East Asia - China(Mainland)Alibaba Group Holding Limited is a Chinese e-commerce company that provides consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer and business-to-business sales services via web portals. It also provides electronic payment services, a shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services. The group began in 1999 when Jack Ma founded the website Alibaba.com, a business-to-business portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers. In 2012, two of Alibaba’s portals handled 1.1 trillion yuan in sales. The company primarily operates in the People’s Republic of China, and at closing time, on the date of its initial public offering, 19 September 2014, Alibaba's market value was measured as US$231 billion. However, the stock has traded down and market cap was $145 billion at the end of September 2015.
