Welcome back, everyone. Again, let everyone kind of get settled down. Some housekeeping items before we start. Just a reminder for everyone, the next afternoon sessions will be live broadcasted. If you can, please exit from the back 2 doors if possible. Without further ado, may I introduce our Chief Executive Officer, Daniel Zhang, on stage. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. It will be 2 long days, and we are going to the final half day. I hope you enjoy the whole time in Alibaba campus. In the past 1 and a half days, our business leaders shared with you the pictures of their individual business. I think it's my turn to share with you how we incorporate all these businesses together to form a big picture of Alibaba, and how we look at today's business and future opportunity. When we talk about Alibaba strategy, Alibaba big picture, we always start with our mission. Our mission from day 1 in 1999 actually never changed. The mission is make it easy to do business anywhere.
At that time, in 1999, actually, when we found Alibaba, the world is like internet just came into the world, and everybody recognized the power of internet actually will change the future. 1 of the big advantage of internet is that we can make the whole world transparent and flat, and no boundary. Now, actually, we move to a new era, which is not only by leverage the power of internet for transparency, for a flat world. Also we can empower our business, our world, by digital power. Today, we are going to a digital era. That's why 3 years ago, when I took over CEO role of Alibaba, I said to all my team, I said, "Today, when we look at Alibaba's mission, no change.
Make it easy to do business anywhere." We have to think about the current situation, which is in a digital era. Every company, every business, every government, actually think about the opportunity and the challenge of being in a digital era. That's why we put together, I think, it's not like redefine, is to evolve our mission in a new environment, in a new era. If you look at the big picture of Alibaba, we start our business, as I said, 19 years ago, with our 1st B2B business. In this business, we said we want to help Chinese SMEs to find training opportunity via alibaba.com, our 1st website. All over the world, buyers, traders all over the world, they can come into our site, alibaba.com, to find leads and find buying opportunity. We call this as a meet at Alibaba.
In 2003, we transformed to serve the customer. To build another interface, not only for enterprises, but also for consumers, which is Taobao. Everybody understand the history of Taobao. While the involvement of Taobao business, we build a B2C Tmall business. We have the fresh sales business, so on and so forth. If we put as a whole, actually, it's more like we're evolving from meet to transact, to trade at Alibaba. Now, actually, if you look at Alibaba business as a whole, I said I always divide Alibaba businesses into two types. One is consumer interface, consumer relevant business. The other is enterprise relevant, enterprise interface, and enterprise relevant business. The key thing is these two types business are not separate two groups.
They are one integrated piece, which is why we can serve hundreds of millions of consumers in China and even around the world is because we, as a platform, not serve them only by ourself. Instead, we enable, we empower the enterprises, no matter it's a multinational company, as a local young brands, or SMEs, or resellers. We empower them to do business on our platform, to serve our mutual customers. Via this method, we build an ecosystem. In recent years, we move forward from only meet, trade, to live and work respectively. In recent years, we move into digital contents industries. We don't view this digital content as a separate business. Instead, we view this as expansion of our categories because all these hundreds of millions of consumers, they not only need physical goods.
With the change, with the upgrade of their lifestyle, they need more digital contents. They need more services. That's the evolving of our consumer consumption category. On the other side, we want our clients, our business partners, not only on our platform to do the trading, to do the transaction, but also they can leverage the infrastructure Alibaba build up to transform their business. We are saying that we are going to help our clients, our partners, to work at Alibaba. Now this is the big picture of Alibaba digital economy. You can see many, many individual business in Alibaba big family. If we put it into one big picture, this is it. I always use this big picture to share Alibaba strategy. We can do it within five minutes, and we can also do it in five hours.
The core of this is, we start with our core commerce, and then we expand it to digital entertainment and to local services. The fundamental infrastructure is improving and it never change, which is we start with our payment and our logistic, then going forward and build up our marketing platform. All this infrastructure are powered by the physical infrastructure, the IaaS, which is the cloud. Cloud, payment and financial services, logistics, marketing platform, actually, they play a very important role in integrate, in connecting all these different businesses. Because all these business, we don't want them to build a standalone infrastructure. Instead, they can share infrastructure with all the others. Most importantly, it's not only about the infrastructure share. Most importantly is about the data, the data technology. When we view this big picture, we see this is integrated one picture.
This is integrated one business, one economy. The core of this economy is data and data technology. As I said before, I remember I said in last year's Investor Day. Today, I repeat this, no change. For Alibaba, for each of these businesses shown in this big picture, commerce, service, and entertainment, we don't view this as a standalone business. We view all these businesses as the use cases to generate data. We generate data by providing the common infra to support the business to grow. When we get the data, we create the value from the data by cloud computing, by analytics, and by AI or ML, machine intelligence, so on and so forth. We refill the value we create from the data to the ecosystem, to this use case. Make our individual business, make our partners in this individual business be stronger.
Which is always tied back to our mission. I always ask my teams, when we talk about mission, the mission is not only writing on the wall, right? Say, make it easy to do business anywhere. Why we can make people to do business easier? The answer is about data and the data technology. That's why Alibaba is not only a vision-driven company. We always tie our mission vision back to everyday business, back to what we do and what we not to do. After we look at the big picture, let's move to the consumption sector. I'm sure everybody are interested in how is the future? Today, Alibaba already so big. Last year, on our core commerce platform, we generate over $760 billion USD GMV. Can you grow in the future? Can you grow even faster?
Today, when we look at this pie, actually, we show you the big pie of China consumption, of China retail sales. Yes, in the past 15 years of Taobao and Tmall history, our retail business history, for most of the time, we spend on online retail. Now, since 2 years ago, we initiate our New Retail strategy. We said to all the world clearly that we don't view online retail as a separate new world. This is an integral part of the total consumption, total retail world. If you look at the addressable market of total consumption in China, is about $5.3 trillion USD. Today, online retail only about $1 trillion USD. Over this, Alibaba contribute $760 billion USD. If we look at the future, I think online retail continue to grow. I will share with you more metrics in later stage.
I will say, my view is that online retail continue to grow. At the same time, all the offline retail is moving to digital. In my world, in the future, there is no difference between online and offline. There is some difference. There is a key difference between the digital business, digitalized business, and a non-digitalized business. If a business in a brick-and-mortar, their orders, their customer's profile, their payment, their product assortment, their marketing information, their supply chain information, all this stuff are digitalized. Actually, if you see all these brick-and-mortars, they are a result of generated data, actually no different compared to a web store generated. Today, I think all the business, all the retail business in China and in the world, no matter we call this New Retail or not, we are doing the same thing.
We are trying first to digitalize the brick-and-mortars so that we can generate data from customers, from product assortment, from logistics, from payment, from supply chain, and the data. Then we can get a chance to understand better our business and get a chance to upgrade or to optimize our business. When Alibaba pursue this online, offline or New Retail opportunities, we do it by categories. We start with our core commerce platform because this is a very, very strong user interface and a customer interface, which can help our partners, our retail partners, to engage with customers, to acquire new customers, and to manage the existing customers. We also leverage the infrastructure of logistics. We believe if we want to move the physical goods more efficiently, we need a more data-driven logistics network to be an infrastructure.
In between, we have to pursue the opportunity by consumption categories. Here we listed eight vertical categories and eight vertical opportunities we are pursuing. For each of these opportunities, actually, we try New Retail initiatives by our vehicles. Some vehicles are self-incubated, self-developed in-house in Alibaba core business. Some via our investment. Tmall actually serve as a flagship in New Retail initiatives. Actually, today, we position Tmall not only as an online marketplace for brands and retailers. Instead, we position Tmall as an engine to help our brand partner and retail partner to win a big success in their digital transformation. Today, when we talk about Tmall, we not only talk about their web stores. We are talking about can we provide value not only to their web stores, but also to their brick-and-mortar stores.
Not only to their sales, but also even to their product innovation, as Jack shared with you yesterday. On top of Tmall, for Tmall, if we accomplish this will become a more of mall. To integrate all the brick-and-mortars on the street and the online operation to be one big operation. For other categories like consumer electronics, like fashion, FMCG, home decorations, so on and so forth, we use different vehicles to pursue these opportunities. Like Sun Art, which is a very important investment for Alibaba. Since our investment, we work closely with Sun Art team to help our retail partner first to digitalize their store operation. Then we help them to extend their reach of the store service.
After this innovation, the physical store not only can serve the visitors in store, but also can extend their reach to the people living around the store within 3 kilometers. We saw this 3 kilometers ideal life circle, life community. For each of these categories, we are doing this New Retail initiatives. Key thing is we share a big user interface, which is our Taobao. Today is mobile, maybe tomorrow is a different interface, but today is mobile, is a Taobao mobile core commerce platform. Then this year, actually, we had a very important change in our logistics infrastructure. Last year, if we talk about this topic, we only talk about Cainiao. Now actually we evolve.
We think with the acquisition of Ele.me, which give us a very good opportunity to integrate not only the service category into our consumption sector, but also Ele.me provide us a very good base to build a on-demand instant delivery network, which is very essential in our New Retail initiatives for all the New Retail initiatives. Today, these riders, they deliver a lunchbox. Tomorrow, actually, they can deliver a lot of products, fulfilled by stores within 30 minutes or 1 hour. That's the New Retail big picture. In this, we are trying to incentivize our retail partners and brand partners by data. Again, this is not only the change of the model of the digitalization. I always said digitalization cannot resolve all the issues.
Digitalization give us a new opportunity to understand better what our customer need and what our supply chain, what our supply forces can provide. Is there any mismatch or is there any opportunities we can pursue to create a new demand of the customers? When we talk about the consumption business in Alibaba, consumer business Alibaba, we have to look at the future's growing engine. I think for consumer business in Alibaba ecosystem, the growth engine are from two sides. First one is user base. Today, with our core commerce platform, we serve over 550 million active consumers last year, which means these 550 million people, they bought at least once on our platform. Many Taobao fans, many fans, they bought far more than that. I'm sure here we have a lot of ladies. I'm sure you are our loyal customers.
