Alibaba Group and affiliate company Ant Financial offered updated projections and metrics during the e-commerce giant’s annual Investor Day in Hangzhou on Tuesday.
During a livestreamed speech, Executive Chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang told a crowd of more than 500 investors that Alibaba aims to serve over 1 billion annual active consumers and surpass RMB10 trillion ($1.41 trillion) in annual gross merchandise volume through its China consumer business by the end of fiscal 2024. The China consumer business primarily comprises its China retail marketplaces, digital media and entertainment, as well as local consumer services.
WATCH: Highlights from Danial Zhang’s Investor Day Presentation
The new five-year projections would bring Alibaba closer to its longer-term global ambitions to serve 2 billion customers, support 10 million profitable small and medium-sized enterprises and help create 100 million jobs by fiscal year 2036.
Zhang also said that Alibaba had 730 million annual active consumers from its China consumer-facing business in the 12-month period, Zhang said. That figure, coupled with about 130 million annual active consumers on Alibaba’s international commerce retail business, translates into 860 million annual active consumers globally for the company.
Ant Financial CEO Eric Jing also spoke at Investor Day, saying that mobile payments and lifestyle platform Alipay had about 900 million annual active users in China for the same 12-month period. In a release this afternoon, Ant said that eight out of every 10 Alipay users in China used at least three categories of services offered by Ant Financial and its financial partners, including payment, wealth management, micro financing, insurance and credit services. Forty percent of Alipay users have used all five categories. Globally, Ant Financial had about 1.2 billion annual active users, including active users of Alipay’s local e-wallet partners, during the period, according to the release.
Growth for Alibaba would continue as the company increasingly focused on consumers in China’s lower-tier areas, Zhang noted. While 85% of Chinese consumers in developed areas shop through Alibaba, the penetration is 40% in less-developed areas, offering a significant opportunity to reach underserved consumers there, he said.
Still, Zhang wants to do more than merely grow its user base. Alibaba is also working to meet consumer demand and deliver services to them across all platforms in the Alibaba economy.
“Today, we are creating and fulfilling new consumption needs with a view to focus on growing our digital consumer population as a whole,” he said. “We can unlock tremendous synergies between our various consumer-facing businesses to convert and harvest incremental customers across the Alibaba digital economy.”
In a release, Alibaba said that its projected growth would be driven by the Alibaba Business Operating System, a suite of digital tools that marries Alibaba’s commerce ecosystem and its cloud intelligence technology to help brands and companies reach more customers, better understand their needs and deepen engagement with them.
“We have always viewed technology through the lens of real business applications. We don’t view technology in isolation,” Zhang said. “We believe in the marriage of commerce and technology. This has always been Alibaba’s unique value proposition.”
