play on-line games, it's so bad. And my kids, my son and his schoolmates all stick to the on-line games. I think yes we can make a lot of money, but I just don't want my kids to focus on line. So we did not do that. China has already got enough companies focusing on line. Almost all the Internet companies have on-line games. We are the only company that does not have on-line games.
So the only we can do is e-commerce and e-commerce is so tough and so difficult to do with. And 10 years ago e-commerce in the world is B2B. They all want to focus on big companies. They all want to focus on buyers. The value they created is to save the cost for buyers. So we do the opposite.
And we believe that USA is very good at playing basketball. We should focus on playing Ping-Pong because we should not always play the same. So we said in China we don't have big companies, so we should focus on small and medium-sized companies. We should not help buyers; we should help sellers because China wants to sell things abroad. SMEs want to sell things abroad. So we focus on small and medium size; we focus on helping suppliers.
And the value created is not saving the cost because SMEs know how to save the cost much better than you do. They want to learn how to sell and how to make money. So then we focus on SMEs; we focus on supplies; we focus on creating money for them. So these are the focus we stayed on. And everything for the first three years we don't have any business model. We have zero revenue for three years. It was so tough; it was so difficult.
The only thing encouraging us to continue is letters, emails of thanks. We've received hundreds of thousands of emails of thanks every week, every month. People thank us because of creating jobs. Because of us, their businesses grow. And you know, we did not get any money, but if our customers make money, we are happy. And in the fourth year, we started to make money. So the second thing is employees. I'm not trained to be a hi-tech guy. I hate hi-tech. And my wife bought me an IPod; I still don't know how to use it. And I never use PowerPoint because I don't know how to do it. Every time I use it, something is wrong with the PowerPoint. Every time I use it, something's wrong with the PowerPoint. So I don't know how to speak.
I'm trained to be a high school teacher and I know nothing about technology. The only thing I can use in the computer is sending and receiving emails abroad. That's it. That's enough, right and 80% of the people in the world like me, we hate technology. We want technology work for us. We should not work for the technology.
用户评论