We still believe that if you look at the net user growth in the past 2 years, you can see a very interesting phenomenon, which is the user growth re-accelerated. Especially in recent quarter, we share with you that 70% of the new net adds came from the less developed areas, from rural areas. We believe this trend will continue. Today, mobile internet make the internet access as actually the lowest forever. We get a very good chance to penetrate more user base. We always said that today, if people use a phone, then they could be our user. If people with a phone, they could be our user. We have the potential to recruit them as our customers. Of course, we are not only trying to acquire new customers in China, but also we are trying to expand our services globally.
When we go to the new market, we get the new opportunity to acquire new customers. Today, if we combine our Lazada and AliExpress services, now we are serving more than 100 million active consumers, active buyers a year. I think that's a good start for the globalization. I think the second engine of the growth of our consumer business is about the category expansion. We have such a long track record of consumer business. When we look at the cohort in the past years, it's a very clear trend. The more time people spend with us, the longer people stay with us, the more shopping categories people will cover. From traditional core commerce platform, in this platform, we start with some virtual products like game card, top-up card in early years of Taobao.
In recent years, we moved to all of the physical products, start from fashion to consumer electronics to home furnitures, home decoration, household product, even cars. By expansion to the digital entertainment sectors, we are now seeing a new world. We do believe our customers, our younger customer base, they need far more than physical goods. That's why today we work very hard to provide them the long-term video, short-form video, and we even provide them the ticketing business to buy ticket for movie online. We even running a Chinese sort of a Ticketmaster in China to provide ticketing services for our customers, for them to buy the ticket of variety shows, so on and so forth. With all these efforts, we are trying to expand the category of consumption. We are trying to improve the ARPU of every single customers.
If we continue to grow the user base and continue to grow the ARPU, the ASP, I think this is a real opportunity for our future consumption growth, the size of the consumer market. One big advantage we see in the growth of this, not only the user base, but also the consuming category, is the synergies in Alibaba ecosystem. Here you can see the big number of every single business. For all these, we just list out the business with the users over 100 million. You can see we still have a big gap via our different businesses. Very interesting thing is that today, if you look at Alibaba ecosystem, maybe 10 years ago, online shopping without online payment.
Today, with the development of the digital wallet, our Alipay, in recent years, recruit more and more new customers via payment because people want to use digital wallet to take subway, to take the shuttle bus, to pay the utility. They use this wallet first for these things. Over time, we get a chance to recruit them, migrate them into our consumer platform. We encourage them to consume and buy, starting from dry groceries to food, to more categories on our platform. Yesterday, some investor asked me, "Daniel, how do you look at your local service business? How can we measure the development of local service business?" My initial response is very simple. I think today you see, for example, our Ele.me business, our AAC of Ele.me, annual active consumers, only 168 million.
All of our today's payment users, our Taobao, Tmall users, could be future Ele.me Users because they are same group of people. Today, our Ele.me still have very low penetration in our Taobao and Tmall and Alipay big family. If we can penetrate, we are not talking about continuing to acquire new customers. If we can penetrate our local services, our digital content businesses with our existing user base, we can generate a huge growth. We can create a huge growth opportunities. That's what we see. That's why, last month, for the first time, we launched our Alibaba Group ecosystems loyalty membership program, which is 88VIP. The purpose of 88VIP is trying to consolidate all our Alibaba services in Alibaba big family, and to provide these services as a privilege to our loyalty customers.
For those customers who spend tens of thousands of RMB a year on Alibaba Ecosystem, I think these are the most important, most valuable user segments we have in China and in the future in the world. After we talk about the consumer business, let's talk about our enterprise side. I remember very clearly, 10 years ago, for the first time, Alibaba announced that we strongly believe e-commerce is not only about C2C or B2C, which will win in the future. We believe at the end of the day, every single business will transform from B2C or C2C to C2B. Today, what we see via our enterprise service, with our service on our different business platforms, we see this as a very clear trend.
When we look at what happened in the past 10 years, I think, for all these brand companies, for all these consumer goods businesses, how they do their business, it's almost like for every single brand, every single business, they were building a, I call this, a pyramid. They were sitting at the top. They design the products, and they manufacture, then they have the stock. Then they either have their own retail store, or they doing distribution. They supply first, then via their partners, they find the real demand. Why we have in the past 10, 20 years, we see so many apparel companies, sportswear company in China, even in the world, they suffer big problem because of the low stock turnover, because of the slow-moving inventories. It's because they cannot get the real-time insight from the market, what the market need.
I always share my view with my business partner. I say, in this pyramid of business, yes, from a financial perspective, all the inventory are not on your balance sheet maybe, in your distribution partners. You have very clean balance sheet. As long as all the goods are not received or not purchased by the end customers, no matter how clean your balance sheet is, at the end of the day, all the goods in your distribution network, in your distribution channel, is your problem. You have to help them to clean up all these assets. The key thing, the pain points, the pain they have to suffer during the whole process. Now, after the digitalization of the whole retail business, what will happen?
After we digitalize, not only on online operation, but all the brick-and-mortars, we can get the insight from the customers about their real demands. We can know what customer want, what they are lack of. We can customize the design, we can do a very flexible, smart production to meet these demands. Quick reaction, flexible supply chain is very important in the future C2B model. If we can do so, we can help the client not only to sell more. I think the key is make the whole operation more efficiently. That's why we say C2B should be ended by targeted distribution, targeted sales. Sales to the right group of customers, distribute to the right group of the resellers. We can understand the end-to-end, no matter how, is it a real retail business or distribution business?
We can help our brand partners, our retail partners to understand the end-to-end data flow of the products, end-to-end data flow of the customer wants. That's what we believe will happen today and in the future. I think this is the core of my presentation. It's about Alibaba operating system. When we look at the whole Alibaba ecosystem, actually, we are doing today is not only to build a consumer business and to build an enterprise business platform. Instead, we integrate all of this. We start with New Retail, with the consumer interface. We evolve and not only to help people to sell more, but also to help people to change the way they sell. We not only to help people to market their brand, market their products, but also help people to change the way they are doing marketing.
That's why we share with you, last year, about Uni Marketing. We are still working on it, and we have many, many cases to validate the model of Uni Marketing, of this data-driven marketing methodology. Today, we even go further to the supply side. I think from customer interface, we have done a lot. People understand this very well. Now we are moving to the supply side. We believe that to make a business successful, it's not only about creating more sales opportunity, but also to improve the whole operating cycle and to make it more efficient. At the end of day, I think the key thing will be products.
For the consumption sector, I think the key thing is that can we provide the relevant, the right product assortment to the right customers at the right time with the right stock, with the right stock level. This is the whole thing we are doing. To match this supply with the demand, to create a new demand from an efficient supply, we have to upgrade all these consumer operation, all the product operation, and also the physical space and virtual commodity. Here I want to stop and add a few word about the virtual community. When we talk about New Retail, then everybody talk about brick-and-mortar. I say, "No, no. That's not right." In Alibaba, when we transform to New Retail, we still start from online. That's why Jiang Fan, our President of Taobao, share with you the innovation we do on Taobao.
We want to change the way people shop online. Taobao is not only a sales marketplace, instead, Taobao is a consumer community. We want to give people more information, give people more fun when they shop on Taobao. Even when people don't intend to buy anything, they still want to come back to Taobao. That's our operating metrics. This is all about how long we can engage with the customers. If customers are with us, we think we have enough opportunity to help them, not only to meet their existing demand, but also create their new demand. Today, when we, on one side, we help our online marketplace to transform to the digital community. In the brick-and-mortar, we are also working very hard with our partners, either self-incubated or via investment, to upgrade their existing physical retail spaces into a digital environment.
That on a real-time basis, we can understand what people do and what people want, what people don't want in the real environment. All the data are on the cloud and could be accessed on a real-time basis. The key thing is that all this data, online and offline, sales data, product data, marketing data, logistic data, all this data need to be flow back to the data bank. We strongly believe that for all our customers, all our clients in Alibaba ecosystem, every business need a data bank for themselves in Alibaba system. Via this data bank, they can not only consolidate the data from different channels, but also for the first time, they can integrate the data to understand better of a particular customer, understand the performance of a particular SKU, understand the movement of a particular batch of goods.
That's the whole picture of Alibaba New Retail dream. We call this as an operating system. We are trying to empower our clients to win the success in the digital transformation via our Alibaba operating system. When we talk about this digital transformation, logistic is very important element in the whole transformation. Let's look at what is look like today. Today, the logistic is about, we grow the point-to-point logistic model in China. China is a very unique market, and we have a couple of logistic partners. They, together, occupy over 90% of the logistic delivery market in China. Overall speaking, half of their business are from Alibaba platform. We do it because why we have this point-to-point service network is because we have so many sellers. We have so many buyers.
All the sellers and buyers are in different cities, in different locations. You need a network, a point-to-point network, to do this delivery. In the past few years, in our Cainiao, not only for this point-to-point network, we also built a new network, which is a hub and spoke network, especially for structured products. For this model, I think most of our friends here are quite familiar. I think most of you, when we talk about the logistic model, you are talking about hub and spoke. My strong view, Alibaba's view, is that hub and spoke is one of the logistic model in the digital economy. The point to point is still very important in the digital economy.
In the future, when the online offline business are highly integrated, you will see more and orders from online could be fulfilled by store, use a stock in store rather than sent from a central warehouse from a forward DC. All the brick-and- mortar stores, if they are repositioned, they could be a forward DC or forward kitchen for all the online orders and could be the service center for the online orders. That's why we believe in the future, all the logistic elements will be reshaped. Before we reshape all the elements, in the past few years, our Cainiao team did one important job, which is try to digitalize the elements in the whole logistic network. We have some advantage. All our merchants, if they have web operation online, their store operation are digitalized. Our customers, if they buy online, their behavior are digitalized.
