Two Years After Its IPO: How Have Alibaba's Ten Big Challenges Played Out? | Top 15 Annual Report

Alibaba switched to a new story — and the market seems to have bought it.

Jack Ma has finally moved beyond dispensing wisdom in shareholder letters.

At the Davos Forum now under way in Switzerland, Jack Ma sat down for a special conversation with New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of Too Big to Fail.

The conversation opened with Jack Ma's meeting a few days earlier with Donald Trump. Everyone wanted to know: would Alibaba really create a million jobs in the United States?

The talk ranged from globalization to U.S.-China relations, from the United Nations to Alibaba and counterfeit goods.

The next day, Alibaba and the International Olympic Committee held a press conference announcing that Alibaba would become a top-tier Olympic sponsor, supplying the cloud and e-commerce services the Games would use. That made it only the second Chinese company to reach the tier, after Lenovo.

All of this rests on Alibaba's market value of nearly $240 billion today and its standing as one of Asia's largest companies.

Alibaba has been a giant since it went public in September 2014. It priced its initial offering at $68 a share, for a valuation of $168 billion. By the close that day, with a market cap of $233 billion, it had briefly become the world's second-largest internet company, behind Google.

But an IPO is never a company's finish line. At the time, QDaily laid out ten challenges facing Alibaba after its listing: how state policy and regulation would shape its business, what to do with slow-burning ventures, and whether it could hold on to high profits as economic growth slowed.

Two years on, we look at how those questions turned out.

1. State Policy: How Has It Shaped Alibaba's Growth?

In the last days of 2016, the E-Commerce Law — four years in the drafting — finally entered the legislative process. As the draft was reviewed, several committee members still argued it needed more work. It wasn't strict enough.

Alibaba's various businesses have run into regulation one after another. In the two years since its IPO, oversight of finance, cross-border e-commerce, data and information, internet healthcare, and e-commerce as a whole has grown tighter — or appeared where there had been none.

Over the past year the People's Bank of China issued a string of rules: it capped the amount, number, and fees of online transfers; restricted licenses for payment and financial-services firms; and barred the reserve funds handed to payment institutions during transactions from being used for financial business.

For a financial platform like Alipay, the daily flow of reserve funds forms an enormous pool of cash. Until the rules became clear, those reserves had been one of the main profit sources for financial institutions. Alipay, which holds more than 50 percent of China's third-party payment market, is without question the biggest casualty of the tightening.

The draft E-Commerce Law also requires every seller on an e-commerce platform to register as a business — which means Taobao's 30 million individual sellers would all have to pay tax.

Business registration, taxes, reserve funds: the gaps Alibaba once exploited are closing as policy spells things out.

New businesses Alibaba had counted on — cross-border e-commerce, healthcare — have also grown harder to run as the rules sharpen.

Last April, new tax rates took effect on cross-border retail imports and personal purchases from abroad. Categories such as mother-and-baby goods, daily necessities, and cosmetics under a hundred yuan all faced higher duties — exactly the categories that sold best on cross-border platforms. Tmall International, which Alibaba had pushed hard since 2015, slammed on the brakes overnight as a result.

Regulation has cost Alibaba. It has forced changes across different parts of the business and raised its staffing and financial outlay.

But it has cut the other way too. Policy has shut overseas rivals out of cloud computing.

Over the past six quarters, Alibaba Cloud has posted triple-digit percentage growth every single quarter.

Meanwhile, the world's two biggest cloud businesses — Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure — cannot operate directly in China. Amazon has had to assemble a roster of partners to handle data centers, network acceleration, and internet filing. Microsoft has had to license its technology to 21Vianet to run in China.

To get into China, both companies had to split their local operations off from their global ones and rework their technology in the process. Their users face one petty problem after another. State-owned enterprise clients are out of reach, and under the new rules the two firms cannot even show the AWS and Azure logos in their marketing — all of which has left room for Alibaba Cloud to grow.

2. Market Demands: Can Alibaba's P/E Beat Amazon's?

When Alibaba went public, its price-to-earnings ratio was 24 times. Amazon's at the time was 700 times.

Amazon is the benchmark Alibaba is forever measured against. After several rounds of turbulence, Amazon still commands a P/E of 174 times; Alibaba's has climbed from 37.7 times in fiscal 2015 to 48 times in 2016 — already high for a Chinese internet company.

