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Jack Ma says Alibaba wants to more than double its GMV to one trillion dollars by 2020

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 this morning at its headquarters in Hangzhou, China.

In order to do that, Alibaba will have to more than double the $463 million 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.

E-commerce alone, however, will not be enough to take it that far. 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.

But Alibaba is still pumping a lot of money into e-commerce (for example it recently invested $1 billion into Lazada to build its online retail business in Southeast Asia), even as it focuses on big data, and investors have worried about how the impact on its profits.

Ma admitted that “we don’t know how to make money off data today, but we know nobody can live without data in the future.” He also cautioned that its shift in strategy means Alibaba Group should not be judged solely on GMV because the metric—which is how revenue for e-commerce companies is measured and compared—will become increasingly outdated as it moves beyond its marketplaces.

(Source: Tech Crunch )