In recent years, we create the e-waybill, and we give the code for our system for every single parcels generated on our platform. By this way, we digitalize every single parcel generated on Alibaba platform. What we are doing is the next step. We are not only trying to digitalize the merchants, the package, the consumers, but also we are trying to digitalize the warehouses, the storage. This warehouse should be with a big question mark. It's not necessarily remain a DC, a fulfillment center. It could be a store. We are also trying to digitalize the vehicles, the riders, the delivery men, and by this way, we can digitalize the whole process of logistic network. Most important thing is that for Alibaba, when we do this logistics, this is not end picture.
The end picture we strong believe is like this. We believe in the new world, in the new digital economy, there will be a hybrid logistic network to support the integrated online and offline business. The delivery solutions, the delivery personnels, they are not only divided by today's type of network, like point to point or hub and spoke or on-demand services. They initiate their service by a hybrid data-driven network. In the future, like I said before, all our riders from Ele.me, they may deliver a jacket for a brand store nearby. All of our hub and spoke warehouses, they are not only trying to fulfill the goods and deliver directly to the customers. Instead, they may be a very good location to serve, to initiate the fulfillment and start the milk run to serve the stores in the local city.
By this way, we strongly believe that in China, in the world, there are enough logistic resources. The key thing is how can we digitalize all these logistic resources and to reposition each of them to be a real network, rather than we just leave the existing logistic resources aside and build a new logistic network. That's why in logistic world, we strongly believe in partnership. We believe the transformation of the logistic model from today's model to future's hybrid model. That's what we are working on today. Here you see that in the future, we show the storage like we have our Cainiao. We have a lot of fulfillment partners. We have very important three dot here, which represent all these brick motor stores, our brand partners, our retail partners, could be the storage, could be the fulfillment center.
Let's spend some time on our cloud. This morning, Simon shared with you the big picture of Alibaba Cloud. When we look at Alibaba economy, we don't view our cloud business as a separate business. We view our cloud business as an infra for all of our digital economy. Today, all of our Alibaba self-incubated and developer business are powered by our own cloud. In each of these sector, for each of our business team, actually, we have a very clear segregation of duties. Our cloud team today, they are focusing on build this infra, I mean, in IaaS and build some PaaS parts. All of our individual business, starting from Taobao, Tmall, Hema, and to all other business. They are more like a SaaS service provider in each of the categories.
In the future, we will see a big picture, which is we believe is not about the SaaS, it's about the BaaS. It's B-a-a-S. We believe for Alibaba operating system, Alibaba economy, we are trying to provide business as a service to all of our partners, all our clients. All these BaaS are powered by Alibaba Cloud. In this way, we are trying to build up the retail cloud, the marketing cloud, the finance cloud, the logistic cloud, so on and so forth. Today, we are not only trying to be an infra provider, but it's more like all-in-one. We try to give people a whole stack of solution in particular industries. This is about Alibaba Cloud. That's why in Alibaba, we always said Alibaba Cloud is a cloud of Alibaba economy.
It's not like we incubate an interesting business, a new business, which is Alibaba Cloud. That's the whole picture. That's the relationship between Alibaba Cloud and Alibaba big picture. Let's move to a new chapter, which is IoT. I think in these past two days' presentation, we did not cover too much about IoT. Today, when we talk about IoT, we believe we're already in an IoT era. When we talk about opportunity IoT, we still have to start with our cloud, still start with our infra, and start with our PaaS platform we provide to all the partners in the IoT in the today and future IoT community. What Alibaba want to do is that we still don't want to build separate businesses, a new business called IoT. For each of Alibaba's existing business, they have huge opportunity in IoT.
That's why we just show three major categories where we will pursue the opportunity. Why we start with smart living? Because we have such a close connection with hundreds of millions of families in China. We know where they live because they are buying from us every day. We know their address. We know where they live. We know their home situation, how many people live in this family. Why are we trying to pursue the opportunity of automobile? Because we have over 15 million records of people's cars information, because they buy a lot of cars, car accessories, car insurance on our platform. By this way, we've already established very close connection with our target customers in IoT. We are not only trying to serve consumers again in IoT, but instead we are also trying to serve our business partners.
That's why we talk about smart business, where we're working with our partners not only to sell more, to marketing more, and to optimize their supply chain, but also we are trying to help them to transform to a smart manufacturing, to a smart workshop. Smart city is another very interesting opportunity. If you go to the street in China, in Hangzhou, in any other major city in China, today you can see the camera everywhere. Today, we see the huge opportunity, which is the public service, the city service, actually are moved to digital. The government actually is the one party who own huge amount of data. The key thing is how can we empower them to generate value from the data and help them to manage the public services more efficiently. We have a separate sector called smart city.
All these 3 sectors are powered by Alibaba Cloud and powered by Alibaba IoT PaaS infrastructure. That's our initiatives for IoT. In my last section, I will spend a few minutes on globalization. As we always said, globalization is Alibaba's long-term strategy. Where are we now? In the past few years, we've already built a very interesting business, which is AliExpress. Today, AliExpress covers many countries. Their top 3 countries are Russia, Spain, and Brazil. We also cover many other countries in Europe and other continents. When we built this AliExpress business, our model is cross-border, is China to the world. In recent years, with our efforts in Southeast Asia, in Southern Asia, and even in Turkey, we are moving from China to the world to local to local. We believe these are not two different business models.
We strongly believe that in the future, in the local market, if we want to win the sustainable growth and win the long-term success in the local market, the business model should be hybrid. We need local to local, both C2C and B2C, or small B2C to big B2C. We also need cross-border. We have the advantage, which is we are in China. We are in one of the biggest manufacturing bases in the world. If you look at the supply in a lot of consumer markets, a lot of goods are from China. How can we start our cross-border from China? Our end is not only about China to the world, but also world to the world. We want to help the merchant in Russia to sell to Brazil. We want to help the merchant in Brazil to sell into China.
What we want to build up is a global trade platform for our global business. Here, actually, we are in the early stage in Southeast Asia and in Southern Asia. We strongly believe that the opportunity is huge. You may ask me a question, "How can you or your team decide which market to go in?" I think our thinking philosophy is quite straightforward. First, of course, we're looking at the population of the market. Is there enough people there? Second, we look at the mobilization. Is the market with enough mobilization, with a good penetration of mobile, of smartphones? Third, how about the retail landscape? Why we move ahead to Southeast Asia, even to Southern Asia, is because the retail landscape in a lot of markets there is quite similar to what it was in China 10 years, even 15 years ago.
We saw huge opportunity there in the future. China to the world or go to a local market is not enough. When we do the global business, we have very important leverage, which is world to China. We are very lucky to be in China, in the largest consumer market in the world. Today, what we want to do is that we want to buy from all over the world to meet the growing demand of Chinese citizens, to meet the growing demand of the Chinese middle-class families. That's why we built a lot of business ambassador offices all over the world. We are trying to work with a lot of retail partners, suppliers, brand partners to help them to sell to China. Today, our top-selling, top 3 countries in terms of import to China is Japan, U.S.A., and Australia.
I think compared to the size of consumption, today cross-border import still in the very early stage. Today, China also indicated a very strong message that China welcome more imports. China will open the door to have more imports to China. That's our real opportunity. When we do this world to China, we are not trying to do it by individual business. Again, we are trying to leverage all our consumer base's power, and as a whole, we are trying to source from the global. Like for the famous king crab, people need it not only in Hema, but also maybe in RT-Mart. Why not we buy from origin and buy a big, more like Alibaba Group buying, Alibaba big family group buying, and sourcing from the origin and deliver to China. Via our individual business and sell to the end customers.
That's our global buying. When we talk about globalization, delivery, logistics is so important. Today, the logistics model is more like the parcels, the packets are flying everywhere. Every day, we have millions of parcels flying out of China, and we have millions of parcels flying to China. In the future, we strongly believe that if we want to support a global trading platform, we need a couple of hubs, very important logistics hubs in the critical areas of the world. So far, we already identified six hubs in the world. In the future, with the initiative of eWTP, we are trying to build more hubs to support the global trading platform. We believe all the products, all the parcels, will be aggregated, will be consolidated in the location of origin, in the eHub, then by batch, and delivered to the destination.
Via destination hub, to the last mile to the end customers. If we want to build a global trading platform, I think a global logistics platform is a necessity. We are on the way. The last one about globalization is Global Fun. To be honest, we used to call this global travel. Very quickly, we changed our idea. We said, "This is not enough." If we only talk about global travel, we are more talking about ticketing business, hotel room reservation. That's not enough. Today, so many Chinese people flying out of China to enjoy their vacation. They are not only enjoying vacation, they are shoppers. They are consumers. They want to enjoy the local food. They want to enjoy the local show. How can we provide them enough fun? During their holidays. That's why we create idea Global Fun.
You can see in 2018, there are about 150 million tourists from China to the world. I saw a statistics which is in five years, there will be 700 million travelers from China to the world. I think that is a huge opportunity for Alibaba and for China. If we look at the big picture of this globalization, actually it's quite straightforward. We start with global sell together with global buy, we're supported by global delivery, global network, and also very important, global pay, global finance. Finance system, payment system, logistic is always the infra to building a trade platform globally. Also, we are not only interested in moving goods around the world. Instead, we will do one thing more. We are not only moving goods, but also we are moving people.
