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In the digital economy, what are the strategies of multinationals from developed countries and emerging markets? How do regulations in the home country affect their growth? Recent digital multinationals in diverse national and institutional contexts raise questions that require new approaches in international business (IB) studies. This chapter examines two leading firms in the global e-commerce industry: Amazon and Alibaba. We compare their digital capabilities and physical asset-building strategies over the past two decades and we connect the Internet governance environment in the United States and China with their business models and internationalization patterns. We argue that despite the platform and global nature of Amazon’s and Alibaba’s activities, the recent moves of governments across the world to regulate Internet governance poses an important challenge for digital multinationals. This research features a comparative analysis of two prominent digital multinationals and identifies a promising area for future IB strategy studies.

The case will help to understand the concept of online marketplaces and the working of their business model through third party selling. The case highlights how third party selling opens door to online counterfeiting. The case well presents the need of integrity and ethics in business. It showcases how Alibaba took responsibility, designed various initiatives to curb the problem and emerged as a global face for anti-counterfeiting actions.

Manufacturing and selling of counterfeits have become easier than ever with the wide and easy reach of technology. Internet has smoothened the sale of such fake replicas around the globe. Alibaba Group faced serious problem of counterfeit selling across its various websites. The various challenges were degrading global image, rising number of fake products and numerous lawsuits filed against the company. The case study will help readers to understand the critical aspects of counterfeiting and decisions involved to run such models where the platform is not a direct seller but just an online marketplace. It emphasises how technology and brand collaboration can be used as a means to identify and remove fake product listings from such platforms, thereby preserving the integrity of business. The case also stresses the need to preserve intellectual property rights and exclusivity of original brands.

Senior Undergraduate, MBA and Executive MBA.

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CSS 8: Marketing.

Supply chain management literature recognizes that interorganizational networks provide resources that convey critical benefits, such as capital, competitive advantage and efficient strategy implementation. The purpose of this paper is to leverage network theory and identify technological innovations as the antecedents for organizations to achieve stronger interorganizational networks. Specifically, this paper investigates how supply chain technologies of its logistics affiliate, Cainiao Network (CN), affect Alibaba Group’s three fundamental network mechanisms reachability, richness and receptivity and how interorganizational networks subsequently drive Alibaba Group’s performance.

A case study approach was chosen as a methodology to develop an in-depth understanding of the proposed innovations-network-performance framework.

Results indicate that innovative technologies positively lead to network reachability, richness and receptivity. Stronger interorganizational networks directly lead to higher performance. In addition, CN is identified as a unique innovative business model.

The key contribution of this research is that it investigates Alibaba Group’s performance from a network and innovation perspective. It identifies technological innovations as a key driver for stronger interorganizational networks. Furthermore, three network mechanisms are introduced and investigated as the antecedents of organizational performance. This research also provides a comprehensive description of Alibaba Group and CN.

In China, online intermediaries have become increasingly influential in the last few years, notably in the business‐to‐business (B2B) domain. However, little research has considered the impact of these intermediaries on either the tacit knowledge or the guanxi that are so central to Chinese business processes. In this paper, authors investigate this impact, as well as the consequent shifts that are taking place on B2B platforms, focusing on the case of Alibaba, China's largest online business intermediary.

An exploratory case‐study approach is employed in this paper. The authors have comprehensive investigated Alibaba's trading platforms and associated technologies. They have also engaged 15 Alibaba users (buyers and sellers) from seven different countries/territories in semi‐structured interviews and use the interview data to supplement the own findings.

Alibaba is effectively functioning as a substitute for traditional, offline social networks. In the process, it is leveraging and disseminating explicit knowledge critical to all aspects of the purchasing/procurement process, as well as changing the role of guanxi throughout the business purchasing/procurement process. Alibaba is thus engineering radical changes in the way business can be conducted in China.

Experienced researchers of Chinese management have traditionally been wary of ignoring cultural norms, which, in this case, would highlight the importance of both guanxi and tacit knowledge. The shift from tacit to explicit knowledge representation, coupled with a modified role for guanxi, is thus rather unexpected and should lead researchers to query previous assumptions, as well as test new ones, specifically in the area of online B2B transactions, but potentially in other domains where online communications are involved.

Chinese business people are all too aware of the importance of tacit knowledge and guanxi. The potential for this tacit knowledge to be represented explicitly online, coupled with the shifting role that guanxi may play, should be of great interest to those who wish to explore the online marketspace. It may be particularly attractive to newcomers (notably non‐Chinese) to the Chinese market since their own tacit knowledge and guanxi may be less well developed and they may be in a better position to leverage the online platforms.

There is little prior work on Chinese B2B e‐commerce from a guanxi‐based or knowledge management (KM) perspective that builds on the experiences of online buyers and sellers. They chart this area and seek to integrate the two disparate streams of research on guanxi and KM in the context of B2B e‐commerce.

