Case Study Analysis: Business Analysis and Innovation at Alibaba Group

This case study delves into the business analysis of Alibaba, examining its innovative strategies and organizational creativity. The analysis highlights Alibaba's remarkable growth, its impact on the retail sector, and its strategic implementation of smart business practices, including machine-learning technology and the establishment of Ant Financial Services. The study explores the four-step innovation approach, including data recording, technological alignment, data flow management, and the implementation of smarter algorithms. It also emphasizes the role of founder Jack Ma in driving strategic changes and fostering a culture of innovation within the organization. The case study references key insights into the company's data-driven decision-making, customer relationship management, and the use of technology to streamline business processes, ultimately contributing to Alibaba's global success. The assignment explores the methods and approaches undertaken by Alibaba and lessons that can be learned from them.

Running head: BUSINESS ANALYSIS AT ALIBABA
BUSINESS ANALYSIS AT ALIBABA
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1BUSINESS ANALYSIS AT ALIBABA
Table of Contents
Answer 1:...................................................................................................................................2
Answer 2:...................................................................................................................................3
Answer 3:...................................................................................................................................4
Answer 4:...................................................................................................................................4
References..................................................................................................................................6

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Answer 1:
The Alibaba Group of E-commerce organization has created a milestone in the retail
sector throughout the world by incorporating the position in the market amongst the top 10
global leading organizations of the retail stores, even surpassing Walmart, one of the
unbeatable retail stores in the world (Maria, 2017). Since its inception in the year 1999, the
founder of Alibaba, Mr Jack Ma fostered a vision amongst the employees that they will be
able to co-ordinate an open and prosperous e-commerce system and maintain a community of
organisms that will be able to interact freely with each other on an online platform (Kwak,
Zhang & Yu, 2019). The organization in its initial days linked the buyers with the sellers for
them to carry out the transactions of goods. However, with the progress in the technological
fields, the company incorporates innovations in the fields of advertising, marketing, logistics,
finance and in various types of other online businesses.
The company strategically implemented the concept of smart business by
incorporating machine-learning technology to use the real-time data efficiently and take
operational decisions by machines (Romagnoli & Garbelli, 2017). These machines use ample
amount of computing power and digital data to generate probabilistic prediction models that
churns these data to produce optimum business decisions by using the algorithms. Another
successful strategy of the retail company was the establishment of the Ant Financial Services,
a lending operation that is bundled with the already successful digital payment business of
Alipay (Wu & Gereffi, 2018). Thus, Alibaba retail store aligned innovations with strategies
by taking real-time business decisions and expanding their business empire to stand out
against its competitors and create an internationally successful trade.

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Answer 2:
Alibaba retail organization has been massively successful in its business operations
because of the effective innovation approach taken by the company at its progressing stage,
which is automating all the operating decisions of the company (Naidu et al., 2019). This
innovative approach comprised of four steps and fuelled for drawing effective business
conclusions as well as gaining satisfaction of the buyers. In an overall perspective, this
automation approach helped the company stay ahead of the market competition leaving its
competitors far beyond.
The first step in this approach was to record every data of customer exchange. The
Ant services by Alibaba dealt with plenty of live data that were helpful in creating the loops
of feedback based on machine learning (Gulumbe & Rahman, 2017). For instance, the bike
rental process previously incorporated several steps where one had to leave the deposit, get
the bike, return them to the location and pay the rent by cash or card. However, with
inventions of QR scanner code and electronic bike lock in the scenario, the application
verifies whether the rider has enough money in his or her account for the ride and opens the
lock automatically along with deducing the money from the account (De Souza, 2020). This
process takes only a few seconds to occur successfully and thus the bike renters are highly
satisfied with this automated service offered by Alibaba.
The second step was to align every activity of the company with the upgraded
technological software process. The domestic retailing website of Alibaba, known as Taobao
incorporates the use of a tool called Wangwang that allows the sellers to launch a variety of
products in the online platform and interact with the buyers regarding payment or quality
issues (Wang & Li, 2017). With the help of this tool, the sellers in Alibaba can also conduct
customer relationship activities such as issuing coupons or offering discounts thus retaining
customers and creating new customer bases. The third step is to keep the data flow intact

