Thanks. I think by now you should be pretty familiar with me 'cause I get to come on the stage, be the guest, question Q&A answer, you know, with every session. That's the prerogative of being Vice Chairman. You get to invite yourself up to stage after every session. I am responsible for the strategic M&A and investments of the company. That's why I'm here to talk about our strategic activities, M&A activities, as well as capital allocation, since the spending of dollars into strategic assets is a big capital allocation-related decision.
I was thinking about how I present this particular segment. After seeing the presentation of all of our businesses today, I think there is a common theme that goes through all of them, which is that all of our business units fit together pretty well through the data platform, through the common consumers that we're serving, through the uniform identity of those consumers. I was you know thinking that maybe this is a more difficult slide to explain. Now I don't think it's gonna be that difficult. Think of strategic investments and M&A as playing a game of Go. Okay?
In the game of Go, the objective is to put the pieces on the board, on the chessboard, and surround your opponent eventually. You can start anywhere on the chessboard, and you can finish anywhere on the chessboard. In one move, you could be in the, you know, northwest corner of the chessboard. In the next move, you can be in the southeast corner of the chessboard. You can be all over the map. I think from the perspective of an investor, it must be very, very frustrating to look at how we look at, you know, how we are making these chess or Go moves when we make strategic M&A and acquisitions.
It 'cause, you know, we may not for competitive reasons, we may not always fully explain which direction we're going. You have to understand that we're playing a game of Go here when it comes to putting the right assets in the right place. The one thing that I'd like everybody to remember is what's the purpose of making M&A and investments? The purpose is to build long-term value for Alibaba. Okay?
In every transaction we do, we ask ourselves, at some point down the road, is it maybe next quarter or maybe next three years from now or 10 years from now, is this asset going to add to the overall value of our business? Later on, I would explain the only way to add value is through synergies to create sort of chemistry effects between the assets that you acquire and the business that we own. In this game of Go, making M&A and investments, what we're really looking at is that the assets on the board are. It's not a linear thinking process.
It's not like, Okay, I've acquired the video business. Next thing I'm going to go acquire, you know, a movie maker, and so on and so forth. The assets on the board are networked. What does that mean? It means that, you may have an apparent reason to acquiring an asset. Like, we bought Youku. Why? Because we want to get into the online video business. Why is that? Because we want to serve more consumers, and because we think that's an extension of consumption, right? In the back end, there's also a network effect when these assets come into the family, through the contribution of data, through better understanding of the users.
What we do is that we need to make sure that when the assets come into the family, that they create chemistry effects with the rest of our business. When people ask me, Joe, what's your M&A strategy? My answer is, I have no M&A strategy. Okay? As the head of M&A, I have no M&A strategy. My M&A strategy always follows our business strategy. Okay? I have to talk to Daniel, our CEO. I have to talk to the heads of all of our business units. Our, you know, I have a team of people that talk to them all the time, day in and day out, to really understand where they're going strategically, what they're thinking.
The other thing that drives our M&A strategy is we have to be very aware of the future technology and trends, user trends, product trends, what's going on out there, so that they can feed back to our own business and inform us as to, you know, we have to make some judgments as to which directions we need to sort of aim our gun, if you will. I'm gonna use an analogy in sort of describing my work. Think of Daniel, our CEO, and also our business unit heads as the chef in the kitchen. They are the Michelin-starred chef.
They're making great dishes in the kitchen. In order to make, you know, a good dishes, they need ingredients. They say to me, Joe, I need this ingredient. I need you to go out and find the, you know, the best ingredient in this category and bring it back. What I do is I go out to the supermarket, I go out to the farmers market, I go out to the wet market and scour the Earth to look at the most proper ingredient so that I can bring it back into the kitchen for our chefs to make. Guess what? During the cooking process, chemistry effects happen.
That brings me to the importance of integration. Every time we make a strategic acquisition or even an investment, some degree of integration is key. We need to focus on synergies within Alibaba, between the investee company or the acquired company with Alibaba. That's actually a very not very easy process. It requires a lot of planning. That's why we, well, you know, in the process of making an investment or an acquisition, we need to get a business owner to also own the project. It doesn't matter if I'm sponsoring the investment.