Put simply, the P/E ratio tells you how many times the share price exceeds earnings per share. It captures the market's confidence in a company's future, and its ability to hold a high share price without much profit.

Stock traders tend to read a very high P/E as a bubble. But for companies that need to invest heavily, a high P/E means they can pour profits into future spending — whether on technology or on squeezing rivals.

Amazon's eye-watering P/E reflects shareholders' willingness to believe the story Jeff Bezos tells — and that is exactly what Alibaba has tried to copy.

In recent years Jack Ma — having already won Chinese e-commerce — has said again and again that Alibaba's future is to become the "water, electricity, and gas" of e-commerce, and of commerce at large: the infrastructure. On that score Alibaba has even more to spend than Amazon.

Alibaba's dazzling IPO gave way to a rough 2015 on the market; the stock even dipped below its offer price at one point. Against its November 2014 peak, half its market value had evaporated. Slowing Chinese GDP growth, slowing growth in the core business, an intractable counterfeit problem — these were all reasons the capital markets had cooled on Alibaba. And the gross merchandise value (GMV) growth rate that Alibaba had happily cited since 2006 was no longer holding up. After Jack Ma wrote a 4,200-character shareholder letter answering the doubts about the company's first year on the market, Alibaba stopped leading with GMV.

GMV counts returns, wholesale orders, and fake transactions that merchants fabricate to pad the numbers — but it says nothing about how much money Alibaba actually makes selling goods.

"We've said GMV is not the most important metric, inside the company and out. When we were young, focusing on GMV made sense. Now, an excessive focus on GMV actually hurts us," Jack Ma said in a Double 11 speech.

What Alibaba now wants to talk about is how many people open its apps each day. In the latest quarterly report, user engagement was broken out on its own. Monthly active users browsing Tmall and Taobao on mobile had reached 450 million, up 30 percent year on year.

By now, the market appears to have accepted Alibaba's new story.

In August 2016, thirteen investment banks — including Morgan Stanley, Raymond James, and Goldman Sachs — raised their ratings on Alibaba. In November 2016, Fitch assigned Alibaba an A+ rating with a stable outlook. By early 2017, Alibaba had become one of the stocks institutional investors favored most. "Alibaba has 440 million active buyers. They can't all be wrong," investment bank Evercore ISI wrote in a research note.

3. The Economy: Can Alibaba Stay Highly Profitable in a Slowdown?

Alibaba's revenue and profit have both grown more than 30 percent over the past four quarters, with the best single quarter topping 50 percent.

China's GDP growth has held at 6.7 percent for three quarters running. Against that backdrop, Alibaba's growth is strong.

The pitch Alibaba makes to investors is that Chinese consumers will shop more and more like Americans. Consumption accounts for only about a third of China's GDP, against roughly two-thirds in the United States. Chinese consumer spending still has room to grow.

But on future growth, Jack Ma keeps inoculating investors every few months. In this year's shareholder letter he wrote: "Two years have passed. The global economy is trudging along; pessimism and hope move in step. Alibaba, too, has faced unprecedented trials and challenges."

At the tenth-anniversary gathering of the Jiangsu Province Zhejiang Business Association, Jack Ma predicted the economy would be harder still for the next three years: "2016 in particular has been relatively tough, and the next three to five years will still be tough. I told a lot of my Zhejiang business friends a few days ago: the bad news is that the economy ahead will be very hard. The good news is that everyone is in the same boat."

To keep growing fast, Alibaba has been doing a number of things.

One is to push Huabei hard, the consumer-credit product under Ant Group. A full month before Double 11, Ant Group announced that users could get a credit-limit bump just for the festival, up to 55,000 yuan — a nudge to get users without credit cards to spend as much as they could.

For Double 11 in 2016, Alibaba also stopped pushing the Tmall app the way it had in past years, folding its prime traffic into Taobao as a single app. During his act at the Tmall Double 11 Gala, Jack Ma stared into the camera and chanted to the live audience for a full minute: "Monday, open Taobao; Tuesday, open Taobao; Wednesday, open Taobao…"

4. Governance: Could Another Alipay Affair Happen?

In May 2011, Yahoo — then Alibaba's second-largest shareholder — disclosed in a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that Alibaba Group had transferred ownership of Alipay to another domestic Chinese company controlled by Jack Ma. The public was outraged. Jack Ma explained that it was needed to work around rules barring foreign ownership in payments, so that Alibaba could obtain a payment license early. The explanation did little to stop outside scrutiny — least of all from Yahoo's shareholders, who questioned whether Jack Ma could be trusted.

