(Bloomberg) —One of Jack Ma’s closest lieutenants just laid down a plethora of ambitious goals for Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
Jiang Fan, who runs the company’s two biggest e-commerce businesses, wants to double transaction volumes on its Tmall service in three years. Alibaba doesn’t disclose dealings over the platform, which helps brands and companies sell goods to 600 million-plus buyers, but it’s one of the single largest online retailers in China’s $1 trillion e-commerce arena. Alibaba owns and operates Taobao and Tmall, which hold the No. 1 and No. 2 spots in the ranking for Internet Retailer Online Marketplaces.
China’s largest company, which also operates the Taobao platform for smaller merchants, is trying to revive growth as its home economy decelerates. Beyond investing in cloud services and making inroads into international markets such as Southeast Asia, Alibaba is also intent on becoming the window through which brands from Valentino to L’Oreal sell stuff to an increasingly affluent middle class. Alibaba, JD.com Inc. and other Chinese platforms are also hawking everything from American cherries to Australian baby formula.