Top 32 Alibaba Quotes & Sayings

If we go to work at 8 a.m. and go home at 5 p.m., this is not a high-tech company and Alibaba will never be successful. If we have that kind of 8-5 spirit, then we should just go and do something else.

At the 'Vanity Fair' New Establishment Summit, I asked Alibaba CEO Mike Evans - who has nine kids! - how he does it, as well as Didi President Jean Liu, a mother of three. Evans said he couldn't do work well without the support of his family and vice versa.

As China's retailing champion, Alibaba makes Amazon look like a company that carefully picks its spots. Sure, Amazon does e-tailing. So does Alibaba.

We don't create things anymore, instead we just have virtual things. Uber, Alibaba and Airbnb, for example, do they have products? No. We went from this product-based model, to virtual product, to virtually no product what so ever. This is the centralization process going on.

Just like I gave Jack Ma and Alibaba the luxury of staying private for longer, I am now giving Arm the gift of being private. My only message to them now is take my investment and let's go, go, go.

I want to change history, do something important in my life, and influence individuals like we have with millions of small businesses on Alibaba. Then they love and respect you because you made their life important.

People tend to wonder when Alibaba will enter the U.S. market. But those people are asking the wrong question. Alibaba reckons that, in 2010, China and the U.S. had an equal number of online shoppers, about 140 million.

Helping doing business easier, we choose the name Alibaba because it is a global company. It is founded in China, but it was created for the world.

We don't believe the market can be dominated by one company in e-commerce in China - namely Alibaba. The Chinese market is very wide and deep, with a huge population.

Consumption is still going up on Alibaba. This is because when the economy goes down people look online to Alibaba to buy cheaper things.

I call Alibaba '1,001 mistakes.' We expanded too fast, and then in the dot-com bubble, we had to have layoffs. By 2002, we had only enough cash to survive for 18 months. We had a lot of free members using our site, and we didn't know how we'd make money. So we developed a product for China exporters to meet U.S. buyers online. This model saved us.

When I started in e-commerce, there was not a lot of clutter because there were not a lot of companies. Nowadays, you have to have a pretty serious moat around your business to compete with Amazon, Wal-Mart, and even Alibaba online.

In the beginning I just wanted to survive. For the first three years, we made zero revenue. I remember many times when I was trying to pay up, the restaurant owner would say, 'Your bill was paid.' And there would be a note saying, 'Mr. Ma, I'm your customer on the Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don't, so I paid the bill.'

The easier question might be, 'What isn't Alibaba?' The company is only 15 years old, but it has gotten so big over that timeframe that it basically touches every single part of the Chinese economy. I think the simplest comparison to draw is that it is like eBay and Amazon combined.

I'm humble 'cause I think many years ago people say, 'Well, Alibaba's terrible company'. And I know we were not that terrible. We're pretty good; we're better than people thought. But today, when people have a high expectation on you, and I start to worry and nervous because we are not good yet.

Asia is changing, and China is changing. The 'Post' will have great opportunities. With its access to Alibaba's resources, data, and all the relationships in our ecosystem, the 'Post' can report on Asia and China more accurately compared with other media that have no such access.

The lessons I learned from the dark days at Alibaba are that you've got to make your team have value, innovation, and vision. Also, if you don't give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.

When I was starting out, I thought about how the Internet is global and that we should have a global name, a name that's interesting. At that time, the best name was Yahoo! Suddenly I thought, 'Alibaba is a good name.'

I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name. Alibaba is easy to spell, and people everywhere associate that with "Open, Sesame," the command that Ali Baba used to open doors to hidden treasures in One Thousand and One Nights.

Alibaba is an ecosystem that helps small business to grow.

I think Snapdeal could become the Alibaba of India.

Amazon and Alibaba are changing retail for everybody. These are two incredible companies.

I think China thinks information technology is less important than we think it is in the US, economically, and more important politically. And so Chinese internet companies are extremely political, they're protected behind the great firewall of China, and investment in Alibaba is good as long as Jack Ma stays in the good graces of the Chinese communist party. Alibaba is largely copying various business models from the US; they have combined some things in interesting new ways, but I think it's fundamentally a business that works because of the political protection you get in China.

Amazon does online application hosting. So does Alibaba.

My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.

Alibaba spends money on improving the products and services, not on kickbacks. That's a good thing. It's called a value system, and because of that, we get more and more small- to medium-sized companies to support us in China.

Alibaba model is the model that I am supporting in China, in India, and even in Japan.

Alibaba is Alibaba. We are going to keep on, you know, having Alibaba as our core company in our family.

If Alibaba cannot become a Microsoft or Walmart, I will regret it for the rest of my life.

Without internet, there would have been no Jack Ma, and no Alibaba or Taobao.

I do wish to emphasize that in light of the Alibaba deal, Youku Tudou management will remain independent, and we will continue to be open to opportunities for cooperation with other strategic partners going forward.

If Alibaba cannot become a Microsoft or Wal-Mart, I will regret it for the rest of my life.