Alibaba - Fashion Company Profile
Alibaba Group is a Chinese technology and e-commerce group founded in Hangzhou in 1999. For the fashion industry its best-known business is Alibaba.com, the global wholesale marketplace where clothing factories, fabric suppliers and trading companies list products for business buyers, alongside consumer platforms such as AliExpress, Taobao and Tmall. Alibaba is a marketplace and technology company, not a clothing brand: the apparel on its platforms is made and sold by independent merchants.
Company Snapshot
- Status
- Operating
- Listing
- Public - New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: BABA) and Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX: 9988)
- Headquarters
- Hangzhou, China
- Founded
- 1999
Company Profile
That distinction matters when using this profile. Apparel Search lists Alibaba because garment buyers use it for sourcing - finding manufacturers, comparing minimum order quantities and arranging production - not because Alibaba designs or sells its own fashion lines. Alibaba Group is listed in New York (BABA) and Hong Kong (9988) and also runs cloud computing, logistics and digital media businesses far beyond apparel.
Alibaba.com, the primary company of Alibaba, is the world's largest online business-to-business trading platform for small businesses (2015), as the historical record files it. For an apparel reader, that sentence is the point of the page: factories, wholesalers and small labels that could never have found foreign buyers on their own gained a single trading floor, and the fashion industry's sourcing habits changed around it. This profile keeps the group's own timeline, preserved below, because the sequence of launches - marketplace, consumer platform, payments, cloud - explains how a B2B site became a group.
Alibaba History
The earlier record for this company - its history, past brand line-ups, figures and photographs from the periods described - is kept on a separate page for historical reference.
Alibaba History & Historical Profile →Common Questions
Who founded Alibaba, and when?
Alibaba Group was founded in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma, a former English teacher from Hangzhou, China, in the historical record.
What is Alibaba.com, as recorded?
The primary company of Alibaba and the world's largest online business-to-business trading platform for small businesses (2015), in the historical record.
When did Alibaba list in the United States?
Its shares (BABA) began trading on the NYSE on 19 September 2014, in the historical timeline.
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References & Further Reading
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