If we say “Open sesame”, who doesn't think of the fable AliBaba and the forty thieves? This at least until 1999, the year in which Alibaba began to define something else: the largest Chinese e-commerce site. Alibaba was named after its founder Jack Ma, who from his small apartment in HangZhou, together with seventeen friends, thought that term was capable of evoking the image of a small business that sees new fabulous treasures opening up before it thanks to the magic of the Internet.
But who is Jack Ma? What was the intuition that made Alibaba one of the most powerful e-commerce sites in the world in just 15 years? To reveal it is Porter Erisman, who was vice president from 2000 to 2008, in his book “Alibaba.com Story” (Egea 2016; 192 pages; 19 euros; 9,99 e-pub).
Jack Ma "a blind man who rides a blind tiger", an English teacher who does not understand anything about computers (this is how Ma introduces himself to those who believe he is an Internet guru), and who perhaps for this reason managed to make the his company to the point of exceeding, in just a few years of life, the sales volume achieved in China by Amazon and eBay.
Today Alibaba has 300 millions of customers and carries about 80% of Internet transactions made in China, a country where the per capita income is $6.800 a year and only 25% of the population has ever bought anything online. In mid-2015, it reported an increase in profits of 148% and revenues of 28%.
Erisman tells the background of this young story, explaining how they managed to overcome the enormous obstacles, cultural, social and even political, and have been able to build an e-commerce company so powerful as to transform global business.
The question Erisman ultimately answers is why Alibaba was it such a smashing success while so many other competitors went bankrupt?
“I will recount the successes, but also the failures” continues the book, “from the boom to the disaster; from around the world to returning to China; from quarantine for Sars to being the only site left standing; to the war on eBay (…we (eBay) are a shark in the ocean, but I am a crocodile in the Yangtze River. And in the water of the river the crocodile always wins…), to being the largest IPO (Initial Public Offering) , of the history of the stock exchange, bigger than that of Google, Facebook and Twitter combined. And finally a look to the future with an open question: “Who knows if the crocodile will eventually eat the shark?”.
Porter Erisman was Vice President of Alibaba from 2000 to 2008, when he decides to produce and direct Crocodile in the Yangtze, a documentary film that collects the essentials of the story of this enterprise in 200 hours of video.
