Reword with no plagiarism
Company History Alibaba Group Holding Limited (also known as Alibaba Group and as Alibaba) is a Chinese multinational conglomerate holding company specializing in e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology. Founded on 4 April 1999 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, the company provides consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B) sales services via web portals, as well as electronic payment services, shopping search engines and cloud computing services. It owns and operates a diverse array of businesses around the world in numerous sectors, and is named as one of the world's most admired companies by Fortune. At closing time on the date of its initial public offering (IPO) – US$25 billion – the world's highest in history, 19 September 2014, Alibaba's market value was US$231 billion. It is one of the top 10 most valuable and is the 59th biggest public company in the world by Global 2000 list. In January 2018, Alibaba became the second Asian company to break the US$500 billion valuation mark, after its competitor Tencent. As of 2018, Alibaba has the 9th highest global brand valuation. Alibaba is the world's largest retailer and e-commerce company, is on the list of largest Internet companies and artificial intelligence companies, is one of the biggest venture capital firms, and one of the biggest investment corporations in the world. The company hosts the largest B2B (Alibaba.com), C2C (Taobao), and B2C (Tmall) marketplaces in the world. Its online sales and profits surpassed all US retailers (including Walmart, Amazon, and eBay) combined since 2015. It has been expanding into the media industry, with revenues rising by triple percentage points year on year. It also sets the record on the 2018 edition of China's Singles' Day, the world's biggest online and offline shopping day. Naming The company's name came from the character Ali Baba from the Middle Eastern folk tale collection One Thousand and One Nights because of its universal appeal. As Jack Ma, one of the founders, explained: One day I was in San Francisco in a coffee shop, and I was thinking Alibaba is a good name. And then a waitress came, and I said, "Do you know about Alibaba?" And she said yes. I said, "What do you know about him?", and she said, "Open Sesame". And I said, "Yes, this is the name!" Then I went on to the street and found 30 people and asked them, "Do you know Alibaba?" People from India, people from Germany, and people from Tokyo and China ... they all knew about Alibaba. Alibaba – open sesame. Alibaba is a kind, smart business person, and he helped the village. So ... easy to spell, and globally known. Alibaba opens sesame for small- to medium-sized companies. We also registered the name "Alimama", in case someone wants to marry us!"