Unsustainable.
They sure have been talking this one up.
Alibaba is untrustworthy
I got burned.
Never even heard of it, what is an alibaba?
You can buy 5 20-foot containers of jasmine rice from Vietnam on Alibaba, how useful is that!
High Quality Mill Direct Jasmine Rice 5% and 100% Broken Grade A and B
FOB Price:
Get Latest Price
Min.Order Quantity:
5 Twenty-Foot Container
Port:
Ho Chi Min City
Payment Terms:
L/C,T/T
“Alibaba Group is a privately owned Hangzhou-based group of Internet-based e-commerce businesses including business-to-business online web portals, online retail and payment services, a shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services. In 2012, two of Alibaba’s portals together handled 1.1 trillion yuan ($170 billion) in sales, more than competitors eBay and Amazon.com combined.[3] The company primarily operates in the People’s Republic of China, and in March 2013 was estimated by The Economist magazine to have a valuation between $55 billion to more than $120 billion.[3]
The group began in 1999 when Jack Ma founded the web site Alibaba.com, a business-to-business portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers. Alibaba’s consumer-to-consumer portal Taobao, similar to eBay, features nearly a billion products and is one of the 20 most-visited websites globally. Alibaba Group’s sites account for over 60% of the parcels delivered in China.[3]
Alipay, an online payment escrow service, accounts for roughly half of all online payment transactions within China. The vast majority of these payments occur using Alibaba services.[4] The company in September 2013 was seeking an initial public offering in the United States after a deal could not be reached with Hong Kong regulators.[5] Planning took 12 months with with the IPO finally planned to hit the market in September 2014. The ticker was allocated as BABA, while the raising was expected to be $20 billion.[6]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Group
Why did Ma, the founder, resign as CEO?
Why was there widespread approvals of thousands of fraudulent merchants, despite complaints: lack of internal controls, perhaps, or even worse, a corporate culture that condones fraud?
Can any of Alibaba's numbers be trusted?
A successful Alibaba IPO will tell us the market's appetite for risk.