The Alipay affair ended when Alibaba promised Yahoo and SoftBank a one-time cash payout once the group went public.

What the Alipay affair exposed at the time was Alibaba Group's tangled VIE structure, and the risks lurking behind a flexible partnership system answerable to neither board nor shareholders. Alibaba's partners hold only a small stake, yet have the right to nominate a simple majority of the company's directors, no matter how little equity they own. If the shareholders' meeting rejects a nominee, the partners can appoint a temporary director.

When Alibaba went public in 2014, the Alipay affair came up again, because that partnership system was still in place. Keeping control in the founders' hands is hardly unique to Alibaba. Google did it at its IPO by issuing dual-class shares that kept control with the management team; Facebook did the same — founder Mark Zuckerberg holds less than 20 percent of the shares yet wields absolute control. But the Alipay affair made Alibaba look untrustworthy.

Two years on, nothing like it has happened. Spinning off Alibaba Pictures and Alibaba Health as separate companies stirred no controversy. Last April, Youku Tudou left the U.S. markets, at the steep price of $4.7 billion that Alibaba paid.

Plenty of smaller internal shuffles have taken place, though.

The units reshuffled most often are Tmall, Taobao, and Juhuasuan. In March 2015, Taobao, Tmall, and Juhuasuan were merged and Tmall's president was removed. By December 2016, Tmall and Juhuasuan were merged again, with Tmall's marketing department and Juhuasuan rolled into a new Marketing Platform Division — all in the name of so-called "New Retail."

As mobile retail revenue and mobile-app monthly active users drew ever more emphasis in Alibaba's reports, the once-separate Taobao and Mobile Taobao teams were merged too, and Mobile Taobao as a standalone unit was abolished.

The organizational structure around core e-commerce has grown more concentrated, and everything has turned toward mobile.

Outside core e-commerce, the four big business lines — Alimama, Alibaba Cloud, Cainiao Network, and B2B — develop fairly independently, raising money separately and run on a president-led accountability model.

5. Business Growth: How to Keep Merchants as Marketing Costs Climb?

Two years ago, the question was this: the price edge e-commerce once enjoyed had given way to all kinds of steadily rising costs, and the various fees on Tmall and Taobao had reached a level many merchants could no longer bear.

For a Taobao seller, the biggest cost is getting more people to see what they list — a problem that has been draining the drive out of small merchants.

In that climate, how to keep merchants on the platform was a question Alibaba had to answer.

Alibaba's answer last year was: make content. CEO Zhang Yong put it this way — Taobao should be "content-driven, community-oriented, and built around local life." More advertising resources, he predicted, would tilt toward content-centered formats; he wanted users to find "the joy of discovery" on Taobao, and to make it a real "time-killing" tool.

For the first time in more than a decade, Alibaba began to rethink what it means to be in e-commerce.

Mobile Taobao's interface was redesigned. The new version swapped fine-grained category listings for a wealth of recommended content: "Hao Huo" (quality goods for daily life), "Ai Guang Jie" (browse-the-mall, skewing female), "Bi Mai Qingdan" (a scenario-driven must-buy list), "Taobao Live," and an endless "Guess You'll Like" feed.

The choicest spot on Mobile Taobao's home screen — dead center, where attention concentrates most — went to "Taobao Headlines." This section has little to do with selling things; instead it chases breaking news, much like Weibo's trending list.

Last August, anyone who opened Mobile Taobao late at night and pulled down on the screen would land in a section called "Taobao Second Floor." For several weeks, the Second Floor ran short films of three to five minutes, each introducing a single product: mackerel dumplings, Gillardeau oysters, Ibérico ham — every episode starring a specialty ingredient on sale at Taobao.

In the run-up to Double 11, Alibaba's platform hosted 60,000 livestreams large and small. Some were run by ordinary shopkeepers, where viewers could watch the merchant model freshly listed goods and tap a link to buy without leaving the stream. Tmall's official team produced a livestream show called "Nine Bulls and Two Tigers," bringing celebrities and influencers into branded streams to draw more users in.