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such that the in-house systems like the inventory management system and the customer
management system can smoothly function and add more value to the ecosystem (JIANG,
2019). The fourth step of the innovation approach is to implement smarter algorithms in
Taobao to guide the machines in taking smart business decisions and integrate the business
processes for an effective outcome.
Answer 3:
Behind the success of Alibaba, is responsible the smart business that incorporates the
use of machine learning and trending software models to capture real-data and turn them to
use in taking automated business decisions. The smart business in Alibaba was to facilitate
the small and medium business owners with loans to conduct their business through the
online platform of Alibaba and this financial service help was named Ant Financial Services
(Wang & Doan, 2019). The data scientists created probabilistic prediction models that created
algorithms to capture data and transform their business from human methods to computerised
methods.
Thus, the Ant services was able to take help of these software models and compared
the good borrowers who repaid the loans on time with the bad ones who failed to repay. Due
to the availability of the data from the seller’s end, Alibaba was able to track down the data of
each transaction and analysed the behaviour of the borrowers in real-time (Hidalgo Naranjo
2018). Thus, Alibaba used this smart business to manage inventories, determine product life
cycle and recalibrated algorithms to create a highly successful business.
Answer 4:
The founder of the business of Alibaba, Mr Jack Ma is one of the top ten renowned
leaders of the world who played a significant role in transforming the retail business from the
in-house to online platforms and lead the employees to a new vision of creating business

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globally. The employees at Alibaba are highly fortunate to be led by such a leader who
incorporates a far-sighted future about how the retail business should look like in
technological economic and social aspects (Kshetri, 2016). Jack Ma was successful in
bringing about strategic changes in the organization by employing efficient data scientists for
building software models for the company. He defined the concrete steps towards achieving
the goals of the organization and enabled the employees to experiment with the business
processes such as conducting market research, scaling ideas and experimenting with products
and services. The primary focus of the renowned leader was to successfully implement the
innovation and then improve efficiency in the processes.

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References
De Souza, M. F. P. (2020). A Brief Contextualization of Big Data in the International
Business environment: evidence from the Alibaba Group's transition. Brazilian
Journal of Technology, 2(2), 648-665.
Gulumbe, Y. A. B. M. A., & Rahman, A. A. (2017). IoT on E-Commerce, Present and
Future: A Review of Alibaba Case Study. Innovation, 11(1), 41-46.
Hidalgo Naranjo, D. S. (2018). The e-commerce market development of China as the biggest
in the world and Alibaba as a successful model of a market platform during the year
2015 (Bachelor's thesis, PUCE).
JIANG, W. R. (2019). Analysis of Alibaba Website by SWOT. DEStech Transactions on
Economics, Business and Management, (ssemr).
Kshetri, N. (2016). Big data’s role in expanding access to financial services in
China. International journal of information management, 36(3), 297-308.
Kwak, J., Zhang, Y., & Yu, J. (2019). Legitimacy building and e-commerce platform
development in China: The experience of Alibaba. Technological Forecasting and
Social Change, 139, 115-124.
Maria, A. (2017). Localization and Adaptation of B2B/B2C Business Model in Russia: Case
Study of Alibaba Group Holding Limited.
Naidu, G., Widhianingtyas, V. K., Alenzi, J. M., & Alfahad, A. (2019). Studying the E-
commerce based Business conglomerate (A Study Case: Alibaba. com). Journal of
the community development in Asia, 2(1).

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Romagnoli, D., & Garbelli, M. E. (2017). Why Promoting Online in a Global Electronic
Marketplace Is a Successful Strategy for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises: The
Alibaba Group Holding Business Model. In Country Experiences in Economic
Development, Management and Entrepreneurship (pp. 423-442). Springer, Cham.
Wang, B., & Li, M. (2017). Strategies for Small OEM Business Success in Alibaba. com: A
Case Study. China-USA Business Review, 324.
Wang, J., & Doan, M. A. (2019). The Ant Empire: Fintech Media and Corporate
Convergence within and beyond Alibaba. The Political Economy of
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Wu, X., & Gereffi, G. (2018). Amazon and Alibaba: Internet governance, business models,
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