Alibaba founder Jack Ma is confident his company will make its way to the top as the fifth largest economy of the world by 2036, sitting behind only the U.S., China, Japan, Germany and the U.K., respectively.
Ma recently saw his personal wealth, which is mostly based off the value of Alibaba, grow $2.8 billion overnight after Alibaba Group’s value jumped by 13.3% on the New York Stock Exchange last Friday, making him China’s richest man at #14 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The Alibaba CEO told investors at the e-commerce giant’s headquarters in Hangzhou earlier this week about his plans for the future.
“If a company can serve two billion consumers, that is one-third of the total population of the world. If a company can create 100 million jobs, that is probably bigger than most governments can do. If a company can support 10 million profitable businesses on its platform, this is called an economy,” Ma was quoted by the South China Morning Post.
Alibaba, which runs the popular Taobao and Tmall e-commerce platforms, has set a target goal of $1 trillion in gross merchandise volume by 2019, which could make it around the 16th or 17th largest economy in the world.
Ma pointed out that Alibaba currently ranks as the 22nd largest economy globally, trailing behind Argentina.
But Alibaba isn’t stopping there.
The Chinese e-commerce titan expanded its big data and artificial intelligence cloud product, “MaxCompute”, in Europe to take on other big companies like Amazon and Microsoft, CNBC reported.
“MaxCompute” handles large data, such as video and audio, in order to let organizations make predictions in real-time.
“With this system, you can prevent the traffic jam from happening in the first place,” according to Wanli Min, AI and data mining scientist at Aliyun, the cloud division of Alibaba.