In the analyst call after the latest earnings release, Alibaba CFO Wu Wei said the average time users spent in Mobile Taobao had reached 20 minutes — more than on many social networks.

The stores and sellers on Alibaba's platform have all become "accounts." With that shift, users do spend more time on Taobao, and each active user spends more than 30 yuan more a year than the year before. Longer dwell time raises the odds of a purchase, which solves part of the problem.

Alibaba has raised content to the level of a "major strategic adjustment." Merchants who play along get priority placement — which in practice means traffic that is ever more expensive and of uncertain conversion. On Taobao and Tmall alike, traffic has hit a ceiling. Alibaba needs new packaging to sell that traffic, and for the merchants following Alibaba into content, it means rebuilding their staffing and their thinking from scratch.

This is a reshuffling of traffic among merchants, not the creation of new traffic.

Changing how people are coaxed into shopping doesn't solve Alibaba's basic problem. Taobao's user base is still growing — but a ceiling will come.

6. Sprawling Bets: What Happens to the Failures and Slow Burns?

In social, Alibaba has never succeeded — and has never stopped trying.

Today you won't find the name "Laiwang" anywhere on Alibaba's platforms.

In 2013, Jack Ma called on every Alibaba employee, over the company intranet, to promote Laiwang, even writing: "Anyone who doesn't take part doesn't belong at this company." He cast the campaign as "Alibaba people's fight for the right to survive in the mobile era."

In November 2015, Alibaba announced that Laiwang would be renamed "Diandianchong," shifting from a standard instant-messaging app to a Snapchat-style ephemeral one. That product, too, dropped out of the top 100 in the App Store's social category.

Laiwang's replacement was DingTalk. To preserve a startup feel, Jack Ma lent the DingTalk team Hupan Jiayuan, the compound where Alibaba got its start, letting them work apart from the main campus in Hangzhou's Xixi district. But DingTalk is mainly used for communication inside companies.

It brings in no revenue and does nothing to ease Alibaba's anxiety about social: it can't build a social life — nobody uses a work tool to socialize, and most people still use WeChat for work anyway.

Alibaba still has no social product to rival WeChat, and may never have one. Yet it has never abandoned the social direction. UC Browser was turned into a Toutiao-style news app; Alistar, launched eight months earlier, was remade into a fan-engagement platform — all of these non-e-commerce products are pushing to lift user activity.

Alipay picked up the baton next — also to little effect.

Another direction that went nowhere was O2O. In July 2015, Taodian was folded into Koubei, and Alibaba and Ant Group announced a combined 6 billion yuan investment in it. But Koubei's food delivery never carried the weight of Alibaba's O2O hopes. In the end, Alibaba took a controlling stake in Ele.me for $1.25 billion, and Koubei's delivery was run on top of Ele.me's operations. After years of investment that never took off, Alibaba gave up on building delivery itself.

Alibaba's latest earnings report shows core e-commerce still accounts for 83 percent of revenue. That revenue funds cloud computing, digital media and entertainment, and startup investments.

7. Ant Group: Cash or Equity — What Did Alibaba Want from the IPO?

When Alibaba first listed, the unit then called Small and Micro Financial Services — later renamed Ant Group — looked like a sure thing. The question was what kind of return it would give Alibaba, and in what form.

But the question of two years ago — where Ant Group would eventually list — has now become whether it can list at the kind of high valuation Alibaba did.

Alibaba's two top executives, Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai, spoke up almost in unison about Ant Group listing in Hong Kong — a degree of coordination that was rare before.

Compared with two years of being in no hurry to list, Alipay now looks anxious.

What Alipay is anxious about is WeChat.

Pony Ma recently told the WeChat Pay team that WeChat Pay had overtaken Alipay across the board in offline market share for 2016. This was Alipay's deepest fear, and it may have arrived sooner than Alipay expected.

The payments war between WeChat and Alipay truly erupted over Chinese New Year in 2015. On the back of its red-envelope campaign, WeChat Pay linked 200 million bank cards — a milestone Alipay had taken eight years to reach. Both sides then poured in subsidies, and this seemingly endless "payments war" spread mobile payments across the country fast.

