Alibaba Is Now The Largest Retailer In The World

Alibaba Surpassed Wal-Mart On GMV basis to become the largest online retailer in the world.

Alibaba Group Holding is one of the biggest and largest online retailers in the industry which has taken the online shoppers on its side by a storm. The company is already on the top in its domestic market by holding an 80 percent market share but has little or no presence in the international markets. And it is working on it through several deals and acquisitions. It recently announced that it will become the largest retailer surpassing an international rival Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on the basis of Gross Volume.

The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group announced on Tuesday in a filing with Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it had succeeded in becoming the largest retail economy in the world. Alibaba was waiting for its fiscal year to end on March 31 before making any announcements. It has now become the largest online retailer “as measured by gross merchandise volume (GMV) on its China retail marketplaces.” The online retailer has still not revealed the results of its final quarter of the fiscal year which ended March 31 but the announcement showed that it has surpassed the revenue reported by US retail store Wal-Mart which was $482.1 billion in a fiscal year.

The executive vice chairman of Alibaba Group, John Tsai, made an announcement through a blog post two weeks before it was scheduled for the SEC filing. He wrote in a statement, “with 10 days remaining in our fiscal year ending March 2016, Alibaba's China retail marketplace platforms surpassed RMB 3 trillion [yuan] in GMV. That is about [$]476 billion in U.S. dollars and, if the platforms we operate were a province, we would rank as the 6th largest provincial economy in China.”

Alibaba also said in another statement that its online trading volume is now accountable for the 10 percent of the total retail volume in the Chinese market which directly generated over 15 million job opportunities as well. “We used 13 years to demonstrate the power of a different business model compared with brick-and-mortar retailers,” the company added.

Alibaba has a very optimistic approach for the next five to ten year. It is believed that the company wants its marketplaces to be the home of 2 billion customers across the globe as well as it wants to serve tens of millions of enterprises in China and abroad.

For all the e-commerce businesses that include Alibaba, Amazon, and Wal-Mart the Gross Merchandize Volume (GMV) is the main thing which decided how good it has performed in the market. Hence GMV is the total value of the products it has sold through multiple marketplaces. It is different from the revenues.