Alibaba is huge.

The Chinese answer to Amazon owns 75% of a market projected to expand 20 percent to 3.6 trillion yuan ($557 billion) next year.

China’s online consumers buy over $14 billion-worth of goods on Alibaba’s platforms on just one day last year (a promotion known as Singles’ Day).

But that is not what makes Alibaba really exceptional.

Alibaba CEO Mr Ma rejects Milton Friedman’s nostrum that “the business of business is business”, namely that companies exist only to make a profit and that philanthropy should be strictly personal.

He has set up a philanthropic fund, but uses Alibaba itself as a vehicle for social change, helping people book doctors’ visits, for example, or selling cheap water-testing devices and encouraging his customers to upload results for big-data analysis.

Will Amazon do the same?

 

Posted in: Infographic of the day, Opinion