Ant Group now runs far more businesses than it did three years ago, with revenue growing 87.28 percent a year on average, and says it has been profitable for three straight years. What Ant Group doesn't say is that its gross and net margins are thinner than in 2013. As competition has intensified, Ant Group has pushed into more businesses — but has had to subsidize them more heavily too.

Jack Ma has said more than once that he wants Alibaba to be the infrastructure of future commerce. Payments are part of that, and the part closest to consumers. But more and more services are routing around Alipay. Meituan's and Baidu's food-delivery arms — which together hold close to half the food-delivery market — are both pulling away from Alipay, and Meituan and Baidu are each building their own payment products. JD.com dropped Alipay from its payment options some time ago.

Hardware makers — Apple, Xiaomi, Huawei — have entered the market too, on top of a formidable rival in WeChat. From early 2016, WeChat Pay expanded overseas, into Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan — all places where Alipay had been actively building a presence.

WeChat's recently launched mini programs are aimed mainly at offline service. Alipay's bid to become a super-app has already failed. Whatever WeChat ends up doing in finance, Alipay is further from its infrastructure goal than it was two years ago — not closer.

8. Acquisitions: What Do Alibaba's Bets Say About Its Future?

Since 2010, Alibaba has planted flags across a sprawling range of sectors: e-commerce, logistics, local services, social, browser entry points, entertainment, and brick-and-mortar retail.

The murkiness of Alibaba's investment direction was one of the doubts investors raised at the IPO.

Asked about Alibaba's scattershot cross-sector deals, Jack Ma told investors during a Hong Kong roadshow: "You question why we invest everywhere. We're not making these investments for Alibaba alone. We're laying bricks for this ecosystem."

Over the past two years, though, Alibaba's investments and acquisitions have lined up more closely with its actual business.

In the past year, the biggest domestic deals were Youku Tudou and Intime Retail. Last April, Youku Tudou's parent, Youku Inc., completed its take-private, delisting from the New York Stock Exchange to become a wholly owned Alibaba subsidiary.

Alibaba paid $4.77 billion for it. The pairing gave the fusion of e-commerce and entertainment content some room to dream. In the end, Youku Tudou was folded into Alibaba's grand media and entertainment group, with founder Gu Yongqiang stepping out of management to run the group's investment fund.

A few days ago, Alibaba announced a take-private plan for Intime Retail — a brick-and-mortar retailer with 29 department stores and 17 shopping malls, about to become a subsidiary of an e-commerce platform.

Intime's decline stands for a faith in digital channels that ran across traditional retail over the past three years: open everything up to the established e-commerce platforms, bring in "Tao brands" that sell well online, turn storefronts into showrooms during Double 11, and bolt on a few location-based apps — all on the theory that this would draw people back offline.

As we noted in our annual trends analysis, success in retail, online or off, comes down in the end to responding quickly to what consumers want, and to the wider selection and supply that follow. Digital channels still matter for selling, but Alibaba is only one of them.

Alibaba's overseas deals have grown more strategic too: two consecutive rounds into Lyft, Uber's ride-hailing rival; Korean entertainment company SM Entertainment; augmented-reality hardware maker Magic Leap; Southeast Asian e-commerce platform Lazada; Indian payments company Paytm; and strategic stakes in logistics firms in Singapore, South Korea, and Japan.

9. Going Global: Can a Chinese Company Become an International One?

Not long after Alibaba's IPO, a negative ad aimed at the company ran on American television and radio. It played footage of the celebrations at Alibaba's New York Stock Exchange listing, while a voiceover warned: "Alibaba is China's largest online retailer. It created the biggest IPO in Wall Street history. And if Congress doesn't close the existing online sales-tax loophole, Alibaba will 'slaughter' American retailers — and Main Street will never be the same."

The ad came from the lobbying group Alliance for Main Street Fairness, whose members include big brick-and-mortar chains such as Target and Best Buy.

In June 2014, Alibaba launched a U.S. shopping site called 11 Main. The site appeared to carry no Chinese goods; Alibaba was trying to create the experience of American sellers selling to American consumers. It set off genuine worry in U.S. retail: was Alibaba coming to take their business?

As it turned out, the ad had been entirely unnecessary. Within barely a year, Alibaba walked away from the platform, handing it to New York-based e-commerce company OpenSky. A year earlier, as a person familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal, "11 Main struggled to win attention and support from Alibaba's headquarters in China."