I really like it. I can't independently go out to the market and say, Oh, I like this fish. I'll bring it back, if the chef didn't order it. That's not right. Some business owner within a business unit or the CEO must sponsor a transaction that we do. The other thing I wanna say is that the success or failure of a acquired business very much depends on the people. Whether it's the people that we bring in and retain them, or it's the business unit people that come and sponsor the transaction. To give you an example, several years back, we acquired the UCWeb business.
We were fortunate to have not just acquired a business, but also the people, the management team. Yu Yongfu, who was presenting the Digital Media and Entertainment segment, came from that acquisition. He actually helped us integrate himself into Alibaba. He went on to help us integrate some of the other assets we acquired. The people, very important. You also need to bring in innovation. You know, synergies don't just happen. Synergies, you know, you can't hire a McKinsey consultant on a piece of paper and say, here's the synergy. Let's do it. Okay. Let's talk about some of the strategic goals why we do M&A transactions.
We have a representative spread of some of the companies that we have acquired or have invested in. A new dimension on the data about the user or improving the logistics experience, that's a primary reason why we do M&A. The second reason is user acquisition. You know, I would say five years ago, we were more of a vertical company in the e-commerce business. We acquired UCWeb, a mobile browser business. We acquired AutoNavi, a mapping business, and we acquired Youku, online video. With that, the acquisitions come with new users, new customers, potential customers for e-commerce.
In the earlier session, Yongfu talked about the two circles, there's some overlap. There's the space where things don't overlap. That's new user acquisition. The third reason is geographic expansion. We have made investments in Lazada for Southeast Asia. We have made investments in India to expand our product and services into these regions. Finally, the new thing that we talk about quite a bit in this setting, as well as things that we have been thinking about for the last year or so is the whole idea of New Retail.
People often ask me, well, you know, why do you sometimes, instead of just making an acquisition, just buy the company? Why do you make a minority investment instead of just buying the whole company? Well, there's some reasons why, especially in the China context. It's very, very difficult to buy an entire company. If someone was willing to sell the entire company to you have to wonder, what's wrong with the business? We have taken a phased-in approach with respect to some of the, some of the best assets that we have acquired.
Again, you know, I don't wanna bore you to death, but example, UCWeb started with about eight years ago with a 15% investment into the company, and then we phased in over two stages, buying up to two-thirds of the company, keeping management in place so that they continue to be incentivized with along with the metrics of that business. Later on, fully acquiring that company. Keeping management aligned, interest aligned with the asset that's coming into the family is the reason why sometimes we don't buy the whole thing.
Another reason is some of the investments that we make have high strategic value to us, but it is just not our core. Okay. It's not what we do. We will make a significant minority investment and have a very and establish a very strong relationship, both formal and informal. Formal meaning commercial contracts and whatever with the investee company. Informal meaning we gotta know the management team or the founding team really well and be friends with them. When we sit down and talk about strategic collaboration, that's an easy conversation.
The third reason why we might not acquire the whole company but partially go in is that we see some risks potentially in the business or in our ability to integrate. Most of the time it's actually our own ability to integrate. We have to be humble about this. If we don't see that ability in place, we'd rather make a minority investment first and then see how things develop and then make the full-blown acquisition. The case of Lazada, for example. We acquired 51% stake in that business. At the time, our thinking was, Gee, we really like this business. Great for international expansion. We'd like to tap into the Southeast Asian market.
Do we have the ability to really fully integrate them? Let's wait. Let's wait to see how the management team of Lazada works with us. That's an example of that scenario. We will be, I think once we've spent time together with the management team of the business that we invest in, we may take the next step to fully acquire them. I wanna talk about valuation a little bit. How do we think about valuation in the M&A and investment market? The first part of the process is someone comes, or we go to someone and say, hey, we wanna making a offer to buy your business, and they give us a price.
The price is usually much higher than what we're willing to pay. You go through a process of negotiating the price. How do you negotiate the price? You negotiate the price through a valuation discussion. A valuation discussion is fairly objective because you can look at comparable companies, you can look at market trading, comps, you can do a DCF, you can sort of use all the traditional financial metrics to have a valuation discussion, and in that process, reduce the seller's expectations.
While we go through that valuation process, what we're really thinking about is a lot of work goes into, well, what is the real value that this acquisition will deliver to us? That's really what we, you know, in the background, focus on during the process. This is what we go through in every single M&A and investment that we do. In the next few slides, what I want to go over is to give you somewhat of a report card. Since Maggie yesterday gave a report card of the whole business, and me, I'll just give you a smaller report card of the area that I oversee.