We're moving people around the world to find more fun and moving goods to their home, I mean, in the new use cases. That's the big picture of globalization. Finally, I want to end my presentation by looking at our near-term goal and long-term vision. In 2015, we share with you our near-term goal, a five-year goal, which is by fiscal year 2020, we want to achieve GMV of $1 trillion. As I said, last year, in our core commerce platform, we generate about $768 billion. We are very confident that in the next two years, we can achieve our near-term goal, $1 trillion. $1 trillion to us is just a new milestone and a new beginning. We already set our long-term vision, which is for the next 20 years.
We want to achieve our long-term dream, long-term vision, to serve 2 billion consumers over the world, to help 10 million profitable small business, and create 100 million job opportunities. That's our vision. By doing so, we are trying to build and grow a unique digital economy in China and in all the world. That's our long-term vision. Thank you.
Thank you, Daniel. We'll welcome you off stage. Next, we have our Chief Financial Officer, Maggie Wu.
Good afternoon. You want to know guidance. Some of you probably have forgotten, we provided guidance on our March earnings call. I don't have any updates on that guidance. Today, I'm going to cover three areas. Number 1, as we did last year, I will give you report cards since last Investor Day. Secondly, I'll talk about our strong core business. Talk about the healthiness and the potential for the future. I'll also discuss how we look at the investment, the investment for future. The third one is valuation framework. Last year, during Investor Day, I gave our revenue guidance, 45%-49% year-on-year growth. We delivered 48%. If you exclude Cainiao, which was consolidated since October last year, we still have 54% year-on-year growth. Very strong revenue growth.
We have outperformed all of our global technology peers. I think we'll continuously to take lead in that run. We have had accelerated annual active consumer growth. If you see during the last year, we added 98 million net adds. That's pretty much 30% of the total U.S. population. Not only we added the users, but also these users are highly engaged with our platform. We see averagely, a Taobao user opened Taobao apps eight times a day. This average spending level has already gone up to $8.7 thousand, considering that such a large new user base. We have developed so much content, and Jiang Fan talked about what we have done on the mobile Taobao. Take one example of the short-form video. We have had average daily number of short video viewerships of 1.9 billion.
I said last year that we're going to invest into expanding the B2C market leadership. Clearly we delivered. Our Tmall fiscal GMV growth was 45% compared to the national overall growth, 39%. We outperformed all of our peers in a big time. New Retail has grown really fast. It's not only the growth in the revenue, but also the proven in the business model. I'll talk more about that. Cloud computing is still showing three digits growth in the top line. Xiaom ing talked about this this morning, that 40% of the China's top 500 companies are on our cloud. Closely half of the Chinese-listed companies are paying for our cloud service. Digital media daily paying subscriber number has shown a CAGR of 180% over the past three years. This summarize all of these key metrics we've delivered in the past fiscal year.
You can tell that we have generated $15.8 billion free cash flow, where Joe going to talk about how he spent the money later on. I think it's very important to talk about the strong core. You've seen our financial results, but what we are proud of and are very happy about is this fundamental healthiness and growth within our business. You've seen the user growth. I wouldn't spend more time on that. When you look at the spending among our users, spending clearly is growing, and then the fastest-growing is spending is with the 19-25 age group. For the age group of 31-35, they represent highest spending among all of these active buyers. Okay. This is the cohort. We still have a very strong cohort. Longer consumers stay with us. More orders they placed across more categories, which results in high spending.
For a year one consumer, for example, you see this RMB 3,000 ARPU level, this is pretty much at the same level as in previous years. Does the five-year consumer. I've talked about this last year. You can do the comparison. For a two-year-old consumers on Taobao, they were one year old last year. When you compare their spending level, it's pretty much doubled this year. Our high sticky spending consumers is showing here. I picked up the 100 million consumers who are our top consumers that with annual spending over RMB 10,000. When you look at the retention rate for this group of consumers, it's 98%. Many colleagues talked about this new membership program. This is still in early stage. We launched this August 8th.
I think we're probably the only one here in China can do this or even in the world that can provide such a comprehensive product and service benefits to our members. We have so many apps and services that contains hundreds of millions of users. It's not only Taobao and Tmall, but also the others. We've showed you some of these 2 days. Together, we are very confident that we're moving towards that 2 billion goal. You can tell, Daniel talked about the goal, and each year, we have been moving closely, very serious about our longer-term goal. Besides talking about consumer, the healthiness of this business is also being demonstrated at the merchant side.
When you look at this data, like 50% of China-listed consumer retail companies on Tmall and also the top 20 global brands on Tmall, the blue bar shows their overall growth, right? 24%, 11%. The orange bar shows their growth at their Tmall store. This is the obvious return. You can see we give back to the merchants. Over the years, we have continuously been delivering and providing new services, tools to enable our merchants to work at Alibaba. You might be familiar with some of these. Some of these are behind the scene. Alimama, you know about Taobao and the Cainiao platform, et cetera. Here we show how these tools and products helping merchants across all of their functions, from the procurement to logistics, to distribution, to marketing.
If you still remember the merchant's P&L I showed you 2 years ago, these are how these tools and the services and products helping from the merchant's P&L angle that help them to grow their business revenue and reduce the cost, increase the efficiency. How many of these products being monetized? A few of them. Are we going to monetize the rest of those? Not necessarily. I think we could be monetizing some of those and then leave the others to serve as entry barriers. Talk about monetization. I want to share with you in this advances in data technology how that unleash new value for consumer and merchants, because that closely related with this monetization topic. Jiang Fan talked about new version, new interface. Some of you see the PPT, some of you see the potentials.
Let me give you a little bit more elaboration on this one. For those ones who don't use Taobao, it's not easy for you to tell the difference. The easier thing is that when you compare these 2, the old one, new version, the new version product photo is bigger, right? That's a very obvious difference. Then if you think about this, our land, if you see this on mobile Taobao, web pages as land, are very precious land. It contains high value. Why are we putting less inventory there compared to the previous? That's because of the confidence of our technology. Because we could provide more relevant and personalized products and service in front our consumers, which could lead to higher conversion. When you talk about personalization, you think Alibaba has already done the personalization, customization, right?
You talked about 1,000 People, 1,000 Faces, you might not be aware of that the machine learning, the technology involvement is continuous process. We have had pass through the version 1.0, 2.0. At the beginning of the personalization, we do very simple personalization. I still remember that by the age that the personalization, the data could only be used on those very simple attributes like gender, your age, what you have bought. When I bought a scooter for my daughter, it kept showing in front me the scooters. Nowadays, the personalization and recommendation gone up to next level. Jeff talked about our knowledge graphs. Give you example that for those people who have, for example, bought a round trip tickets to Europe, and we figured out this is a 10-day trip, and this people has family and kids.
The whole travel theme products could be put into place, of course, considering his personal attributes, etc. Nowadays, people start to see things that they haven't searched before, haven't bought before, haven't seen before, even they haven't thought before. We're very happy to see that the conversion on these recommendation feeds are increasing, keep improving. Currently, our technology team has created all of these themes through this knowledge graphs. We have over 100,000 themes that backed up by more than 300 million products and services. Just think about the power of that. Technology is keep evolving. At the same time, our traffic mix has shown fundamental shift. This chart, you can see three years ago, our search traffic definitely demonstrated the mainstream. Recommendation is still very small. Nowadays, the recommendation traffic already surpassed the search.
Our monetization mechanism, P4P Alibaba, where the consumer revenue come from, is only on search. We're kind of behind on the monetization mechanism. Of course, we're working on it, this represents a potential. People will ask, "While you keep growing the recommendation feeds, etc., would that impact your near term?" We are thinking, it's not surprising if there is a little bit impact on the near term, this is the right thing to do for the consumer experience, for the merchants' benefit. If you further think about this, when other peers has news feeds, right, in the social platform, etc., we're talking about recommendation feeds. Recommendation feeds is not an ad fees. We can see all of these follow-up actions of the consumers, right? They view, they click, they bookmark, they add to the cart, they purchase.
They make payment. Logistics start working, they give feedbacks. They share with friends. They will stay and repurchase. This is such a closed loop of the database, make our data technology even more stronger, which eventually going to show on the relevancy level of the products we recommended. Okay. The core is very strong and solid. We have always been saying that this is the company always thinking about invest for future. Our free cash flow, 15.8 billion, about 28% of that cash flow being spent in investing in our organic business. In the past year, actually, this is the past quarter's number, that we have generated 37 billion RMB of just the EBITDA, our marketplace business, the core commerce, which is the core, right? Here shows where we spent that profit, where we invest.
The orange bar shows the major investment areas within our core commerce business. These are international Lazada, local service like Ele.me, New Retail, logistics. We also have the other segments of business to invest in, digital media and entertainment, innovation initiatives, and cloud computing. I want to share with you not only how much we spend on those business, but also the progress we have made in that business. It takes time for all the investors to see financial returns. The business progress is essential. New Retail, for example, Chris Tung talked about all of these superior consumer experiences, great business we built and provide best quality products and then 30 minutes delivery, et cetera. We are more happy about is we believe we figure out the model.
If you think about this, China had 36 trillion consumption, only 18% are penetrated online. The big majority is still 80% offline. How are we going to tap that market? We're now moving them all online, but we are able to enable them. When we compare with the traditional groceries retail business, our New Retail model clearly show advantages. If you look at the business model, the traditional grocery retail, they have the primary self-operated stores, right? First P. In our model, we have a hybrid model. The reason for the self-operate, the New Retail model, is to serve as pathfinder. To continuously to explore and build the sustainable model, figure out the cost structure and how we could improve the user experience.
We have transform old model, which is we're now working with Sun Art, later on more partners, to enable them to better operate. In terms of our revenue model, of course, the direct sales model, we record the gross sales as the revenue. For the enable the third parties, we just take a technology service fee or commission. The latter one has obviously higher margin. While the traditional services are closing stores, Hema's kept opening stores, and the efficiency level is multiple times. Now Hema, the early stores could even reach higher than RMB 50,000 sales per sq m per annum. Profitability. People ask me about what's the margin level going to be on this Hema? I think rather than talking about margin, it's more reasonable to talk about profitability, because that's absolute return.