When Jack Ma most recently met U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, his pitch was to use Alibaba's platform to sell American goods to Chinese consumers and create a million jobs in the United States.

"We talked about small businesses, young people, and selling American farm products to China… We'll support a million small businesses, especially in the American Midwest, selling American farm products and services to China and across Asia through our platform." Jack Ma's globalization has come full circle, back to the B2B business where Alibaba began.

Today, Amazon's grip on U.S. e-commerce is firmer than it was two years ago. By the end of 2016, Amazon's market value had surpassed the combined value of the ten largest publicly listed brick-and-mortar retailers in the United States. For Alibaba to go into the U.S. and sell directly to consumers, the task has only gotten harder.

10. Rivals: Pressure from the Giants and the Vertical Players?

Over the past two years, vertical e-commerce players ran the full arc from peak to decline. Once a big, traffic-rich platform learns the tricks of the smaller specialists, those specialists find their differentiation harder to defend.

Alibaba's content push may not solve Alibaba's own ceiling problem, but it has sucked the air out of the smaller players.

At home, it looks as if Alibaba's only remaining rival is JD.com.

But the moment Alibaba began telling a story about dwell time — hoping people would "spend more time" on Taobao — its competition stopped being confined to e-commerce.

The largest share of user attention has already gone to WeChat. WeChat's own published figures show that more than 50 percent of users spend 90 minutes a day on WeChat — 4.5 times the average dwell time on Taobao.

At the 2013 Shenzhen IT Leaders Summit, Jack Ma said openly: "When I see WeChat, I get nervous too."

That nervousness has never faded — if anything it has grown.

WeChat's threat to Alibaba started with payments. Once WeChat Pay became the more-used payment channel, the idea of Alipay as the sole infrastructure for retail and e-commerce became questionable.

The bigger impact is this: nothing in the Chinese-language internet is a larger traffic gateway than WeChat. Tencent's latest quarterly earnings showed monthly active WeChat users at 846 million — more than the entire online population of China. Open your phone, and WeChat is always on the first screen of apps.

WeChat has built no e-commerce platform of its own, but as a traffic gateway whose user base already matches the whole of China's internet, its threat to Alibaba is huge. A barely visible shopping entry tucked inside WeChat's Discover tab alone drove 50 percent growth in JD.com's new Double 11 users.

JD.com, Meituan's food delivery, Dianping — every company in WeChat's third-party services portal is leaning on Tencent to push back against Alibaba. JD.com and Tencent have also teamed up on a social-commerce marketing plan, helping merchants run campaigns across WeChat and QQ — which used to be Alibaba's turf.

Across every business Alibaba has pushed into in recent years, the ultimate rival turns out to be WeChat.

Beyond Tmall and Taobao, Alibaba's work this past year in entertainment, digital media, and payments has all been, in a sense, an attempt to claw back — one channel at a time — the attention WeChat has drawn away.

The most aggressive of these was Alipay's year-long effort to move users' social relationships into a payments tool.

At a briefing for Alipay's New Year red-envelope AR campaign, Guan Hua, head of the Alipay red-envelope project, said: "People outside always think Alipay wants to break through in social. In fact, Alipay decided long ago not to do social."

But the moment the "Scan the Fu Character" red-envelope campaign launched on Wednesday, people were back inside Alipay — adding friends, swapping blessing cards. For many users, the last time they had talked to an Alipay friend was this same time last year — during Alipay's first "Collect Five Fu" red-envelope campaign.

Alibaba has seen off all manner of e-commerce rivals. Against WeChat, it still has no answer.

About the Top 15 Annual Report

2016 was a year of upheaval around the world. Judging by corporate performance, the market leaders suffered more than their challengers.

The Top 15 companies QDaily tracks — the ones shaping how our lives change — had a hard year, and they shared a single problem: the ceiling.

Whether developing new products (like Apple's watch and car) or developing new users and channels (like IKEA moving into e-commerce), these industry leaders were all urgently — and perhaps blindly — hunting for the "next" engine of growth.

Breaking through that ceiling has proved harder than anyone imagined. The Top 15 year-end report for 2016 is not all good news.

Cover image: Alibaba's 2016 Double 11 event, the 2017 Davos Forum, and WSJ