Alibaba Transaction Volume Jumps 23 Percent

Alibaba has hit a new transaction milestone yet, at the same time, has come to terms with the challenges it faced during the end of 2015.

At an event yesterday (March 21) at its headquarters in Hangzhou, China, Alibaba’s executives shared plans to focus on how to grow its eCommerce efforts, while continuing to build its transaction volume. Alibaba’s transaction volume has officially reached 3 trillion RMB, or $462 billion (leading into the fiscal year ending March 31), which was a 23 percent growth from last year. Alibaba’s GMV in fiscal year 2015 grew 46 percent.

That figure shows how Alibaba’s eCommerce company has managed to continually boost its GMV significantly each year, which included doubling the rate since 2013. And, according to Executive Vice Chairman Joe Tsai, who spoke on Monday at the event, Alibaba had achieved “unprecedented scale.” Just to put that into context, Alibaba’s transaction dollar value across all of its online platforms has placed it as the sixth-largest provincial economy in the country, according to Tsai.

“Growth is meaningless unless it is sustainable,” Tsai shared in a post on Alibaba’s news site, pointing toward the company’s efforts to draw in more brands cross-border.

Alibaba has faced plenty of challenges amid the allegations that it allowed for the sale of counterfeit goods across its platforms — claims that the eCommerce giant’s executives have strongly denied. Since fending off those criticisms, Tsai noted that the company has focused on the “quality” of its financial metrics’ growth.

“In the past year, we have stepped up efforts to bring quality producers and brands onto our platform, especially foreign imports; and our Rural Taobao initiative has, thus far, penetrated over 12,000 of China’s 600,000 villages to bring everyday items that city dwellers normally enjoy to the rural population. As you can see, we still have a lot of work ahead of us,” Tsai wrote.

He also shared more about the company’s plans to scale growth.

“While GMV is a proxy for scale, our focus on quality and sustainable growth means how we measure success is no longer dependent on a simplistic view of GMV growth. This is because we now deliver multiple value propositions to the businesses that take advantage of our marketing platform and commerce infrastructure services. In other words, Alibaba today is much more than a sales and distribution channel,” he wrote.