‘Cloud infrastructure is critical to the future of society’ and Alibaba wants to play its part, says CEO Daniel Zhang
- The e-commerce giant is enabling more companies to become digital, data-driven enterprises
“Today, because of digital technology, we can enable people and our merchants to do business in a digital way. We are able to help traditional companies transform themselves into a digital, data-driven company,” Zhang told the South China Morning Post this week. “That was our mission from day one. We have a huge digital infrastructure and we want to use this for good, rather than just build scale.”
Zhang said Alibaba is focused on trying to help its partners transform their entire business – including sales, transactions, product innovation, cloud infrastructure and supply chain management.
“Around 544,000 orders per second were processed on our Apsara cloud, which is a public cloud,” added Zhang. “This validates our capabilities and means we can help many other companies with their cloud needs.”
Furthermore, energy consumption at Alibaba’s data centre dropped 70 per cent from the previous year, saving more than 200,000 kilowatt hours of energy, according to information provided by the company.
Another new trend at this year’s Singles’ Day was the sharp increase in people using smart assistants – or voice shopping – to buy goods. More than one million orders were placed and processed through voice command using Alibaba’s smart speaker Tmall Genie this year.
“New technologies means that consumer behaviour changes – just like the desktop to mobile internet switch,” said Zhang. “Voice shopping is a very important new entry point from the physical world to the digital world and we were very happy to see more and more young consumers use voice shopping through Tmall Genie.”
Zhang indicated that Alibaba was looking at offering its customers more innovative ways to shop by exploring various disruptive technologies.
China’s record Singles’ Day offers glimpse of future shopping trends as buyers embrace live streaming
“Consumer internet penetration in rural areas and communities is very important. In the past year, 70 per cent of our new customers came from lower tier cities in China,” said Zhang. “Due to lifestyle changes we once again saw consumer buying behaviour change.”
Alibaba said Juhuasuan, its e-commerce platform that targets tier-3 cities and below, had 7,000 items that hit over a million orders and 576 items that received over 10 million orders at this year’s Singles’ Day event.
Zhang said it is not just about consumption though.
“We want to help them create new businesses and generate more addressable income,” said Zhang. “For example by helping them sell their agricultural produce to buyers in big cities in a more efficient way using digital technologies.”
“Trade can makes things easy and partners can make things easy,” said Zhang, adding that he hoped the US and China would reach an agreement as that would be good for the world.
“I am very confident about Alibaba’s future though,” said Zhang. “All of our core technologies today are self-developed, such as Apsara, and that is a testament to our digital capabilities.”
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