Last month, Alibaba, the internet trading company founded in a cramped one-bedroom flat in China 15 years ago, made its wildly successful debut on the New York Stock Exchange and stunned investors, becoming the 18th-biggest company in the world by valuation, ahead of Facebook, Amazon and eBay.
Jack Ma, the company's founder who became an internet entrepreneur and cemented his position as China's richest man with his 9% stake valued at nearly $21bn.
Just as the show introduces, as the largest E-commence company in China, Alibaba Group’s businesses covers different fileds on line. It is a combination business of Groupon, Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist and Paypal. However, these not all the things about Alibaba. In this information era filled with various social media, Alibaba also wants to have a share.
Last autumn, Alibaba launched a mobile messaging app called Laiwang. It can search the people around you to chat with them and share songs, photos and videos in the social circle. In order to lure in more users onto Laiwang, chairman Jack Ma even led an headline-grabbing publicity blitz.
“Smartphones have become an integral part of life,” Alibaba Group Chief Executive Jonathan Lu said in a statement. “With consumer behavior changing, Alibaba Group must follow society, technology and users down the mobile path and into the wireless era.”
According to the recent statistics, Laiwang has attracted more than millions of users so far. Although it only has Chinese version for now, it is looking ahead to get more users abroad in the future like WeChat does.
Screenshot from Laiwang
In addition to Laiwang, Alibaba released another new social platform recently. It’s a sort of Instagram that’s based around tagging brand names that appear in your photos. Rather than making it a standalone app, Alibaba’s newest effort, called Fun, is built into its Tmall shopping app and is rolling out to users in an update for iOS and Android. Users just need to snap a photo, tag the brands you’re in, and share it within Fun and also to other social networks like Sina Weibo or Alibaba’s Laiwang.
Screenshot from Fun
It seems that Alibaba has great ambition for grabbing share in the social media market. Nevertheless, it is still facing many different challenges. Their main rival Tencent's voice and text messaging app WeChat is nearly ubiquitous on Chinese smartphones and is growing internationally with 438 million users, up from 300 million last January. One of WeChat’s key talking points in China recently is its group chats, which many have praised for their relative orderliness.
Besides, Fun isn’t the first brand tagging social network in China. Some similar apps like Pinco and Nice, two competing apps dedicated to tagging brands in selfies are both doing so well.
How to stand out from the crowd and attract more users is the one of the important things that Alibaba needs to think about. To become the next internet giant in the world? Alibaba seems still has a long way to go.
Great Post and very timely. I remember seeing this on the news Laiwang seems like a very cool app, it will be interesting to see if the company takes off in the US.
ReplyDeleteGlad to see this amazing company is transferring into a financial empire. But the big succeed in stock market probably is temporary phenomenon because most of its investors is trying to cash their stock these days. Another problem on the APP Laiwang is facing a big problem-it has a lot of strong competitors like we chat, QQ and foreign APPs like facebook's messager.
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