If you look at traditional retail market right now, right, their margin level is 2%-4%. If we could enable them to double, we could take our fair share. For a Hema model, if we could figure that out, that's already bring tremendous value because the 80% of the offline market, say 10 trillion of those relates with the FMCG groceries. Which means, in a year's time, if we're doing this right, we should be able to create a business that as large as the Taobao Tmall we're seeing today. Okay. Local service, we talked a lot about this. How we go back to this? Again, obvious advantage, backed by the synergy that can be generated among our ecosystem.
I can't go back, but Hema, Wang Lei discussed about the synergy among the group companies and how we are going to utilize the data technology we have to have the business grow. It is very interesting that team has their goal of getting the 50% market share. Actually it is fun that we haven't been enjoying that process of turning number 2 to the number 1 since eBay age, I think. AutoNavi, we have done that once, and we're supporting the team to get there. Cainiao, we see the scale of the business. I think people kind of take for granted of the scale, don't underestimate the scale. If you're thinking about delivering 69 million packages per day, that's the biggest achievement of Cainiao. It is not about you just the package level become larger.
It is because of the technology and all of these, the platform, the network effects we've built, being able to make that happen. At the same time, delivery speed has been improved. If you look at five years ago, for delivering the first 100 million package in Singles' Day, it took us 9 days. Now it is only 2.8 days. Global footprint, we've already had over 100 million overseas buyers. The revenue growth is 79%. While you see these businesses are platform, we have those cash flow generating units over there. We do see the traction among all of these businesses. New Retail, Cainiao, Hema, AliExpress, Lazada. We have Youku and AliCloud, all of them growing really fast. We also have a lot of seeds planted, right? Some of these, people try to bury us, but they don't know they are seeds.
AMAP and DingTalk and Tmall Global, Ling Shou Tong, you've seen the presentation given by Xiaohai. That's for the future. In summary, we do have a very strong core, which is going to continue to grow sustainable and strong growth. For the others investment areas, we're going to continue to invest because we see the potential. For most of them, we see that we are probably the only one in the market are able to deliver the best results. Valuation, you are familiar with the four segments we've been given in the past. Nowadays, we have several investment even within our core commerce business. I further break it down, for your reference. You probably see this business and their core, including the investment we're making, new businesses which are growing really fast, Cainiao, Hema, then Lazada, New Retail. Cloud digital media innovation initiatives.
Also the comparable companies, they keep adding up. Besides this, we also have strategic investments, which almost all of them have a market value. This was the valuation we got from Friday's market value. Which may make sense even more easier is for our marketplace-based core commerce business, this is a profit-generating business. For fiscal 2018, our adjusted EBITDA was $18 billion. You could apply a multiple to that business. If you calculate it by using our last night's stock price, we're around like 22 or 23 times of that business only. By the way, that multiples is well below the average of our global peers. Obviously, people haven't really fully appreciated the potential business we have been building. Some of them are not really small. The cloud computing, digital media, entertainment, the core, the innovation initiatives.
Plus, there is a $80 billion U.S. strategic investment. You could do the math. We think that right now, you're basically, current price is buying this business with the others for free. We have announced our share buyback plan, and we're implementing that, which demonstrates our confidence in the business. I think that pretty much concludes my presentation. Thank you for all of your support.
Thank you, Maggie. We'll come to you offstage. We're going to take a short break of 10 minutes. Please be back. There are only about 100 tickets. For those that are coming to our cloud conference tomorrow, I think there's about 300 of you, but we only got about 100 of you pick it up. Go back down to the main lobby registration desk to pick up your tickets. Thank you. 10 minutes.
尊敬的各位来宾，本次会议将于一分钟之后开始。请您尽快就座，并将手机等通讯设备关闭或置于静音状态。谢谢您的合作。
Ladies and gentlemen, the event will begin shortly in one minute. Can we please ask for you to kindly take your seats. We would like to remind you again to switch off all mobile phones and put electronic devices to silent mode. Thank you for your cooperation.
Hello. Hi, everyone. Please get seated. We'll start momentarily. Everyone, we're gonna get started. We're gonna get started. If everyone can take a seat, please. Everyone. Everyone, let's get seated. I think there's some folks in the upper deck. Let's get seated, please. Welcome back. We need to get started. I know some of you are flying out, so I'm conscious of time. Everyone up there that's still speaking, maybe get seated down, please. Next session. We're gonna have our executive vice chairman speaking about investment and M&A. Without further ado, let me welcome Joe Tsai.
Okay. I have the privilege of doing this presentation right before Jack's presentation. I'm going to try to rush along and get the hell out of here, we can let Jack talk. I'm going to talk about our strategic acquisitions and M&A. Last year, I gave you guys a little bit of sort of the philosophy of our M&A, the rationale why we do things. This year, what I'd like to show you is a little bit of a report card specifically focused on synergy creation. I'm going to talk about a few case studies. I think, as I mentioned before, an acquisition is not done when you close the deal. An acquisition is an evolving process.
How much value you get out of the acquisition really depends on the integration efforts and also the synergy creation efforts between the operating teams of Alibaba and the acquired company. That's really, really key. I think I've shared some stories with you before, in particular scenarios involving $ billions and billions. The thing that gave me the comfort to move ahead with an acquisition was a conversation I had with Daniel, where he assured me that there is somebody within the team that he can bring and assign into the acquired business to run the business. That is absolutely critical because I think I mentioned last year, the people that we bring into the business or the people that we acquire that comes along with the acquisition are the most important element in an M&A transaction for a company like ours.
Last year, I think I showed you this board. Our M&A strategy is like a Go board. From the outside, you are not going to be able to tell what sense of it. I did say a couple of things. Number one, the rationale for making these investments is to build long-term strategic value. Build long-term strategic value for Alibaba. All right? The second thing I said is, even though this looks kind of confusing, the assets on the board, when we make these acquisitions, right, we added more assets. These assets in the end are all networked. When we make the acquisition, we already thought about how they're going to fit into the picture. This is how it fits.
The ones with a shaded yellow dot are the businesses that we acquired, and the ones that are with a white background are businesses that are organically grown within Alibaba Group. You could see, we started with core commerce. We added some more acquisitions to extend into the New Retail strategy. With our entertainment assets as well as services, we have made quite a few acquisitions to put together these businesses under one roof. Today, under a three-pronged strategy of facing consumers, three-pronged strategy of commerce, entertainment, and services, we have now I could say that we sort of have a complete picture, if you will, of where we want to be or an intermediary point. I wouldn't call it a stopping point, but it's an intermediary resting stop in terms of our M&A activity.
The goals of making our acquisitions, obviously we want to solidify our core markets. We also want to tap into new addressable markets. Our whole strategy, investment, and acquisition in New Retail is to tap into the new markets. We also want to explore new technology and trends. We have a group within our M&A team that's out there looking at studying new consumer behavior, and also look at new technologies that would complement, or catch the trend, in terms of how we would predict how new users or young users will in the future use products. We would make certain investments in new areas. With these goals, just a quick historical viewpoint of what we've done in the last, I would say two and a half years. Fiscal 2017, that's the year ended March 2017, so most of that is 2016.
We have spent most of our capital allocated to international expansion, and also digital media and entertainment. The big businesses that we acquired include Lazada and also Youku. That's fiscal 2017. As this thing evolved into fiscal 2018, most of last year, we were very busy looking at New Retail. We allocated quite a bit of capital to the New Retail business. If you look at the first quarter of 2019, our fiscal quarter, which ended in June of this year, we continued to make heavy investments into New Retail, but we also did a huge acquisition in consumer services. That's our food delivery business, Ele.me. This is a historic evolution. I must say, historical performance does not give any indication as to the future.
What the future will look like, I think a lot of venture capitalists will want to know, because they want to front-run us. I'm not going to give them the pleasure of knowing what the future looks like. For investors, you could just look at what Daniel said, what Maggie said about the future, and what Jack is about to say about the future, to kind of get a sense of which direction we're headed towards. Case studies. I'm going to give you four case studies on integration. We strongly believe integration is absolutely crucial in value creation. The first case is the Sun Art investment. We made an investment in Sun Art, which is a Hong Kong-listed company. It remains listed. We own 36% of the company.
I think yesterday and today, our business people have given you a lot of the discussion about what kind of things we're doing with Sun Art. I would like to highlight maybe three things. The first thing is, on the consumer end, we are implementing a POS system so that we can capture offline data. We're also trying to map the offline data with our online consumers because these may be the same people. Someone might have bought from Taobao a week ago, and then they go into a RT-Mart store, which is under Sun Art. That gives us a richer profile of the consumer. That's real synergy value. If we have a more complete profile of the consumer, we can better target, we can better do merchandising decisions. The next integration is the supply chain and products.
We are using big data to do merchandising. We are trying to create a unified inventory system between online and offline, because if you think about it, for an offline retailer, they want to be able to track their inventory, whether it's someone in a store buying something or they're serving an online order. One of the biggest challenges of offline retailers is that their inventory systems between e-commerce and physical retail are separate. This is what we're trying to change, digitizing their back-end inventory. We also have joint procurement efforts. The final aspect of integration is what we're bringing to the table in terms of retail space redesign and thinking about the retail space. As you can see from our Hema example, the Hema store is not just a store. It's also a fulfillment operation. There's a dark part of the store. It's also a restaurant.
It's three in one. Same thing with RT-Mart. We're doing a lot of things to rethink the retail space. I'm not going to go through all the examples in detail, but just wanted to focus on the middle one, this Taoxianda idea. If you open up a Taobao app today, you will be able to find the products that are in your nearby store through our geolocation technology. Then you can order, on your Taobao app, items from an RT-Mart store, and it'll be delivered to you within a very short period of time. We will not be able to do 30 minutes like Hema, as efficient as that, but I think we can deliver that within a couple of hours.
