Prior to beginning work on this discussion forum, read the “Closing Case” in Chapter 9 titled Emerging Markets: The Rise of Alibaba and review the articleAlibaba’s Jack Ma, China’s Richest Man, to...

Emerging Markets: The Rise of Alibaba
What are the characteristics of Alibaba’s growth, innovation, and financing strategies typical of successful entrepreneurial firms? What is unusual about Alibaba?
The success factor of Alibaba is due to its sheer focus on development of new strategies and innovation through modernization and implementation of technology. This was the reason due to which Alibaba was a booming entrepreneurial firm and giving tough competition to the online retailers globally. Alibaba’s strategy was to use the concept of market segmentation through which they were able to meet the rising demand and preferences of the customers throughout China. For this they used a payment system which was known as ‘Alipay’. This system was an innovative idea of Alibaba which relied on the escrow. Alipay is a payment app and a third party online payment service provider. Alipay’s primary product is to work as a digital wallet which would help the customers to do transactions through their mobile. This helped the Chinese customers to shop hassle free and with confidence. This helped Alibaba to capture the untapped market of China where most of the customers were unable to shop online through their mobile which was mainly due to lack of desktop PC or laptop. Alibaba developed a portal called Taobao to help...