Alibaba Group (BABA)’s annual shareholder meeting kicked off at 9 a.m. ET on Thursday. And with the meeting comes executive chairman Jack Ma’s letter to shareholders, which conveys confidence, wisdom and inspiration.
“Alibaba
is a company aiming to help solving social problems,” the letter
stated. “In 20 years, we hope to serve 2 billion consumers around the
world, empower 10 million profitable businesses and create 100 million
jobs. This will be an even more difficult journey than the one behind
us.”
Ma
has always had lofty goals. He launched Alibaba nearly two decades ago
while he was an English teacher in China. Now the e-commerce behemoth
has a market cap of $246.12 billion.
But Ma has yet to get complacent about his company’s growth and believes there’s still a long runway ahead.
“We’re
proud of our accomplishments, but we want to do far more,” he writes in
the letter. “We are not merely trying to shift buy/sell transactions
from offline to online, nor are we changing conventional digital
marketing models to squeeze out a little additional profit. We are
working to create the fundamental digital and physical infrastructure
for the future of commerce, which includes marketplaces, payments,
logistics, cloud computing, big data and a host of other fields.”
His enthusiasm is palpable throughout the letter, as he details how excited he is for the future of the company.
“I can already see this future unfolding, and I am more excited today than I was when I started Alibaba 17 years ago,” he said.
Beyond e-commerce, Alibaba has been doubling down on its cloud computing business, which many analysts believe will be a key growth driver for the company.
Ma has even made a foray into Hollywood. This week, Alibaba Pictures bought a stake in Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners, a movie production and distribution company.
Disclosure: Yahoo Finance parent Yahoo (YHOO) owns shares in Alibaba.
Culled from Yahoo Finance
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