“光棍节狂欢”全球化？

“光棍节狂欢”全球化？

曾经当过英语老师的阿里巴巴创始人马云(Jack Ma)为未来10年设定了一个20亿消费者的目标。换句话说，到2026年，他预计全球将有大约四分之一的人通过阿里巴巴的电商平台购物，包括淘宝和天猫。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

orgy狂欢；放荡['ɔːdʒɪ]

brouhaha吵闹；骚动['bruːhɑːhɑː]

trove收藏的东西[trəʊv]

pilot programme试点方案

merger合并；并购；吸收['mɜːdʒə]

unshackled不受束缚的['ʌn'ʃækld]

overturning颠覆性的[,ovɚ'tɝn]

Alibaba looks to expand Singles Day shopping spree beyond China（ 468 words）

By Louise Lucas in Hong Kong

With an opening concert from pop star Katy Perry and an appearance by former basketball player Kobe Bryant,China’s Singles Day sale — Alibaba’s annual orgy of consumption — kicks off this week with more glitz and money than ever before.

The 24-hour sale,which takes place on November 11（more graphically,11.11) was not invented by Alibaba but the ecommerce group has made it a fixture of the retail calendar. Now the company plans to use the brouhaha around the event to launch itself beyond mainland China.

As a China-only event,Singles Day has already blown America’s Black Friday out of the water. Alibaba turned over $14.3bn on November 11 last year,compared with the $11.1bn spent online in the US over the whole five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday,which includes Black Friday when retailers kick off the holiday season with big discounts.

The company is exploiting a trove of big data gathered through its retail,streaming and payment platforms in China,and this year it is launching a pilot programme targeting Singles Day shoppers in Hong Kong and Taiwan for the first time. Next year it plans to target Southeast Asia.

It is also expanding via mergers and acquisitions,such as its stakes in south-east Asian ecommerce group Lazada.

But internationalisation is a tough ask for Alibaba,say analysts,as it is for peers Baidu and Tencent. China’s tech trinity,collectively known as BAT,have grown rapidly at home,unshackled by international competition,but have taken little more than baby steps abroad. The reverse,analysts add,is also true: Amazon has failed to make much headway in China.

“There’s a tremendous challenge to take it global,”says Scott Likens,who heads PwC’s analytics and emerging technologies business in Hong Kong.“The model that works in China does not work outside China,or at least not as well.”

Jack Ma,the one-time English teacher who founded Alibaba,has set a target of 2bn consumers in the next decade. In other words,come 2026,he expects roughly one in four people in the world to shop through Alibaba’s ecommerce platforms including Taobao and Tmall.

These global ambitions are typically immodest. Mr Ma describes his plans for a“World e-Trade Platform”as a sort of World Trade Organisation without disputes,helping“the 80 per cent of companies and developing countries that cannot participate in world trade”to sell overseas.

His claims to be overturning the concept of ecommerce are equally bold. Alibaba is becoming a“consumer-to-business”company,rewriting the retail rule book,it says,so that shoppers,through big data,tell retailers what they want to buy.

“We will become the future of new retail,”says Daniel Zhang,Alibaba chief executive.“Product design and manufacturing will move in the direction of truly being driven by big data.”