Alibaba was established in 1999 as a business-to-business (B2B) portal connecting Chinese manufacturers to overseas buyers, essentially making it easy to do business anywhere.
The group has since grown to become the largest e-commerce company in the world in terms of gross merchandise volume (GMV). For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2017, Alibaba had a GMV of ¥3.8 trillion and 454 million annual active buyers on its marketplaces.