Same day, within hours types of delivery is happening right now, and we're enabling the over 400 RT-Mart stores that are in China. That is all happening. I think with all these synergy value creation, we're creating value for Alibaba Group, but also we're creating value for our investee company. The next case is the Youku case. After the acquisition, we did a few things. Number 1, we improved the technology. With our technology platform or re-platform of the Youku technology, we're able to reduce the latency rate by 80% and reduce cost by 60%. The next thing we did is we said, all right, Youku standalone, as a standalone business, it's generating its own user traffic and affinity, but what if we brought the entire Alibaba ecosystem? We have the same consumers.
The same consumers that are buying from Taobao using Alipay should be able to come to our platform and watch video on Youku. We've been able to increase the daily average subscribers year-on-year by twofold, from the 100% growth to 200% growth. Finally, this is the problem with a video company that is a standalone business. When you're a standalone business, you are capital constrained. You're worried about the P&L, the standalone P&L. Once we have the Youku business into our fold, we said to the team, "Don't worry about the standalone P&L because the content generation and the good video that we create could be shared among our ecosystem, among over 500 million annual active consumers.
That cost of making the content can be spread over a larger base. One of the things that we have told the Youku management, is that please go and try to make more investments into original content. I think in the presentation yesterday by Weidong, he talked about our original content capability. You could see that on the right-hand side is the chart. We increased our spending on licensed content, third-party content by 10%, but we have increased our original content investment by 2.3x. Putting our weight and capital behind original content creation is the value add that we brought to the table. The next case study is Ele.me. We made this acquisition earlier this year. You have heard a lot about the business. First thing we did with Ele.me is, again, bringing the entire user base of the Alibaba ecosystem to these services.
I think it is very, very important that when Ele.me is making investments, growing into more third-tier, fourth-tier cities and investing in logistics, that we are able to spread the cost over a larger consumer base. Again, all the Alibaba apps today are entry points to our food delivery business. We also are able to integrate the Ele.me food delivery service into our 88VIP membership system. Imagine for those of you who are familiar with the U.S., imagine you are an Amazon Prime member, and you can also enjoy the benefits of Uber Eats. Now on the logistics front, we are able to diversify the various delivery scenarios. It used to be when you deliver meals, the personnel is busy during lunchtime and dinnertime.
Now if they are part of the Alibaba ecosystem, they could deliver groceries, they could deliver flowers, fruits from other parts of services that we provide within our ecosystem. You are spreading that cost of personnel, which is a fixed cost, among multiple use cases, among multiple users. That will bring the delivery cost down. Finally, in the prior session, I talked quite a bit about people and people development and how important that is. That is Alibaba's strength. Not just in the development of individuals, but also organizational development. One of the most important things about evaluating a business, one of the first things that we always ask when we go visit an investee company is we say, "Show us your organizational chart.
Show us your org structure." That could tell you a lot about how they are thinking about the business and how they are executing the business. We changed the business from a very hierarchical structure with three separate functions that are divided, and they do not talk to each other, into a flatter structure by empowering the local city managers, and put all the functions of customer users, logistics, and merchant acquisition under one roof within the city. We changed the org structure. That means we are ready for business. We can execute. These are some of the things that we do to bring value to the table. Finally, Lazada.
In the case of Lazada, again, you've heard today about our capabilities in technology, and you also heard our CTO talk about in an acquisition, we would want to make sure that the technology platform is centralized and also the data platform is centralized so we could actually take advantage of the faster product launches and also the consumer insight in an acquired business. That's exactly what we did. When we acquired Lazada, we re-architected their entire technology platform. What happens is that it increased the product development cadence by fivefold. In other words, let's say it used to take five months to develop a new feature. Now it's only one month. The other thing is the know-how that we can bring to the table about how to help the merchants to operate their business.
That has actually helped the merchants on Lazada to increase their conversion rate by 30%. We also helped Lazada to improve their logistics. Actually, one of the very attractive features of Lazada is that they've actually have a pretty good build-out of their logistics network in parts of the markets that they operate in, including Indonesia. Because of the collaboration with Cainiao, we're able to reduce cost by 10%. Also, the lead time across border orders has been reduced from seven days to 72 hours, so three days. Finally, we're able to bring sort of the entire manufacturing capability of China into the Lazada marketplace. The thing about Southeast Asia is it's a developing economy. The manufacturing sector is not as well-developed. It's on its way. Today, compared to China, is not as big.
What we said was, "Look, let us go to our Chinese suppliers and bring their product offerings into your marketplace." We increase the assortment, we improve the user experience. Now, what we've done is we've brought 200,000 high-quality merchants from China into the Lazada platform, and also increased their product listings by 10 million. Sorry, SKUs. Their distinct SKUs by 10 million. That's what we did with Lazada. Anyway, these are the four case studies I wanted to share with you. Finally, when people say, "What does synergy mean?" At Alibaba, synergy does not mean one plus one equals greater than two. It's one plus one is greater than 10. We are still in a market because of digitization, because of technology.
If we can bring our expertise, know-how, and technology into an acquired business, we can actually create exponential value, and that's what we've seen historically with our own business and with acquired businesses. For us, when people ask me, "What kind of ROI are you calculating? What's your IRR of your investments?" I say, "Wait a minute. I'm looking at venture-like returns," except that our success rate is a lot better than venture-like returns because we have people in these businesses to make sure that they work. Digital transformation, the huge user base, the consumer scale and insight that we bring, right? Over 500 million. Right now, almost 600 million annual active consumers in China we can bring to the table. Plus the technology enablement will make our acquisitions work. That's why one plus one equals greater than 10.
I want to end just with a quick review of how we've allocated the capital relative to our free cash flow generation. As you can see here, over the last three fiscal years, our investments pretty much kept pace with free cash flow generation. I think a lot of you will probably be angry at us if we under-invested. Our perspective is since we're not a dividend-paying company, and we've communicated that to you very clearly, we should think about using our free cash flow wisely in areas where the value creation could be one plus one greater than 10. All right? That's how we think about it. On a cumulative basis, we've generated $33.8 billion in free cash flow, and so far we invested about $30 billion. We still under-invested a little bit.
Gives us a little cushion to make more investments in the future. That's how we're looking at this. Finally, you asked me, back to the first picture, everything organized in a very organized fashion, under commerce, entertainment, services. The question is, Joe, are you going to make more acquisitions and more investments? Are you done? Well, yeah. Right? Are you done? We're not done yet. There's other pieces on the board that will require the chess master or the Go master, which is collectively the management team of Alibaba, to arrange to put pieces in place. We still need to do that because we're investing for the future. We're running this business for the future, not for the present. Thanks very much.
Thank you, Joe. Next, we welcome our Executive Chairman, Jack Ma.
Wow. Thank you. Wow. Now I understand you got screens here. Good afternoon, and thank you so much for coming. Welcome to Alibaba. I think after two days, a lot of numbers. Let's back to vision. I insist we should have the shareholders conference in Hangzhou and on the campus. I don't want you to be in the hotel like any others. When you come here, I want you to spend more time with our colleagues, our people, and possibly seeing the customers, how people work. In Alibaba, we believe customer number one, being probably number two, shareholder number three. I say anywhere, not only internally, but also in the Wall Street when we IPO. Even customer number three, we got so many great investors. I mean the investor number three, we got so many great investors.
Keep on investing in us. Thank you for the trust, because Alibaba, we don't have enough service in America like Amazon, eBay, the American companies, so you know what they're doing. A lot of people buy our stocks based on the trust. I think the most valuable thing in this world is about the trust. You don't have our service in the U.S., into Europe, but you still buy our stocks. I really want to say thank you so much. No matter what, we'll keep our customer number 1, employee number 2, and shareholder number 3. I know that next year I will not be able to speak to you as the Chairman. I will sit there as the investor and listen to the team to speak.
I hope if the Investor Day will be before September 10th, while I'm still Chairman, I'll be able to speak. After that, I will sit there and listen like you. I would say that today is my last day I speak as the Chairman of the company. I want to mainly focus on four points. First, why I asked Daniel Zhang to take the Chairmanship. Second question is, what's the future of Alibaba look like when Jack Ma leaves? The third, what's my view on U.S. and China trade war? Last is my personal view on China's short-term, middle-term, and long-term economic situations and Alibaba strategy. These are the questions I want to ask, and I hope this is my personal view. I want to share my ideas, my thought. Why I invite Daniel Zhang. It's not sudden.
I've been thinking this for a long time. My first thought about leaving Alibaba was in 2005, when we got Yahoo China. We got investment Yahoo. One of our investors is a venture capitalist, said, "Jack, you should retire." I said, "Why?" He said, "You should set an example for Chinese business people that the company grew up, as a founder and CEO, step down, giving this job for younger people to take." I agree, but I said, "Not now." In my mind, the reason he said this are two reasons. One, he knew I was not a qualified CEO, which I agree. He's saying, "No, you're too crazy. You should leave." Second is that he's made a good point. In Chinese culture, in Asian culture, not only China, but also in Japan, you see a lot of gray-haired CEOs and Chairman sitting there all their life.
I think faster-growing company, the company want to improve the world, they should have a system. I said, "Not yet. Someday I will." Because we know very well if this country really believe that our company will last 102 years, nobody can work as a CEO for 102 years. If I become the CEO of 102 years, I will be over 150 years old. It won't work. Should have a system, a group of people, the culture, the model that keep on growing. If you really believe it, you should start to prepare. Since then, I start to prepare. 2009, Alibaba 10 anniversary, we start to take action. Actually, from 2005 to 2009, Joe and I have been talking a lot, discussing a lot. I visited a lot of companies, trying to understand how they can last long.