Over the last two years, we've invested about $21 billion of the company's capital, in a number of companies, businesses. If you look at it's actually been fairly concentrated. About 75% of the capital have been invested in a few very key strategic initiatives, including digital media and entertainment, including international expansion, including logistics, including getting into the O2O space, and be a more of a player in the whole sort of local services. All told, our approach is not very scattered. Our approach is actually very, very concentrated and very, very focused.
I don't really need to go into a lot of detail to explain to you why Youku is important, why Lazada is important, because the presentation in the last two days have pretty much explained that unifying theme, you know, why we do certain things. That's just a report card of how we have utilized the company's capital. As shareholders, it's your capital as well. Next thing I want to talk about is some of the minority investments that we have made because people always say, well, you know, this thing, you kind of made a minority investment. Is it really strategic?
How are things doing? Well, I'm pretty happy to report that our largest minority investments over the years have returned more than four times the original cash cost. I'm not gonna go into the details, but we've laid out all the numbers here. We spent about $4 billion in, what is it? Like seven different investments. Today they have a market value of $18.2 billion. If I ever go into the private equity business, I would probably put this chart up as my track record. No, just kidding. Now there's one thing that I'd like you to understand. There's a cash cost, and then there's the balance sheet carrying value.
We have done a few things where, on a, on a accounting basis, we had to adjust the carrying value on our balance sheet. A case in point is Alibaba Pictures. We spent about $700 million buying into this company that we used to control. Through a financing transaction, bringing in outside shareholders, we deconsolidated the transaction. Actually, what happened two years ago was, upon that deconsolidation, we had to book an accounting gain, a non-cash paper gain. We didn't wanna do that. It was silly to book, You know, it was something like a $3 billion accounting gain.
Of course, we have to follow U.S. GAAP, we had to book the gain. The carrying value gets written up. Today the stock market price of that investment is below the carrying value, but we're not worried about it because on an aggregate basis, number one, our minority investments have done quite well. Number two, we're still way above water when it comes to the cash cost that we put into the business. Finally, this is the other aspect of capital allocation. What we have done with our capital structure and the cash on our balance sheet.
As you all know, in the last quarter earnings announcement, we announced that the board has authorized a $6 billion stock buyback program over the next two years. This is a continuation of the buyback authorization and the buyback activities that we have done over the last two years. In the last two years, calendar 2015, 2016, we've bought back a total of more than about $5.1 billion of stock. $5.1 billion being the cost to us of buying back those shares. It equates to about 3 percentage points of our outstanding shares.
Today, the value of that, the stock that we bought back today, is $9.2 billion based on the market price of June 7th. Not June 8th, June 7th. We've created value. We created accretion to our shareholders, and we created value if you just look at the asset that we bought back and what it was worth back then and what it's worth now. Pretty much that's my report card to you. With that, I think Jack is up.
Thank you very much. That was wonderful. Now we're going to give a warm welcome to our Executive Chairman, Mr. Jack Ma.
Good afternoon. Well, after almost two days reports, let's talk about something big. Let's talk some big numbers, right? I think you get tired of all these details today, what we've been doing and this. Because when I talk about the future, when I talk about the big numbers, everybody's scared in the company. They say, No, no, no. No more big numbers. I've been keeping on doing for 18 years, and I think the day, you know, as long as I'm alive, I'm always talking about the future. In the past, five years, I tried to learn to be a chairman.
I think as a chairman of the company, I promised Daniel and Joe that I will focus on three issues. First, I try to making sure that this company is a vision-driven strategy company. It's a vision-driven company. I hate that Alibaba IPO. Every day we worry about next quarter, the quarter after next. This is no good. This is I hate about that. I'm happy to be on the board, joined some board many years ago. Some big multinational companies, I joined there. When they make decisions, they hate, they worry about make decision for the future.
Everybody only care for next quarter, they buy company, merge company just for next quarter. I hate that. I say, the day when we IPO'd, we have to be making sure that this company, in next to 84 years, should always be a vision-driven company. The second is, as a chairman, I should making sure the company should have a healthy culture and great people. This is the second job as a chairman I should have. The third, before I retire as the chairman, I retired the CEO five years ago. Before I retire the chairman, the CEO, I try my best to build a healthy ecosystem for this company to survive.
