[17] As Jack Ma, one of the founders, replied to Lorraine Hahn on TalkAsia: One day I was in San Francisco in a coffee shop, and I was thinking Alibaba is a good name.

On 22 September 2014, Alibaba's underwriters announced their confirmation that they had exercised a greenshoe option to sell 15% more shares than originally planned, boosting the total amount of the IPO to $25 billion.

[36] The lawsuit was filed in October 2015 on behalf of investors who purchased Alibaba's American depositary shares alleging violations of the Securities Act.

In November 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese leader Xi Jinping personally scuttled Jack Ma's Ant Group IPO.

[46] Bo Zhuang, chief China economist at TS Lombard said that the suspension "forms part of a wider political drive as the leadership seeks to widen and consolidate its control over finance and technology".

[47] What followed was an unexpected Chinese government-released draft on 10 November 2020, which gives regulatory authorities a wider latitude to regulate their biggest tech enterprises.

[48][49] In December 2020, the shares of Alibaba Group suffered a historic stock price crash to the lowest close in around 6 months, following the antitrust investigation into the company by Chinese regulators.

[59] Jack Ma made a public appearance in Hangzhou, China in March 2023 where he met with students and teachers at the Alibaba partners-funded Yungu School.

[74] The Wall Street Journal reported on 30 March that Jack Ma engineered this in talks with company CEO Daniel Zhang while he was overseas.

[91] In March 2010, Taobao launched the group shopping website Juhuasuan (聚划算), offering "flash sales", which are products that are available at a discount for only a fixed time period.

The 11 Main marketplace hosts more than 1,000 merchants in categories such as clothing, fashion accessories and jewelry as well as interior goods and arts and crafts and it plans to keep adding more, said the company.

[100] In June 2015, Alibaba started a joint venture Koubei with its affiliate Ant Financial Group to tap China's fast-growing local services market, each investing approximately US$483 million into the business for an equal equity stake.

[104] In 2016, the Office of the United States Trade Representative added Taobao back onto a list of notorious counterfeit platforms that includes the likes of torrent site The Pirate Bay.

[107] In 2017, Alibaba started opening a chain of supermarkets, named Freshippo (or Hema; 盒马), as part of the company's "new retail strategy," where customers can either order in the store or online for delivery in under 30 minutes.

[113] In October 2020, Alibaba agreed to pay US$3.6 billion to take control of China's biggest hypermarket operator Sun Art (SEHK: 6808) from French billionaire Mulliez family.

[117] In February 2011, controversy ensued when Alibaba's corporate office admitted that it had granted the mark of integrity of its "China Gold Supplier" program to more than 2,000 dealers that had subsequently defrauded buyers; the firm's share price dropped "abruptly" after the announcement.

[121] In 2016, Alibaba's Taobao and Tmall, two of the world's largest and most popular online retail marketplaces, achieved a total transaction volume of 3 trillion yuan (US$478.6 billion).

The software is able to access data about retailers, products, transport details and flows, a person familiar with the company's IT systems told the British newspaper Financial Times.

[138] In 2018, Alibaba's Wanli Min presented City Brain,[139] a technology geared towards urban solutions such as streamlining traffic, detecting accidents and improving transport efficiency.

According to Alibaba, drafting emails, creating business proposals, and converting meeting dialogues into written notes are among Tongyi Qianwen's capabilities.

Media reported that the company has received more than 200,000 requests from businesses to join its beta testing program, from industries as varied as fintech, electronics, transport, fashion and dairy farming as of April 2023.

[150] In November 2024, Alibaba unveiled QwQ-32B-Preview, a groundbreaking 32.5 billion parameter AI reasoning model that challenges OpenAI's o1 series by demonstrating superior performance on AIME and MATH benchmark.

[citation needed] This innovative model, developed by Alibaba's Qwen team, can process prompts up to 32,000 words long and features a unique self-fact-checking mechanism that allows it to solve complex logic puzzles and mathematical problems.

[citation needed] In December 2020, The New York Times reported that Alibaba had developed and marketed facial recognition and surveillance software configured to detect Uyghur faces and those of other ethnic minorities in China.

[163] In April 2014, Alibaba Group and UCWeb, a Chinese provider of mobile internet software technology and services, launched Shenma (神马), a mobile-only search engine, as part of a joint venture.

[166][167][168] Alibaba's Y Projects Business Unit developed the Xuexi Qiangguo app, which is used to teach Xi Jinping Thought and other aspects of the history and ideology of the Chinese Communist Party.

[192] In December 2015, Alibaba agreed to acquire the South China Morning Post and other media assets belonging to the group for a consideration of $266 million.

[206] Alibaba owns the app Feizhu, which is a platform on which companies can sell tourism services such as day trips or cultural activities to Chinese consumers.

This move comes as the company seeks to revive growth in the post-crackdown era, with Tsai providing strategic direction and Wu driving operational excellence.

[222]: 129 In May 2017, Alibaba signed a memorandum with the Supreme People's Procuratorate's Anti-Corruption Bureau "to create a clean, credible, rule-of-law market environment.