I think to be good, to be great is simple. To be sustainable growth and sustainable good is not easy. I visited a lot of companies, and I even visit the church, monks, temples, all the organization, and military, and government. We start to figure out a way, and we start to design our model partnership. Year 2009, our first action is all the 18 founders resign from the company. I don't know whether you remember that. I asked my 18 founders, including me, send a letter to me, "You will resign tomorrow. From today, you are no longer the founders of Alibaba.
The next day, after 24 hours, if you want to join Alibaba again, write a letter of application, and we will treat you not as a founder, as a normal employee." We start from year 2009, and every year since then, we start to prepare, training people. I spent a lot of time training the Alibaba younger leaders. These days, you see our CTO, all right, Simon Hu, and a lot of the young presidents. They actually, in the past few years, in my class called Class, I spent time on them. They prove by spending time on young people is the best investment in our company. Today, they take the leaderships. They're never scared of the future. They fight for the future. They believe the mission, they believe the value. Every year we do, I start to think about that.
I remember, I think you remember the year before last, my time spending in the air 840 hours. Last year, 840 hours. This year, probably 1,000 hours in the air. Does not include the way to the airport. I leave on purposely not working in the company. Let the management make all the decisions, and they operate perfectly. I told Daniel years ago, those investment below RMB 20 billion, don't even tell me. You just make decision. Don't even ask me, because he has to make decision himself, and he proved. I would purposely leave the company, don't come. This year, I left the company on May 28th. I left the China council, in Europe, Africa, for over 60 days without coming back, and I did not get one phone call from the company. I know they're ready. This is something that you're not doing.
For what you want to do, you have to prepare for a long time. If you love the company, just like if you love your kid, you can teach him in the kindergarten, primary school, no problem. When he go to the middle school, high school, university, let him go. If you let him go, you really love the company. If you control it, you're not loving the kids. I think it's my responsibility to let the company go. Second, we have a great team and great leaderships. If you got a great team like Daniel Zhang, Eric, Joseph Tsai, of course, he's going to retire soon, I think. Right. When you got a great team like that, you will know that it's our honor. We are so lucky that we got great people like them. Daniel, he thinks very logical, very clear. He knows what he's doing.
He believe the vision. He's been in the company for more than 10 years. He got respect from his people. He and I have been discussing almost every month, every week. We sit down, we talk. Such a wonderful relationship. His vision, his belief, and I know I'm getting old. I love company, but I love them. I know they are smart. They can do much better job than I do. You say, "Jack, are you disappointed? Are you sad?" I'm not sad at all. I think I'm still young. 54 years old. In Alibaba, I'm old, but my career is still young. I think I will probably next 16 years, before I'm 70 years old, I could do something in the other field, some area like education. Not teacher, education. Environment. Rural areas development. Something I can do better. I can start a new career.
If I start to do, when you a man, you should never think the company cannot live without you. Actually, a lot of people, when they leave the company, you don't know where to go, so you have to continue to stay in the company. I know very well now I can go out, leave the job for those people who can do better than I am, and I can start a new career. I'm sure in all the areas I want to do will be something I find, something can do better. All the experience, resources, all thing I got, I can do a much better job. If I start to retire 64, I don't think I will retire because I know 64, when I retire, I have nothing to do. I will stay in the company all the time, torture all the young people.
Like most of the old guys. Everybody will get old. Everybody gotta get sick. Everybody got problems. We have to prepare this. Every year, we're preparing that. Now it is the time. Thank you, Daniel, and thank you. I know it's not easy to operate a company like Alibaba, but I'm pretty sure, I'm 100% sure that Daniel will do better job than I do. We had a long discussion with him, I said, "Daniel, every mistake you make, I will make." I'm sure a lot of mistakes I will make, he will not make. Any mistakes the team make, Jack Ma understand and support. That is the trust. This is the trust we have, and I'm honored to have them. This is my first time.
People call me these days, "Jack, anything wrong?" I got government officers call me. Are you crazy? What happened? Are you going to be something painful or some disease or what? I said no. I got rumors from outside China saying, "Because government want to push you out, down." Oh. Nobody can. If you don't want to leave. Because I know it's not about politics, government. People say, "Is it because of China-USA trade?" "That the situation is bad, so you're scared, you run away? Or something like a Minnesota happening?" Not yet. We're not. I want to say, people have a lot of guess. People have a lot of guess. For me, I know this is not today. This has been 10 years preparation. Our team, I told the team a year ago that we should prepare for this day.
September 10th, my 54 year birthday. That is the determined day of we were to do that. Nothing to do with the U.S. and China trade conference. Because ask anybody in the company, in my life, or you ask my parents, in my life, have I ever got one minute scared of the future? No. I'm never scared of future. I'm never scared of anything coming back to us. It's opportunity. It's a chance. Especially these days. The more I thought about this, the more I think there are so many things we can do. There are so many things we should do. There are so many opportunities there. This is first question. What's the second? What's the future of Alibaba will look like after Jack Ma leaves? Don't worry. I think I'm 100% assured and confidence for Alibaba future.
As I said, this thing has been tested in the past three years. The management, great. You see all the young leaders these two days. We got a lot of them. I've always have a dream. This company should be [Foreign language]. This is all I believe. We share a lot of generals. They are great, young, talented. A lot of women employees and women colleagues, women leaders. This is the day we decide to do that in year 1999. The team ready, the culture. I see very few companies like Alibaba in China. We believe mission. We believe value. We believe the future. All the plan we do for 10 years. I think what you will feel, for 20-year plan, we had that. We will be Alibaba digital economy. We create 100 million jobs for the world.
We will serve 2 billion consumers. We will support 10 million small business globally to be profitable. This is 20-year vision. We also have a short-term vision. That is on Alibaba 20-year anniversary, we will be go across $1 trillion U.S. GMV. This number was not made this year. This number was made six years ago when nobody had even think about what trillion dollars mean. We start now, we are getting closer. We also have a very clear strategy. Globalization. Think about it. Today, more than 95% our revenues, customers, all the things are in China. Alibaba must be a company of globalization. Otherwise, we will never choose a name Alibaba. We should choose another crazy Chinese names that people don't understand. Right? We call Alibaba because this company must be globalized. Globalization is a long way for us.
For us to have an international business takes about three to five years. To be a global company, a global company means create value for the global. Really think about create jobs for global. Right? It takes about another 12 years. This is globalization is the thing that Alibaba is going forward. Next is urbanizing. We go to the rural areas to support the farmers. If we can improve the China way, if we can figure out the China model of supporting the rural areas, we can find the best business model support in the world. There 90% of the business of the country, a lot of countries, they are in the developing countries. We have to figure out the world. The next is the technology. How can we make our technology more inclusive?
All the things, you see a lot of business models we have, actually, most of them, not for today, but for the future. Including Gaode, including satellite datas, all the things we invested, we never invest for today. We never invest because we want today's revenue or tomorrow's revenue. We believe the future. We believe that China, Alibaba, and e-commerce, internet, IoT, so good. For the middle term New Retail. Very soon, we have a new manufacturing, IoT, new technology, new financing, and new datas. All the things next 10 years in Alibaba will go. When we announced two years ago about New Retail, nobody believed that. These two years, New Retail comes. What's the purpose for New Retail? New Retail is for new manufacturing. The new manufacturing, Alibaba is on the way. Lot of companies just learn New Retail.
They never think about the next step and the step after next. This, I don't know how many of you play the black and white Go. Joe just showed. A professional Go player, when he plays once, he think about the 14 or 15 steps. People like us, we just focus on one step. We think Alibaba is trying to play the Go that fighting for the future. This is, I would say, I'm confidence in Alibaba, and the culture, the partnership is so unique, and the people so good. No problem. Don't worry about that because I would be a shareholder like you and a meaningful shareholder. Right? I would cheer for that. No problem. The third view on U.S.-China trade wars. What will look like? Well, it's going to last long. It's going to be mess. Maybe 20 years.
Don't think it will stop in 20 months or 20 days. It's not about the trade war, it's about the competition of two countries. In American history, there are two countries that they really launched a trade war. Not because they don't like trade, right? I think Ronald Reagan, he loves free trade. He launched a lot of things to promote trade. When Japan came, he launched the war to fight against Japan. Japan at that time was the second largest economy of the world. Today, China become the second largest economy of the world. This kind of thing happens, very natural. In the Western, they believe competition improve. In China, we believe harmonious improve. We are two totally two different culture. This thing will last long. If you want to have a short-term solution, there's no short-term solution.
China-U.S. trade last for 40, 30, 40 years, become such a big size. If there's no problem, it's impossible. There are big problem, it is very natural. The one does not like it, the other guys don't like it, sit, talk. If they cannot talk, they fight and they talk. I think this thing, even Donald Trump retired, the new president come, it will still continue. There is one big opportunity, and there's one thing that for sure the world need new trade rules. American don't like the trade. European do not like the trade rules. China don't like it. We need a new trade rules and laws. We need to upgrade globalizations. We need to upgrade WTO. In the past 30, 40 years, globalization was driven by big companies, by big countries. Next 30, 40 years, the world need inclusive globalization.
The world need to system that every country, big or small, can be involved. The world need small business be able to join this trade. It's not about two countries trade war. The world need a new trade rules and laws. What is that? That is what Alibaba doing. We need to build up a system. We need to build up a trade, cross-border trade for small business, for consumers. We need to making sure everybody can global buy, global sell, global deliver, global pay, and global travel. Don't think it's impossible. It is possible. This is what Alibaba's responsibility. This is Alibaba's opportunity, too. 19 years ago, nobody believed e-commerce will like that in China. We made it. Today, we have enough resources to make that happen. We take back another 20 years to build it up.