These are the three jobs that I took as the chairman, and I learned how to do that job better. When I talked to the investors, I said that Joe was scared and all the team of financial teams, they scared. Because I say, I'm not scared. I remember that 18 years ago, Joe and I went to Silicon Valley. We talked to over 30 venture capitalists. We said we want to be one of the top internet companies in the world. VCs, all the venture capitalists were scared. They all say, no. Forget about it. We did not raise any money the first trip Joe and I went. Since then, I did not write any business plan.
Well, it was brave. At that time, Alibaba.com ranking like a couple of hundred million names behind. We want to be number top 10 sites. Everybody thought we were crazy. The second time I remember, 15 year It's like year 2003, when we just break even. We start to compete with eBay. Joe and I went to San Francisco. Oh, no, Los Angeles. I talked to many big PEs, and when I talk about we will move to C2C, we will go to the consumer market, we'll compete with eBay, the investors at that time were also scared. No, no, you have no chance to win eBay because C2C market in China has no chance.
eBay already taken 90% of the market share. Three years ago, when we listed in New York, I say we will raise a little bit money, $20 billion, people thought it was a joke. Now, I think we need more money. More money for the future. I think compared to the future, Alibaba is still a baby. If you say in the past, 18 years, we were amazing. I think we are amazing. We were so lucky. We're one of the luckiest company in the world. We're in a wonderful industry, internet. We are in a wonderful country like China. We got so many supports from our colleagues and great team and all the things. We're lucky.
This company would love The vision is to last 102 years, so we have another 84 years to go. People say, well, 102 years is a great number, but we take it really seriously. As me, founder and chairman, I really take this thing very seriously. Every plan, every year, on the strategy meeting, we review what we're gonna do next 10 years. What the 10 years. Every project, every big investment we do, we think about 10 years later. We think about five years later. We have a three-year plan, five-year plan, and 10-year plan. Almost every year, we review.
Without that, if you talk about 100, 102 years, but never care about five-year plan or 10-year plan, you really do not believe what you're talking about. I want to tell all the investors, we are very serious about 102-year vision, that we have another 84 years to go. Compared to the future, you know, our market cap, of course, I think I'm happy about that, but don't compare to the others. If you compare to Amazon, I'm not happy about that. If you compare to the future, we are still a small company, a very young company. At 18 years old, we are growing to that size, but we're still a baby, thinking inside.
What we wanna do in the future? We want to be the 21st century, a globalized company. I would say the first technology revolution had the business model called a factory. The second technology revolution called, there's a business model called company. What will be the data time, the internet time, in the 21st century? What will be the best business model for this century? We think about is something called a platform business. We are lucky, 15 years ago, or we start to move our company from a normal website to a platform-like.
I think the other thing is that, whether you're a big company, a great company, not depends on what kind of opportunity you catch. Most of the companies in China, they're always waiting for opportunity. If there's a good opportunity, they catch it, they become a good company. When they cannot, when they miss some opportunities, they're gone. In China, couple of years ago, there was a very popular saying that Right? If you're a pig, right, even if you, if you're lucky, happen to be on the, you know, on the wing of some bird, you will fly.
A pig will fly. If the wing goes, the pig will die. I think that it's not about what kind of opportunities you grasp. It's about what kind of value you create for the future, what kind of problems you solve for the world. The big problem you solve for the world, the big company you will be. The great problem you solve for the world, the great company you will be. Alibaba think about one thing, that what kind of problems we can solve for the world in next 10, 20 years. If we are able, we can figure out the problem in 10, 20 years, what are the problems, we start to prepare now.
We'll be big. We think we are company in Hangzhou. We are not a company in New York, and we're not company in Silicon Valley. We're not a company in Beijing, Shanghai. We're a company in Hangzhou. As a Hangzhou company, the way we compete with the others is that how we judge for the future. You know, that's the competition we have. We believe the future like this, and we spend all the resources going that. We believe this will be the world problem. If we can solve that problem, we'll be great. That's the way we think about how we lead our future.
Today, e-commerce, cloud computing, and, you know, whatever business we have, all decided by 10 years ago, 15 years ago. People say you're great today. No, I think we're not great today. We were great 10 years ago. 10 years ago, we believe this thing will happen. 15 years ago, we believe this thing will happen. Eight years ago, we believe cloud computing, big data will come, we start to make decisions 18, 8, 15, and 10 years ago. We put all the resources, all the talents, everything, just to focus on.
