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Alibaba: Soon the (e-commerce) world will be ours. And the cloud

Modest aims include trillion dollars in transactions, living to be 100

Global e-commerce company Alibaba has set its sights on world domination, with its new chief executive outlining global expansion as the company's top priority.

In his inaugural speech, Daniel Zhang said: “Over the next five, 10, 30 years, this is the journey. We must absolutely globalize and it must be a successful effort — if not, Alibaba won’t be able to last," reported the company's news and commentary website, Alizila.

Around 350 million active Chinese buyers used Alibaba's marketplace last year, with $394bn (£255bn) of transitions being processed during that period.

However, that's seemingly not enough for the company's chairman Jack Ma, who wants that figure to hit one trillion dollars (£633bn). Ma's other pretty ambitious goal is for the company to last 100 years.

"In order to reach our [transactions] goal, we need to transform our platform into a high-quality, thriving one," said Zhang. "We have to take the time to understand ... habits, cultural differences and way of thinking. This is how we become truly an international company."

Zhang singled out Aliyun, the company’s cloud-computing arm, for potential growth. “Cloud computing is taking off, I have confidence that (it) can become as important as e-commerce and finance because big data is our basic, fundamental, important platform.”

This week the company set up a cloud computing base in Dubai, with the division also recently opening a data centre in Silicon Valley to support its overseas cloud expansion.

Last week the company recorded a revenue increase of 45 per cent to 17.43bn yuan (£1.8bn) for the first three months of its fiscal year. Of that, international revenue accounted for just 9 per cent. ®

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