Alibaba to boost transactions
June 10, 2015
Addressing a conference in Chicago on Wednesday, Ma said the group would achieve $1 trillion in "sales" in five years.
A spokesman for the company said Ma was referring to "gross merchandise volume," a measure of the transactions across its various platforms, which came to roughly $390 billion in the past fiscal year.
Ma's statement comes a day after he was quoted by the "Wall Street Journal" as saying that "if I had another life, I'd keep my company private," when he was asked why the company chose to go public. "Life is tough when you IPO."
The Hangzhou-based company completed the world's biggest initial public offering (IPO) in September 2014 with a listing on the New York Stock Exchange that earned it $25 billion (22.1 billion euros).
The IPO was priced at $68 and the shares rocketed to $120 in November. But since then they have been falling back on account of lower-than-expected results and problems with counterfeit products.
sri/hg (Reuters, dpa)