
In November 2023, Jack published an internal note in Ali BabaAnd urged the e -commerce giant that helped to create “correction of its path”. The message was a massive cry by one of the most prominent technology leaders in China for a company in one of the most turbulent times in its history.
Alibaba’s share price was near the lowest levels, and the growth was suspended amid intense competition, and administrative changes were thick and fast, and Beijing continues to examine the company closely. He was barely in public opinion.
But his message has installed some of the new hope in Ali Baba-the e-commerce giant has now seen growth in its basic business and has become one of the most prominent artificial intelligence players in China and the summer, and competed with the likes of Openai and Deepseek. And Ababa is now in favor of the Chinese government.
The shares of Alibaba listed in the United States quietly increased by about 60 % this year, adding more than $ 100 billion to evaluate the company.
“China is on the leadership of Ali Baba and the global investors, as the best way to Chinese technology … and we agree. Ali Baba is in the pole position to take advantage of AI and Cloud Ength,” said Dan Evez, head of international technology research at Wedbush Securities.
CNBC spoke to Alibaba President, as well as a former executive official, who drew a picture of the changes in the technology company that led to the start of the company’s return.
Ali Baba’s fall
Ali Baba’s fall was quickly. Many of its beginnings were attributed to the comments made by MA in October 2020, where he is It seems that he criticizes the financial organizer in China.
The comments have not been widely captured. A few days later, Alibaba’s share price reached a record with the market capital, which exceeds 858 billion dollars.
Alibaba was riding a wave of successes that it had been growing to become the largest e -commerce player in China, with an international expansion of the agenda and its device Cloud works grow quickly. To liquidate everything, the Group of Ants of Albaba was preparing for a preliminary general offer A northern collection of $ 34 billionWhich makes it the largest list in history.
Ant, founded by MA, is a Financial technology company behind alipayOne of the mobile phone payment systems in China.
Just two days ago, Ant’s Ants in Shanghai and Hong Kong will be included, The public subscription has been canceled. At that time, ANT was cited with changes in the “organizational environment” in China.
Founder of the ants group Jack Ma.
Costfoto | Future publishing Gety pictures
This was followed by several years of intense auditing on an empire and the largest technology companies in China. The organizers emerged on practices from the giants, who considered it as an interest of billions of fines for companies Including Ali BabaForced Changes in ANT group structure And brought in A large number of rules Touching many areas of technology.
“Uncertainty and confusion”
The organizational audit was one of Alibaba headaches in 2021. But it was also facing a number of other issues, including uncertainty about the strength of the Chinese economy, which was trying to recover from the Covid-19 and high competition.
In particular, modern companies such as Pinduodeo and even Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok, was attracting attention in China in e -commerce.
In March 2023, Alibaba – a sprawling company to do everything from delivering food to cloud computing and movies – decided to divide Six separate business groupsAnd each of them has the ability to collect external financing and the public. Alibaba believed that the step will make these units more flexible.
Then came the leadership amendment. Ali Baba announced in June 2023 that Daniel Chang was CEO since 2015 and Head from 2019It would step down from both spin to focus on cloud works. But only three months later, Zhang suddenly Leave the cloud unit.
Eddie Woo, the co -founder of Albaba, assumed the position of CEO and head of the cloud. Joe Tsai, another co -founder, He ascended to take over the role of the president.
That was one of the most troubled times in the history of Ali Baba.
“During this time period, a great sense of certainty and confusion over the employees hovering. While there was a kind of mentality in waiting and seeing, the problem was that over time, many did not know the time it would take,” said Bian Wong, a former executive in Alibaba and the author of “The Tao of alibaba”.
“While the Chinese economy remained during the beginning of Kofid at the beginning, after everything turned into locking everything, a mixture of disrupted supply chains and changes in the economic climate only exceeded the interests of the place where all this is directed.”
Joe and Eddie fixed ship
WU sought to re -focus alibaba to e -commerce and basic e -commerce and reduce some other initiatives that the company has decreased, and to stay away from the idea of alibaba as many separate sections.
Artificial intelligence moved in the foreground and the center, where Wu and TSAI suggested that the company needed to adopt the start -up mentality to keep pace with competition.
Tsai said at CNBC is converging directly The event in Singapore earlier this month, adding that making fast decisions is the key to competition with the startup competitors.
Tsai said that he and Wu decided that the first thing they needed was “simplifying the company.”
Tsai said: “Instead of talking about Ali Baba Kasti, different business units, we talked about ourselves as two basic work-electronic trade and cloud computing.”
“This simplifies everything and continues. It is very important to transfer this to our employees. They need to have a simple structure in their minds in order to move faster.”