I said to many, the entrepreneurs, if there are nine rabbits on the ground, if you want to catch one rabbit, you should not change the rabbit. You should change yourself. Just stick to one rabbit. That's the way to do it. We had our vision 10, 15 years ago. We know this is where we wanna go, and we do anything, change ourselves, to be sure that we catch that rabbit. We think globalization, anti-globalization, anti-trade, and trade protection is a problem. It's gonna be a big problem in the future. How we can help globalize? We think globalization is a great thing.
You know, it's only, like, 20, 30 years. In the past 20, 30 years, globalization helped a lot of developing countries, helped a lot of big companies. In the past 30 years, globalization, global trade was controlled by 60,000 big companies, and which make rich company richer, big company bigger, and small companies, small countries, SMEs, all in trouble. The young people didn't have a chance. We think about, if we can make globalization, international trade, cross-border trade more inclusive, making sure every small business has the chance, making sure every young people has the chance, that we can solve a lot of problems.
People worry about jobs because the new technology come will take away a lot of jobs. We think if we can make globalization more inclusive, then we can create more jobs. If a small business, you can only sell your products to your neighbors in your county. What if you can sell products across the ocean, across the country to the others? That might be a great solution for the job creation and a great solution for today's problems. That is why we've been focused. We believe that we can do something for globalized trade, for globalization.
We were helping not 60,000 big companies. We can help 6 million or 60 million small business, that they can sell and buy cross-border. This is what we wanna do. The second thing is that the world economy has never been sustainable. How can we make our technology to enable the global trade, global business to be more sustainable? Meanwhile, how we can make business people and people of the next generation happy and healthier? These are the three values, three problems, that we want to solve.
The world is not globalization, people don't like it, but we think we should make it inclusive. We should make global business more sustainable. We should make the people in the future are more happy and healthier. These are three problems, and these are three values we wanna create. In this way, that we definitely want to be a company that can help globalization. E-commerce will be the best solution. If you want to do e-commerce, you definitely have a good technology, good people with good vision.
Five years ago, when Alibaba, when the Taobao Tmall GMV just crossed $170 billion GMV, which is CNY 1 trillion. I had a crazy idea. I say, what if we can make a $1 trillion by the 20-year anniversary of Alibaba? That is year 2019, because we were born in 1999. We said year 2019, today we call year 2020 fiscal year, right? We should meet the $1 trillion. Everybody will say, yes, why not? I hate the exchange rate. We never put that in the count. At that time, it's like, you know, $1 is like CNY 6, but now, like, $1 close to $7. We have CNY 1 trillion gap, which is not easy. I'm happy about Daniel said, target is a target.
KPI is a KPI. Let's do it. If we can, if we do in a normal way, we will never meet it. The next three years, our small target is go cross $1 trillion. $1 trillion, nobody, no company in the whole world in the last 100 years, people can't imagine any company can do it. We have to do in a very innovative way. We have to do, make it happen. If we cannot make it happen, we'll be in trouble. The trouble is that we got a big goal, that is in year 2036, we will be a company that can serve 2 billion populations, 2 billion consumers. We want to be a company that can create 100 million jobs for the world.
We want to be a company that can support 10 million profitable business on the Alibaba platform. What is that? If a company can serve 2 billion consumers, that is one-third of the total population of the world. If the company can create 100 million jobs, this is probably bigger than any most of government can do. If your company can support 10 million profitable business on its platform, this is called economy. Today, Alibaba's GMV, which is I mean, commerce size. Alibaba GMV is ranking 22nd economy of the world. We are just behind Argentina, right?
I think when we cross $1 trillion, we are sort of ranking 17 or 16. In year 2036, if we can make $2.11 billion, we will be ranking number 5 economy of the world. What does number 5 mean? Number one, I don't know China or U.S. If just say U.S.A., China, Europe, maybe Japan, and us. Well, people say this is too big. It costs nothing to imagine, right? If you even do not dare to vision it, if you do not think about it. 18 years ago, when 18 people in my apartment, we altogether less than $50,000, we start to think that one day we will be the top 10 business, I mean, website of the world.
We were brave at that time. Today, we have 55,000 people. We have a lot of money. We have a lot of talents, technology, data. We have a lot of believers, users, or we have a half billion people already using our services. Why not think about it big? Of course, we do not own that economy. The fifth-largest economy, we envision. We believe if Alibaba cannot do it, the other people will do it. If we can work with other people, make this global new economy, it's based on internet. Using this economy, we were helping global buy, global sell, global pay, global logistics, and global travel.
