More than twenty years ago, when we established BIIA in Asia, it was impossible to discuss China’s emerging information economy without talking about Alibaba.
Alibaba represented something genuinely new. E-commerce was growing at extraordinary speed, but from my perspective as somebody who had spent a career in the business and credit information industry, something even more interesting was happening beneath the surface.
Commerce, payments, information and eventually credit were beginning to converge.
As a co-founder of BIIA, I was particularly interested in attracting Alibaba as a member. It seemed to me a natural fit for an association representing the emerging business information industry in Asia. Our approaches, however, were either rebuffed or ignored.
Nevertheless, I continued to watch Alibaba from a distance.
My interest increased considerably with the emergence of Ant Financial. Its activities expanded beyond Alipay into lending, financial services and credit assessment. Here was potentially an entirely new model: commercial transactions generated payment information; payment information generated data; data could support credit assessment; and credit assessment could support financing.
Again, as a co-founder of BIIA, I was eager to attract Ant Financial as a member. We never succeeded, although we did manage to have Ant Financial participate in one of our conferences. And then, over the years, something curious happened. We seemed to hear less about Alibaba. More surprisingly, we seemed to hear less about China’s e-commerce revolution itself.
Had I simply stopped paying attention?
A recent report on Alibaba’s financial results prompted me to take another look: E-Commerce Did Not Disappear. China remains one of the world’s great e-commerce markets.
In 2025, Chinese online retail sales reached RMB 15.97 trillion. Physical goods sold online represented 26.1% of total Chinese consumer retail sales.
But the growth rates tell another story. During the first seven months of 2026, online retail sales increased 4.8%. That is respectable for a mature industry, but a far cry from the explosive growth that once made Chinese e-commerce one of the great stories of the digital economy. The broader consumer environment has also weakened. China’s total retail sales increased only 1.2% during January-July 2026.
Perhaps Chinese e-commerce has not disappeared from the news. It has simply become mature.
Alibaba Is No Longer Chinese E-Commerce
There has been another fundamental change. Twenty years ago, Alibaba and Chinese e-commerce were almost synonymous. They no longer are.
Alibaba now competes with
Taobao, Tmall, Pinduoduo, JD.com, Douyin, Kuaishou, Meituan and others. E-commerce itself has fragmented into conventional marketplaces, social commerce, livestreaming, instant retail, food delivery and increasingly integrated digital services.
Alibaba remains an enormous participant, but it no longer overwhelmingly dominates the industry it once appeared to define.
Chinese e-commerce did not disappear. Alibaba’s dominance did and Alibaba Is Changing Again
This makes Alibaba’s latest financial results particularly interesting. During the quarter ending June 2026, Alibaba’s China e-commerce revenue declined 8%. International e-commerce revenue declined 1%, its first contraction since 2019. Yet total Alibaba revenue increased 9%.
The growth is increasingly coming from somewhere else: AI cloud and compute services 
revenue increased 45%, while AI-related product revenue continued its extraordinary expansion. At the same time, Alibaba’s capital expenditure surged 75% to RMB 67.7 billion, driven substantially by investment in computing capacity, AI infrastructure and increasingly expensive chips.
Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu believes the company’s cloud and AI business could eventually generate $100 billion in annual revenue. These numbers suggest more than another diversification strategy. They suggest another transformation of Alibaba.
From Marketplace to Digital Infrastructure?
Alibaba began by connecting buyers and sellers. It then helped connect commerce with payments. Ant Financial expanded the ecosystem into lending, financial services and credit assessment.
Now Alibaba appears to be moving further up the information value chain—from facilitating transactions toward providing the cloud infrastructure, computing capacity, artificial intelligence models and AI agents through which future business activity may increasingly be conducted.
There is an interesting historical symmetry here. Twenty years ago, I was interested in Alibaba because I believed e-commerce, payments and credit information would inevitably become intertwined.
Today the question may be considerably larger: What happens when commerce, payments, credit information, cloud computing and artificial intelligence become part of the same digital ecosystem?
Perhaps the interesting question is therefore not whatever happened to Alibaba. It is what Alibaba is becoming.
If you ask me, that may ultimately prove considerably more important to the information industry than the Chinese e-commerce revolution we were watching twenty years ago
Sources: Caixin Global, E-commerce Reporting, Intrepid Explorers, LLC Research supported by ChatGPT