THE FUTURE OF E-COMMERCE & RETAIL WILL BE WRITTEN IN CHINA...

We believe China is ground zero for the future of retail and the West will learn from and adapt the experiments that are already moving to scale in the East.

Consider Alibaba, the Chinese Internet giant whose wide-ranging businesses span e-commerce, offline retail, fintech, online video, maps and browsers, and artificial intelligence. By end of its latest fiscal year (March 2019), Alibaba’s business model appeared to have reached peak fruition, as the company took pole position as the world’s largest e-commerce platform with a GMV (gross merchandise value) of over US$850 billion (a factor of well over 2x Amazon, which moved some $300 billion of goods in calendar year 2018), but was also third in digital advertising, just behind Google and Facebook. What could possibly change?