Alibaba Group’s goal is to become the equivalent of the world’s fifth-richest country in four years. Founder and chairman Jack Ma laid out the company’s ambitions during its first Investor Day, which took place on June 17 at its headquarters in Hangzhou, China.
In order to do that, Alibaba will have to more than double the $463 billion in gross merchandise value it made last fiscal year.
Achieving one trillion dollars in GMV by 2020 would make the Alibaba the equivalent of the world’s fifth-largest country by gross domestic product, Ma claimed, after the United States, China, the European Union, and Japan.
Ma told investors that Alibaba’s growth strategy revolves around Aliyun, its cloud computing and big data unit.
In fact, Alibaba “is not a retail business, we are a data business,” he said, and everything it does now—including financial services like Alipay and investing in logistics—is to gather yet more data.