Takeaways from 2017 Alibaba Investor Day 1

Executive Summary

At Day 1 of the 2017 Alibaba Investor Day, the senior executive team shared its strategic vision for the company’s core commerce segment, as well as recent developments.

• CEO Daniel Zhang presented an overview of Alibaba’s ecosystem. He believes that data technology will be pivotal in driving synergies across all business units, which are driving new initiatives in commerce on a global scale.
• CFO Maggie Wu guided for FY18 revenue growth in the 45%–49% year over year range. She reviewed Alibaba’s satisfactory financial performance since its IPO, driven by strong cash-flow generation of the core commerce segments. She expects AliExpress and AliCloud to be the next growth drivers, followed by initiatives currently being incubated such as New Retail, international expansion, IoT, AI, etc.
• CMO Chris Tung talked about Uni Marketing and Brand Databank—both tools which Alibaba has made available to brands to increase their marketing efficiency. He illustrated that brands can leverage Alibaba’s platform throughout the consumer journey to raise awareness, interest, purchases and loyalty.
• One of the leading Key Opinion Leaders (KOL) on Taobao, Cherie, stated that lower traffic-acquisition costs, inventory costs and trailing costs are the key advantages that KOL-driven commerce has over traditional commerce.