Indefatigable Jack Ma, chairman of the board of Alibaba Group, announced at the fifth anniversary of Taobao.com that the group will invest another CNY2 billion in Taobao.com's Internet auction services in China.
This is the third major round of investment that Taobao.com has received from Alibaba since its founding in 2003. Taobao.com was established by Alibaba Group with CNY450 million on May 10, 2003. In October 2005, the group invested another CNY1 billion in its subsidiary. So far, the accumulated investment by Alibaba Group to Taobao.com has reached CNY3.45 billion.
Ma says that the task of Taobao and Alibaba in the next five to ten years is to create a large and mature e-commerce ecosystem that will stretch throughout China. The CNY2 billion investment will be used in technology development and innovation in the next five years and the group hopes to exceed eBay and Amazon in business volume by then.
According to the statistics from Taobao.com, the company has 67 million registered users and the number of daily visitors is about 10 million. However, as one of the biggest C2C platform in China, Taobao's profit-making ability has been questioned by Internet analysts. In regards to the profit-making problem, Ma says that he is not at all worried about it. Compared with making money, the sense of achievement and satisfaction that bring by Taobao's rapid development is more meaningful for him, he added, which surely makes investors happy to know that creation of profit is not paramount in the mind of Ma.