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Are you Alibaba-literate? 5 things to know about company

Alibaba is the world’s biggest e-commerce platform. Over 420 million people scooped up $485 billion worth of stuff last fiscal year on Alibaba’s sites. The company went public in 2014, raising $25 billion, more than Facebook, in the largest offering in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. Here are key things to know:

What is Alibaba?
Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms cater to both Chinese and global consumers, though the majority of its transactions are generated domestically. At its heart is Taobao, a Chinese consumer-to-consumer website much like eBay. Tmall offers merchants official storefronts to consumers in China. Alibaba and AliExpress connect businesses in China with buyers around the world.

What else does Alibaba do? Alibaba has a financial affiliate that also runs a leading online payment platform called Alipay. Alibaba has stakes in Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, as well as Youku Tudou, a video platform akin to YouTube. It’s also a major backer of Didi Chuxing, China’s dominant ride-hailing app and an investor in Uber rival Lyft in the U.S.
It has made investments worth hundreds of millions of dollars each into various sectors including Singapore’s postal service, the photo- and video-sharing app Snapchat, newspaper publisher South China Morning Post group and upstart Chinese smartphone maker Meizu. It’s building up a cloud computing and internet infrastructure business, setting up data centers in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.

Who’s behind the company? Alibaba was founded in the living room of Jack Ma, a former English teacher. A self-made billionaire, Ma is a folk hero to some Chinese.

Why do some people hate Alibaba? There is widespread suspicion that Alibaba knowingly profits from the sale of fakes on its platforms _ a point Gucci America, among others, has made in an ongoing U.S. lawsuit. Some brands complain about how slow and difficult it is to get fakes removed from Alibaba’s sites. Alibaba says it has spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-counterfeiting and that it is constantly trying to improve its systems.

Where’s the name from?
Ma wanted a name people around the world would recognize. He asked a waitress in a San Francisco restaurant if she recognized the name Alibaba and she said, “Yes, open sesame!” Drawn from “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” the name stuck.