The trade war between China, USA, will that affect China or affect Alibaba? Yes. For short term, lot of business in China will be in trouble. Lot of American business will also be in trouble because war, if there's a war, nobody will benefit. I'm sorry to see that. We try to stop it. As a business people, we know how to do business. We don't want to have a war. Easy to launch a war, difficult to stop a war. You may win the battle, but you'll lose the war. Short term, business community, China, USA, Europe, will all be in trouble. Middle term, a lot of Chinese business will probably move to the other countries. Long term, China will have a new model. China must open its market. China must have the domestic demanding reform.
I think for sure, there are two things that in China will never change. First, domestic consumption. Today, China have 300 million middle-income people. 1.1 million people, not middle income. The middle-income people will grow to 500 million. You like it or don't like it will go. Middle income to middle class, there's another huge opportunity. This is the opportunity leave for Tmall. There are a lot of people, among one billion people, they are under middle income. These are the consumers for the Taobao. I think the trend is going on. China needs to have consumption upgrade, China also needs to separate or divide different consumptions. Called [Foreign language] 消 费 分 级 and [Foreign language] 消 费 升 级. These are the opportunity. China will never change. People don't.
When problem comes, when economical come, problem comes, people have no money to spend, they go to Taobao. I see it's an opportunity. We help, when problem comes, small business, they cannot buy expensive products, equipments, they come to Alibaba. I would say good time, have a good business model. Bad time, have bad business model. Have problems, but how do you fix it? Next thing is about technology-driven economy. I think the technology-driven, internet-driven, data-driven in China, next 10, 20 years will never change. If the domestic consumption do not change, the technology-driven economy not change, we don't feel any problems with us. I'm sure for China, short-term problems, middle-term problems, for long term What do I mean by long term? I think about three, five years. Three, five years later, China will upgrade its economy.
China will really rely not only on one country. If America don't want to do business, RMB 400 billion not happy, we should separate RMB 400 billion to 20 countries. Every country have RMB 20 billion. That is called One Belt, One Road. That is called we should work more in Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe. In the future, if the two country rely on each other just purely, it's not healthy for both countries. I think opportunity is there. The world is called for new rules and laws. This thing, China need to change. If China, this trade conflicts or wars is going to push China to reform. By the way, I want to say there are three reasons why China will have short-term problems. First, we just had a fantastic past of five years, anti-corruptions. President Xi said, [Foreign language]. You know that?
It's so painful. It's a surgery to take all the garbage away, the corruptions. After the big surgery, like [Foreign language], you need to stay and lie on the bed for years to recover. We are facing challenges. We need a lot of young leaders. We need more government officers that understand business, understand economy, for them takes about another three, five years to recover. I think all people understand, right? In the past five years, China launched the biggest anti-corruption wars in the world. When you take all the things away, you need to rest. You need to recover. We are recovering time. The next is China is entering into "upgrade economy" and shifting economy, right? From exporting to importing, from outside to domestic, from real estate investment to supply chain. All the things change. [Foreign language].
For all these things, nobody have experience. Nobody know where to go. Nobody know how to do. It is the puzzling period. China, I think I believe the people here, I believe all the business community, government, it will work. In the three, five years, we'll figure it out. The third, this trade war, if we view it's a war, it's against China. It is. It depends on how Chinese people view it. I think it's a challenge to us. It's an opportunity to us. We need to change the business model. We need to upgrade the way we do business. We need to be more open, and we need to more reform everywhere, most of the things in China. I take this as an opportunity. I think if we face this positively, it's a great opportunity.
10 years later, China will be different. 10 years later, USA will be different. 10 years later, I think if we can make full use of these 10 years, start to prepare your model, doing a little bit modification, believe the future. Nobody can stop globalization. Nobody can stop technology. Nobody can stop young people, and nobody can stop this innovation. Alibaba should get ready for that. I strongly discuss with Daniel and the team. For Alibaba, we should get ready for the great opportunity of domestic consumption comes up. We should get ready for the new technology, not only in retail, but also manufacturing, the IoT. We should not focus on this quarter, next quarter, or next year's profit. We should keep on investing because this is the huge opportunity.
Nobody in the history, in your life can get opportunity like this for a year or two. Don't worry about Alibaba. If Alibaba cannot sustain, cannot grow, no company in China can grow. I am 100% growth. 100% confidence in that. We should not stupid enough to prove that we are making profit growing or revenue growing every quarter to prove how smart you are. When somebody prove how smart he is, he's get into trouble. We have to prove how young people smart, how our small business smart. We have to prove they can survive. This is the opportunity for Alibaba. When every problem comes, when Alibaba internet bubble busted, 2003 and 2004, we start to train our leaders. We start to prepare for the future. Year 2008, when the financial crisis came, we start to train our people.
I remember I took the whole team to Silicon Valley, to America, to Seattle. We learn, we listen. We start prepare, coming back with disaster goal, we're ready. Today is the same. We should not focus on next quarter. We should not focus on next half year because no matter if the rainstorm come, no matter how hard you run, you cannot run faster. By closing my talk, I tell you a story. Father had three sons. A big rainstorm is coming. He say, "You guys go pick up something back home, which is 10 kilometers away." The eldest son had a great equipment, wonderful equipment, all the things, stuff. He start to run. The second son had a beautiful, very strong umbrella. The youngest son, he had nothing. Three people went out. Late afternoon, three people came back. The eldest son broken the leg.
The second son broke the back. The young son came back with the machine, with the stuff. The father said, "What happened?" The eldest son said, "Because I have a good equipment, I think storm is okay, so I run out." The second son said, "I have an umbrella. I think storm is okay," so he went out. The youngest said, "I have nothing, so I waited, hide in a cave. Until the rain go up, I go out, pick up." When problems come, learn how to hide, how to train. Do not go out, like two days ago, Hong Kong, the big storm. You will be in trouble. This is the secret sauce of Alibaba. We see the future. As a CEO, not only see the opportunity, but also see the disaster.
When the disaster comes, you know how to avoid it, how to make use of it, and how to benefit. This is what Alibaba is learning. This is in the past 20 years, we see all these kind of problems every day. I believe Daniel and his team, they will have this wisdom to fight for the future. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Jack. Jack, if you can remain on stage, let's invite Joe, Daniel, and Maggie on stage for a Q&A. Okay. I know you guys have a lot of questions. We made it 50 minutes, enough for everyone to get an opportunity to ask questions. We'll start out with the center region, lower level. Any questions? The gentleman right there. In [blue shirt] , you raised it first.
Thank you. The question for Jack, Joe, Daniel, and Maggie. In your mind, does a company ever get too large, too unwieldy, or do you think the partnership structure can grow and can control that? That's my
The question is: Is the company getting too large and unyielding, and so that is the partnership structure able to continue to move this big company along?
Yeah. I think Alibaba will have 102 partners, and now we're only above 30. Actually, I told Joe, for the partnerships will be perfectly wrong after 30 years. The first five to 10 years is the testing. Even this, I think I told Joe, I think a year ago, I could not imagine if Alibaba become such a complicated business model, such a large scale with Alipay and all the company, such a huge business economy without a partnership. I don't know how can this company sustain. Our partnership is only at the early stage, and all the partners working very hard to improve this system. We were in Japan just a few weeks ago. All the partners there were discussing the rules, the laws, how to improve the leadership, training, and business talents. I think I'm very, very confident. This is Alibaba partnership.
It's only in the very early stage. Give us another three to five years, you will see a huge improvement.
Yeah. I think companies that don't have a unified mission and also a vision about the future that all the management team can sign on to will get too unwieldy. I think throughout these two days, you've heard us say very clearly what our mission is, to make it easy to do business anywhere. Everything we do, we ask ourselves whether that's consistent with our mission. Daniel has clearly laid out the vision of 2 billion consumers, 10 million profitable businesses, and also creating 100 million jobs. Everybody is aligned to that long-term goal. I think with having a very, very clear mission and also a vision that sets kind of the long-term target, strategic target for us, everybody is aligned to that. I think that's kind of the unifying factor to bring everybody together.
Okay, for the next question, can the person stand up, mention your name and your institutions, and put the speaker closer to your mic? I think there's the lady that really want to ask the question.
Thank you, Rob. I'm trying very hard here. My name is Mona Jung. I'm from Mackenzie Investments. We're based out of Toronto, Canada. Only longtime shareholder for Alibaba. I have two questions for soon-to-retired Chairman Jack Ma. Number one is, I think Alibaba has grand ambitions in many business segments. I'm curious, well, given China's legal framework and political system, how do you define the boundaries of corporations like Alibaba? That's my first question. Second question is, personally, in my opinion, I think Alibaba has been a great enabler for Chinese economy in many aspects. I also assume you also cause some frictions in other areas. How do you think about your enabling economy, but also sometimes disabling the economy, with the lack of better word, and its policy implications?
Well, she's repeating the question in Chinese. In the Chinese context, companies like Alibaba, to what extent do you think the government can tolerate Alibaba's operations? Secondly, to what extent Alibaba is enabling the Chinese economy, and to what extent you are maybe having some negative impact on some of the sectors?
Yeah, first
Repeat the question.
The boundaries. Well, I consider Alibaba is a reform driver engine for China. I don't think that Alibaba today would have the I've got a government officer asking me, "Jack, what is the boundary of internet? You're almost everywhere." I say, "Internet is just like electricity. There is no boundaries. It's a way of thinking. It's a way of doing things." We're entering into a new period, the new era. I don't think we should think control ourself. If it is good for the future of society, we should do it. If it is follow our missions, helping doing business easier, we should do it. The other thing is that we have to communicate with the government frequently. We respect rules and laws, not only in China, but any other, with every country we go. We listen to them, we communicate with them.
We tell them what we want to do, we listen to what they worry about. We try to making sure that everywhere we go to help the small business, young people, and women. I think almost every business we do, we are focused on helping doing business easier. That's all.