Alibaba

Alibaba Group was founded in Hangzhou in 1999 by Jack Ma and 17 other co-founders, starting with the Alibaba.com marketplace that connected Chinese manufacturers with buyers abroad. It has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 2014 and in Hong Kong since 2019; Joe Tsai chairs the company and Eddie Wu leads it as CEO.

Its businesses include Taobao and Tmall, the international marketplaces AliExpress, Lazada, Trendyol and Alibaba.com, the Cainiao logistics network and Alibaba Cloud, one of the largest cloud providers in Asia. Alibaba also develops the Qwen family of large language models, many of them released with open weights; according to the company, the consumer Qwen app passed 300 million monthly active users in early 2026.

According to its annual report for the fiscal year ended March 2026, Alibaba had 131,462 full-time employees. Its main campus is in Hangzhou, with offices across China and in Hong Kong, Singapore, the United States and Europe. Its engineers are known for Java open source such as the Dragonwell JDK, Dubbo, Nacos and Sentinel, and for real-time data processing at scale with Apache Flink.