The recent emergence of Chinese digital platform firms, whose size rivals that of the US platform giants, has attracted much popular interest. Given the size and increasing technical sophistication of these firms, there has been increasing interest in whether they have developed sufficient capacities and resources to become global-class competitors for the reigning US platform giants. The authors assembled a database of all overseas operations of the Chinese platform firms. Nine of them have foreign operations, with Tencent and Alibaba being the most important offshore investors. The authors describe the globalization patterns of these firms and analyze the strengths and obstacles to their globalization. Their globalization has proceeded on a number of vectors: first, these firms, with a few exceptions, when they have global strategies, have largely invested in firms with useful technology or content. One common strategy has been to follow Chinese customers abroad. Second, Chinese firms have made equity investments in a number of foreign Internet firms. And yet, in nearly all foreign markets, Chinese websites and apps still trail the US firms in market share and salience. Finally, Chinese investments are concentrated in proximate countries. Chinese platform firms, while having some state-of-the-art technologies, have a far smaller foreign presence than their US competitors do. Finally, the authors consider the implications of their research for discussions of whether emerging nation multinational firms require new theories for explaining their globalization.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate Peter Senge’s ideas from the perspective of the spiritual ideal of harmony/He (和).

Following a literature review of the conceptualization of Senge’s fifth discipline and harmony, an appreciative case study of Alibaba is adopted to demonstrate the role of harmony in guiding the transformative application of the five disciplines of the learning organization.

In developing as a learning organization, Alibaba is portrayed as having embraced three levels of harmony: person-within-oneself, person-to-others and person-to-nature harmony. The authors identify three equivalencies between Senge’s disciplines and the traditional Chinese ideal of harmony. First, personal mastery and metal models correspond to developing person-within-oneself harmony. Second, team learning and shared vision entail developing person-to-others harmony. Third, systems thinking aligns with person-to-nature harmony.

The case study demonstrates various approaches that can be used to foster the development of person-within-oneself, person-to-others and person-to-nature harmony within an aspiring learning organization.

This paper shows how core values of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, distilled into the Chinese ideal of harmony, can encourage the cultivation of learning organizations.

The influx of mainland capital to different media sectors in Hong Kong has been commonly seen throughout the last decade (Leung, 2019). While the changes in ownership have been shaping the ecology of Hong Kong’s media industry, the rapid development of digital technology such as the internet and social media has also been important in the industry’s transformation. This study aims to investigate how and to what extent technology has shaped the Hong Kong media work culture.

Alibaba, the powerful e-commerce conglomerate, has sought to advance its development in the media industry and leverage its technological expertise by acquiring the century-old Hong Kong English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) in 2016. This essay, by using the SCMP as a case study, focuses on the workers and their use of technologies in their daily work practices, which offers an alternative lens to investigate the influence of a Chinese tech ownership in transforming a Hong Kong media outlet’s culture.

This case study illustrates how the implementation of Alibaba work culture at the SCMP through technological application remained minimal over the four years following this Chinese tech giant’s acquisition, whereas a Silicon Valley-style start-up culture and techno-organisational gaze were profoundly found at this workplace and received both acceptance and resistance by the employees.

This study results in a revealing unique type of techno-organisational culture change that deviates from the previous Chinese organisational studies within and outside the Chinese contexts.

Alibaba strategist Ming Zeng explains how the company operates its “smart business” in the era of business ecosystems

Alibaba today presents a vivid picture of the new business world emerging, one that operates using the data generated by the network of participants, as processed by machine learning, to automatically respond to customer behavior and preferences in real time.

At Alibaba link after link in the value chain is being modularized and reconfigured into technologically optimized networks and much of business decision-making is powered by algorithms.

Creativity becomes the crucial productive factor and thus the purpose of an organization is to enable, rather than manage creative people.

<abstract_text>In the emerging world of “smart business,” entrepreneurs and strategists must learn to assess the entire network as a whole when deciding how to position their business and create value. Then the strategy making process is one of generating, coordinating and modulating experimentation

area E-Business; Corporate Strategy; Strategic Management; Operation Management.

level/applicability Senior undergraduate; MBA; EMBA.

overview After development for 10 years, JD was now China’s second largest business-to-customer (B2C) e-retailer and the largest in self-operated sector. It was September 2015 when Liu Qiangdong was deciding whether to persist with JD’s self-operated model and the heavy investment in the self-built logistics system. JD’s business model had been functioning well. However, as JD grew bigger and bigger, it became too expensive to expand its logistics system. JD had not made a profit since it raised funds from investors. Liu had to come up with a good proposal before the next monthly meeting to convince them that JD would finally overtake its biggest rival, Alibaba which ran on a different business model. In addition, JD was exploiting the rural and the global markets, as well as a new business in internet finance. Facing challenges and dilemmas, should JD persist with its model? How could Liu align short-term profitability with long-run development? How could JD overcome attacks from Alibaba and other competitors?

learning outcomes This case is appropriate for courses in e-business and strategy, particularly those with a strong focus on doing e-business in emerging markets (e.g. China). After studying the case, students should be able to: understand the e-commerce market in China; understand business models and key strategies of e-retailers; identify and analyse the pros and cons of the self-operated business model and self-built logistics system in e-commerce; learn how to evaluate performance, strategies and business models of e-commerce companies; and extract key trends in the market and compare different strategies.

materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 11: Strategy.