Today, many cities in China, you don't need to do anything. Just a mobile phone, you can travel all around the world. We believe in couple of years, when you have a passport and mobile phone, you can travel all around the world. Five years later, you don't need a passport, maybe. Just a mobile phone or just your face recognition. Travel around the world based on your data. This thing could happen. We have to open our mind and think about it. This is what we wanna do, that we will globalize the business.
We will make globalization more inclusive. We will make everybody If you have a mobile phone, at that time, whether it's a mobile phone or not, if you have a, like a gadget, like a mobile phone, you can global buy anything you want. 'Cause we hope, as Daniel see, must have told you that in next eight years, because this goal was put two years ago, anywhere in China, you want the buy things online, within 24 hours you will receive it. Anywhere in the world, if you order online, you will receive a product within 72 hours. I met a girl in Russia a few weeks ago.
She said, Wow, AliExpress was great. I said, why is it great? She said, the speed was fantastic. I said, what do you mean by fantastic? She said, only nine days I received my products. Remember, like two years ago, it took almost two months and a half for a Russian girl to receive a product from China to Russia through AliExpress. Nine days for them is like a rocket. We will make it happen anywhere in the world. For Daniel, I told Daniel, the vision, one of the vision for Daniel is 24 hours anywhere in China. Beijing faster, Shanghai faster, Guangzhou faster.
To my standard, that's not count. Tibet faster, Mongolia faster, Yunnan faster, Guizhou faster. That is called speed. We have to make a network first. When network is invest is work, the network effect comes, the speed is gonna be speed up. I would say, globally we will build up logistic network that within 72 hours, anywhere you order. There's no big difference between you order things here from Mongolia, you order things from here to Argentina. 72 hours. We have using technology, have to be creative, have to be connecting all the logistic and warehouses, all the companies, bring business to them, let them join the network.
This is something that we wanna do. We want any small business, they can go across the board. You know, today, most of the free trade zone are designed for big companies. We are encouraging every government to build their free trade zone for small business. The big companies can go across the custom offices within 24 hours. For small business, maybe seven weeks. How we can encourage government? How we can encourage the policy makers make globalization more inclusive, supporting millions and millions of small business can buy and sell across the board?
This is called EWTP, not EWTO. EWTO is organization, very complicated. Platform is something we can work on. Also payment. I think Eric has told you about, we are building up a network that we were making sure every small business, every individual, in next 10, 20 years, the financial should be inclusive. We believe TechFin, not the FinTech. Right? FinTech is a financial institute, try to improve their power. TechFin is to enable everybody to be able to reach the financing. We are technology companies to making sure that everybody is equal.
Everybody should be able to reach the money they want. Not those people, don't need the money come. You don't need the money, you never receive it. This is something we wanna bring to the world. I've been working very hard, shareholders. I've been really working hard. Last year, I fly in the air 870 hours. 876 hours. Traveling and meeting, visiting 40 countries, and seeing all the prime minister, like, diplomatic minister. I'm happy that I enjoying doing that. I got a lot of response from those countries. Malaysia, as the first country, has already started the EWTP, the testing country.
We will try to make this thing more and more popular, and we will try, I'm sure that more and more young people, women, small business, government officers will join us. This is something that I'm excited about. If we really can make the fifth largest economy, we need two billion population. As the 2 billion population, China will probably get 800 million something. We need 1.2 billion people from outside China. This is why we go Southeast Asia, One Belt, One Road. Imagine the other thing, which you think about. President Xi Jinping announced in Davos meeting, next five years, China is going to import $8 trillion.
This One Belt, One Road conference just happened last month. The China government again said, in next five years, China will import $8 trillion. Guys, what does $8 trillion mean? 16 Walmart global. China is changing very fast from exporting country to import countries. This $8 trillion means a lot to China, means a lot to the world, of course, means a lot to a country, a company like Alibaba. 'Cause eCommerce probably will be the solution. If you go to Canton Fair or Las Vegas Fair to sell $8 trillion, it's impossible. Let's think about the other. The globalization, absolutely we are excited.