Tsai said that the youngest in the administration has given the ability to make decisions.
“This means that allowing them actually make some decisions and allow them to make mistakes and train them so that they can recover from mistakes,” Tsey added.
Wu and Taizi also Cainiao lines plansAli Baba’s logistical arm, on the occasion of moving to previous obligations.
“Eddie wins the hole internally for his old salvation and built New.
Change political wind
After canceling the ANT Group in late 2020, MA came out of public opinion. The billionaire was seen as the poster for Beijing’s step to curb the power of private companies and businessmen.
And hit the tightening of the government investment. Billions of dollars were eliminated from the value of Chinese technology companies during The investment capital investment decreased in startups.
In a country where government policy and the main support of sectors and companies are considered to be Beijing’s clear hostility towards private business has disturbed lives in the technology sector. But as China continues to face economic opposite winds, the role of the technology sector in promoting the economy has returned to focus.
In February this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping A rare meeting with entrepreneurs He urged them to “show their talents”, in the comments that are seen as supporting private companies.

Dogs, among the senior executives and other Chinese founders, were present in this gathering. The presence of what was particularly interesting, given that his empire has been under a microscope over the past few years and was not seen with the political elite in China for some time.
“The meeting of Xi with Jack has not sent a very clear signal about the place where the Chinese government’s priorities are currently – Amnesty International and the growth of private institutions are important for economic growth in China, and we believe that Ali Baba is supported by the Chinese authorities,” said Chelsea Tamm, an old stock analyst at Mornkstar.
The meeting helped the price of Ali Baba this year. It appears to be a new confidence in Ali Baba to employ and invest.
“We have given us confidence … to return our profits to Capex (capital spending) and investments as well February.
You are successful
There was a large part of the stock gathering in Alibaba this year driven by deteek and investors looking for technology giants in China to see what they are doing with artificial intelligence technology.
Alibaba is among the leaders of China, and in 2023, a long time after ChatgPT, the company launched its first model of artificial intelligence named Tongyi Qianwen, or QWEN. Since then, Hangzhou, Hangzhou, has launched the power of many models that allow tasks such as video, text and images of user claims.
Alibaba has made its models open source, which means that anyone can download and build on it. This was the key to its success. Some of The most popular models on the embraced face, A global warehouse for artificial intelligence models, built on QWEN.
“Alibaba has launched high -dependent open -ended source models since early 2023,” Tizhen Wang, Huging Face, told CNBC.
Wang said Alibaba, which covers features such as video, pictures and text text, said, “providing strong performance through tasks.”

While Ali Baba was early in the artificial intelligence game, it was the release of a research paper from a Chinese company Depsik this year This forced all eyes to focus on what is going on in China. Dibsic claimed that the artificial intelligence model was trained on a small part of the cost of leading artificial intelligence players and at the least Nafidia Chips, which leads to global sale.
“Deepseek has been an invitation to wake up that China Tech is not only sitting on infection on artificial intelligence, and this is directly beneficial to Alibaba as a clear appetite for Amnesty International in China.”
Amnesty International Competition increases
Ali Baba’s first models actually precede Deepseek. But the competition in China is intensifying. Some of the largest technology companies in the country from Baidu to TENCENT Model Edition.
But there are questions about how Alibaba has money from the AI Open Source Models for free. The answer, according to investors, artificial intelligence experts and executives of the company, is cloud computing work in Ali Baba.
Open Source allows the company to build a community of developers around a specific model, which enhances its capabilities and also its arrival worldwide.
More availability of artificial intelligence and increasing demand also means that Ali Baba can push growth in cloud computing work at the end. Alibaba is effectively technology to use their servers and computing power required to operate artificial intelligence applications, even if Alibaba models are not.

Tsai said: “We are running a cloud computing company that will actually benefit from the spread of artificial intelligence, because every time someone trains a model or runs inference … They have the infrastructure of cloud computing, and we sell the account.”
Cloud computing works in Ali Baba Spreading the accelerated growth in the quarter of December From the previous quarter.
“The key that I think now is that instead of looking at alibaba as a losing company in the market (and) an e -commerce company margin, it can now be considered a large cloud company (and) Amnesty International benefits from all new opportunities.”
“It is a complete change in the narration.”
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