Alibaba Beats Wal-mart As The World's Biggest Retail Company

By Staff Writer

Apr 07, 2016 01:59 AM EDT

Alibaba's SEC filing on Tuesday announced that it had "become the largest retail economy in the world" at the end of fiscal year on March 31st.  The Chinese retail giant company has beaten the $482.1 billion reported revenues by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. for its fiscal year that ended January 31st.

As of March 31, Alibaba has become the biggest retail economy in the world as weighed by annual gross merchandise volume on its China retail marketplaces as announced by the company on April 5th. Based on another statement from Alibaba, the company's online trading volume had reached about 10% of the total retail volume in China and directly employed 15 million jobs too, reports Zero Hedge.

"With 10 days remaining in our fiscal year ending March 2016, Alibaba's China retail marketplace platforms surpassed 3 trillion yuan in GMV. That is about $476 billion and, if the platforms we operate were a province, we would rank as the 6th largest provincial economy in China," said Alibaba's Executive Vice Chairman Joe Tsai in a blog post on March 21.

Alibaba's record-breaking sales prove that China, as the world's biggest retail market that switched from offline to online. It targets to reach 6 trillion yuan in its annual trading 2020. Two weeks before the filing, the retailer claimed that it had projected 3 trillion yuan in Gross Market Value as reported by RT.

According to International Business Times, Alibaba has completed its acquisition of Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post on Tuesday.  After the takeover, the news website became totally free for readers.

Shares of Alibaba dropped 2.23% likewise with Wal-Mart with shares dropping 0.71% throughout the Tuesday trading.

Now, with Alibaba as the largest retail company in the world, Wal-Mart is surely has a long way to cope up. New strategies and new products might be the answer to get back into the position of being the first and only largest retail company in the world. 

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