Absolutely it's a huge opportunity. To reach, go across, $1 trillion next three years, we need a lot of money from GMV from these countries. That's why Lazada, AliExpress, all going to move very fast. The second opportunity I would say is China opportunity. China today have more than 300 million middle class. They are middle class, but the spending capability, spending, you know, capability is very low. China is going to reach, with today's growth, in five to six years, we're going to have 500 million middle class. That means almost close to two American population.
This is going to be a huge change for this economy. China today is shifting from investment economy, export economy, to domestic consumption. Domestic consumption, definitely today e-commerce will take a huge role inside that. We think that consumption upgrading, importing is the key. We're gonna do a lot on that. China, the other thing is, which I told last year, that a lot of people did not agree, I say, in next 20 years, next 10 years, China is gonna facing Five New. New Retail, New Manufacturing, New Finance, New Technology, and New Energy. The New Retail, I think you have heard by Daniel yesterday talk about in detail.
The essence of New Retail is like shifting from selling products to people to serving the people. From selling to services. New Retail is gonna be big. The other is New Manufacturing. I heard people ask about the questions about New Manufacturing. The way we, eight years ago, cloud computing and big data, eight years ago we make decision. That because we know that in the future, retail based on data. Manufacturing is based data. In the past 3 years, our company discussed a lot, much more, than most of people in the world about IoT. We believe IoT.
We think IoT is the future, is the solution of solving the manufacturing upgrading problem of China. Today, a lot of people in America talk about AI, big data, especially AI. It sounds like if you do not talk about AI, you are in trouble. Honestly, we never talk about AI in the company. I hate people talk about AI in the company. AI normally discussed by those company without data. AI is normally talked by the academic professors. We've been using that for long, long time. I remember when our first CEO of Alipay. You know, the Alipay transaction's big. Lot of thieves coming.
In order to 'Cause if we, like Alipay today's transactions amount, we need at least 2,000 policemen, maybe 20,000 policemen. You cannot catch all the bad guys, because when you have such a large transaction, all the bad guys come. We use machine learnings. We hired over, I think in our company, more than 200 policemen joined us. They are all the expert of criminal behaviors. We teach computers to learn how to catch criminals. If you are a thief, a great thief can figure out 10 ways of stealing money. This is a great thief. Normally, a thief can only figure out two or three ways.
Computer can learn 20,000 or 2 million ways. When the thief was think he is so smart with the idea, the machine will say, I have seen this 100 times. I think doing good thing, to me, AI doing good things for the other people. Normally irrational. I just love you. I like you. I do things without thinking. All the bad guys do bad things with logic. If you have a logic, AI can do better job than you are. To my understanding, machine learning and artificial intelligence is the better way to arrest bad guys. We've been doing that on the e-commerce and Alipay for many years, and we never call it AI.
I think that the IoT. It's gonna be big because in the past years, machine all drink electricity. Next 20 years, machine will drink datas. In the past 20 years, we make people like a machine, and next 20 years, we will make machine like a people. This is gonna be big. The Made in China 2025 and the Industry 4.0, this all moving to the datas. New Finance. New Finance, I think Alipay has already Ant Financial already told about that. We are TechFin, we are not the FinTech. FinTech is still old financing. FinTech still try to control 20/80. The 20/80 is a special date for China.
Big banks, they serve 20% of the big companies, and they made 80% profit. For us, we want to do 80/20. We want to serve 80% of the small business, 80% of the consumers that never got a chance to reach the financing. We are happy about 20% profit. Joe, is that right? 20% is good enough to me. Also, the New Technology. We are moving faster on cloud computing. We are moving faster on the mobile technology. We also invest on the operating systems, and we are having a lot of, you know, big vision that trying to be sure that Alibaba is a real high-tech company.
I told the team, the company, Alibaba, should set a model. You know, like a model is Google. People say, you know, Robin is engineer. Pony is a engineer. Jack Ma is a teacher. Is a salesman. No, I'm not a salesman. I'm a evangelist. I want to say is that evangelists believe in the future. Engineers believe in technology. I believe technology is for the future. I may not be a good engineer. I may not be a good engineer. I'm actually, I'm not a engineer, but I respect engineers than most of the engineer. I respect them. I listen to them. I admire them. We communicated better.
I tell, This is something, if you do in that way, you can solve lot of problems. If you do this way, you can solve the engineer problems. They love that. I work very well with all the engineers. One of the examples we did is Ali Cloud Computing. Dr. Wang Jian and I working perfectly. Most of engineers hate Cloud Computing 18 years ago because they think this thing does not work. I believe this thing work. I never barging with engineers how to make things happening, but I tell, this is the direction supposed to be. We're lucky, and I want to say, we should build technology that is great for the future.
