Alibaba on course to become world's top retailer

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Alibaba on course to become world's top retailerIf Alibaba exceeds its total trading volume of USD 463.3 billion this fiscal, it will overtake the US multinational firm WalMart as the world's largest retail platform.
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The latest trading volume figure for Alibaba was three trillion yuan (USD 463.3 billion), while WalMart registered net sales of USD 478.6 billion for its fiscal year ending Jan 31.

It is equivalent to China's Sichuan province's gross domestic product (GDP) last year, when the province's GDP ranked sixth on the Chinese mainland, state-run China Daily reported.

Despite its economic growth falling below 7 per cent (USD 6.9 per cent) for the first time since 2009, China surpassed the United States last year to become the largest e-commerce market in the world, according to statistics from multinational consultancy Forrester Research Inc.

Zhang Yong, the company's CEO, said in Hangzhou that the figure was recorded on the company's business-to-customer platform Tmall, consumer-to-consumer platforms Taobao and Rural Taobao, and group-buying site Juhuasuan.

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Zhang said he expected the company will achieve an annual trading volume of six trillion yuan by 2020 (about USD 980 billion) and that "in 2024, we wanted to be a business platform serving 2 billion consumers and tens of millions of enterprises at home and abroad."

According to Zhang, the company will strive to combine cloud computing and big data technologies with the Internet and the Internet of Things, as well as consumer terminal equipment, to spur its development.

The Internet of Things is the network of physical objects devices, vehicles, buildings and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data.