We should build technology that solve the problem. Alibaba is not the company that, there's some money there, so we should go there. There's opportunity there. We go there. We grow from Taobao. Why we go Alipay? If we do not have Alipay, we will collapse. We do the Alipay. When we have Taobao and Alipay, we say, If we do not have Cainiao Logistics, we'll collapse, so we do logistics. We say, now, if we do not have the cloud computing, all the traffic will make us collapse. When we do all these things, we find out we are not happy. If we're not happy, nobody will be happy. How can we make people happy?
Entertainment might be happy. We do things because customer need, not because this is something that will make money. Today, the more things we do, the more human nature we understand. The more things we work with partner with others, we know our problem, our partner's problem, our customer's problem. We want to be the customer- the company that solve the customer's problem. With that much opportunities in China, the Five New, the grow fast growing China economy, and China will be, is the second-largest economy, might be the first-largest economy in next, whatever years.
Do you think China should have a few companies that are the top tier of the world? People say, Oh, Alibaba's a Chinese company. No. Yeah, we are, we are born in China, but we're grow for 21st century. We grow for the world. We are born in China, but we made this company for the global. We having a great plan for globalization. In our company, every year, we will have at least four meetings amount of 300 senior management of Alibaba. We say two in Chinese, two in English. If you cannot understand, I'm sorry, go back to learn English.
We will see more and more international colleagues here. We will send all the Chinese colleagues go outside to support. As the second largest economy, we think China will have company like Walmart, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Apple, that influence the world in the past years. In the last century, there are so many American companies that influence the world and be the number one. We think China may have the chance to have a couple of them, and Alibaba hopefully will be the real top ten of the world. What will we have? You see all the things what we have today.
We think we have our people, we have culture, and the very important, the other assets we have is we have the data. If you look at the world today, I don't know which country or which company in the world that has such rich data than us have. People say, you are everywhere. We are economy. You invest anywhere. You have no logic. We have a logic. You don't have a logic for economy. Because we have an economy logic. You only have to think about People say, you are Amazon. No, we are not Amazon. Amazon is Amazon. Alibaba is economy. We are not a Google. Of course, we have Amazon business.
We have Google business. We have a physical business. We have most of business you can see because we are economy. The economy, to support this economy growth traditionally is the soil, water. The land, the water, and the environment. For our virtual economy, the most important thing is data. Data is our water and soil. The other is network. The other is environment. The value we create for our Alibaba users. This is the datas that's why, there's a conference. There are a lot of conference in the future because Alibaba own that much data. We know datas, you have to be careful the privacy.
You have to have care for the data security. I saw one of the questions that, how many datas that you have not used yet? 99.99 we have not used yet. 'Cause we don't know how to use these datas. This is something that we did eight years ago, where we made decision for Alibaba become a data company. We say, we don't know how to make money out of the data, we know in the future, no company, no country, no business can survive without data. We have to focus on data. Today, if we cannot figure out the solving the problem of privacy and security, we should not using data.
The data just improve our business. How? It's like when you conserve all the oil, what do you worry about? We never worry about we have more data. We will continue to making sure the data is good for society, for the globalization to be more inclusive, sustainable, and happy and healthy. That's it. Something I wanna say, we have data, we have a people, and great culture. I will say the other thing is I'm happy about the most powerful organization, the governing of the company. We are partnership-driven. Our partnership are so different from the investors partners and lawyers partners.
Joe probably can share next time about our partner system. Because the partner system culture, we guarantee that our company is a vision-driven strategy. We have to be vision-driven. We have to solve problem for the world. We have to create value for the customers. We have to be happy all the time. That's it. That's what I wanna say. Hope to see you again next year. Last year, we have, like, 200 investors. This year, we have, like, close to 400. We hope we can have 10,000 investors someday here.
Not about data, not about the data on the screen, not about the, not about the results and, you know, forecast, like Maggie said. People in the future come here, we want to share how we do the business and how we go across the data from IT to DT, how we survive, what the experience. We want to be the company that can share experience with you guys. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Jack. We ask Jack to stand by, and then we're gonna invite Joe, Maggie, and Daniel back on the stage for our Q&A.