Alibaba’s former CEO just downplayed unmanned retail, and the current CEO is now standing up for new retail

Dear customers, partners, friends, all our Retail Channel colleagues, and our partners, good afternoon!

Welcome everyone to the Alibaba campus. In this venue, some very important business releases are held every once in a while. This afternoon is another very exciting moment. After more than a year of dedicated preparation and rapid expansion, our entire Retail Link business has finally officially met with the news media today. At the same time, we have also cooperated with many of our partners, customers, and brands present here for some time. Today we are also looking to the future, and hope to take this opportunity to share with you many new thoughts and ideas and plans for the future.

I think for Alibaba Group, in a dozen days, we will be celebrating Alibaba's 18th birthday. This year, we will also hold a staff conference in Hangzhou for the first time in recent years. It will be a conference for tens of thousands of people. Before such a special day, we are very happy to have another new and fast-growing business emerge.

The host said that since Mr. Ma proposed the "Five New" at the 2016 Yunqi Conference last year, the five new things, namely new retail, new finance, new manufacturing, new technology and new energy, have become a hot topic of discussion.

Among them, the most popular one, the one that is currently the most discussed, and the one that is being discussed the most, is about new retail. There are many discussions. For Alibaba Group, before the "Five New" was proposed, we were concentrating on research, experimentation, and innovation. In the past year, everyone has seen the expansion of our various fields, all of which are based on the layout and development of our five new strategic ideas.

We firmly believe that the development of digital technology and Internet technology will ultimately benefit businesses and consumers. During this process, the comprehensive integration of Internet technology, ideas and business is happening in all aspects. This is also our starting point for why we believe that we will eventually move towards the "Five New" things. The "Five New" things are happening quietly and are causing large-scale changes in all aspects of the entire business.

Because of this kind of thinking, we have been looking at what changes the Internet has brought to China's economy and business in the past decade, especially in the 18 years since Alibaba's growth. In fact, it can be said that until now, everyone has felt it, and many people are discussing it, including Alibaba's very successful businesses in the past decade. In fact, the first thing is that the Internet, as a new user to understand information, obtain goods, enjoy services, a window, first affects consumption itself, affects consumers, and affects consumption.

I personally like to use a word. I say that today's Internet is recognized by everyone as consumer Internet. What is the concept? Whether it is physical goods, digital goods, or today's local services, shared economy bicycles, taxis, or umbrellas, all things, many startups, and the development of many new things in the industry are centered around consumers.

But in fact, the impact of the Internet on business and the impact of digital technology on business is not limited to sales, and it is definitely not limited to the consumer side. Today, we can see that the development of our entire Internet is moving from the impact on consumers to the entire industrial chain of every field of business, starting from consumption and slowly moving back, going deeper and deeper to the supply side, and finally to manufacturing, and more and more to design. I think this trend is happening in China today, and even in the world. Business is fully embracing the Internet and integrating with the Internet. This is the change we see.

In the middle, what is the next level to influence consumption? I think this is what we have been trying to do in the past one or two years at Retail Link. How can we use the advantages of the Internet and digital technology to influence, redefine and recreate the entire channel, making it more transparent, flatter and more efficient? Business is nothing more than a perfect combination and balance between user experience and cost-effectiveness. In this process, the development of the channel revolution, accompanied by the development of digital technology, will definitely undergo such a full change.

In such a vast land as China, covering an area of ​​9.6 million square kilometers, the entire channel that we originally established and built rapidly during the industrial economy era through reform and opening up over the years, which I call a pyramid-shaped tree-structured channel, has brought new possibilities for change because of the advent of the Internet and the widespread application of digital technology. This is why we thought at the time that we could do a business like Retail Link, which is actually to build a big data-driven one.

What is Lingshoutong? As we all know, many of Alibaba's businesses like to have very innovative names. Alibaba has not made this business into a new animal with the name Lingshoutong, but on the contrary, the name itself still reflects the purpose of the business, which is to help retail channels become better, more efficient or smoother.

Alibaba Group CEO Zhang Yong gave a speech

During this process, the effect that the entire Retail Link wanted to achieve was to establish a shared channel with all brands and partners through digital technology and the Internet platform, so that the entire flow of goods could be more efficient, and at the same time, millions of retail practitioners in China, regardless of where they were, could obtain a transparent channel, and have the same rights and opportunities as large merchants and retailers, so that good goods from all over the world could enter China, and reach the hands of users in any city or town. This was our original intention and dream at the time.

Today, I think that Retail Link has grown to a very large scale. Xiaohai will introduce the current status of Retail Link and future plans. What I want to say here is that for Alibaba today, we are committed to building the business infrastructure in the digital economy era. We believe that consumer platforms, consumer service platforms, and sales platforms are infrastructure. We believe that digital media platforms are infrastructure. We also believe that Retail Link, which is driven by big data and is a sharing platform for the entire channel or a new channel construction platform and the entire service platform, is also the infrastructure for future business.

So I particularly like the two words written next to the screen just now. Our Retail Channel must first be inclusive. What is inclusive? I think that with the development of China today, when we built our business on the first day, we said that China does not need an Alibaba to build a new channel, or to use the scale advantage to build another black-box channel.

After all the goods flow in, they flow layer by layer and finally to each level of dealers and distributors, and finally to retailers and consumers. In fact, today, with the development of digital business, such an entire channel relationship, the entire end-to-end path of goods flow, from factory to consumer, can be made fully explicit as long as we are willing and as long as we work together.

In this process, we will find a lot of opportunities, save a lot of costs and increase a lot of benefits. This process must be an inclusive process and a process of joint construction. Only by building such a platform together with everyone can we make the efficiency of the entire flow of goods reach the advantage of big data.

Taking advantage of the Internet, the whole management has reached a new level. It is precisely because of this that inclusive integration has become very important. I just said that we absolutely do not want to leave the brand owners and rebuild a closed channel, saying that I have a channel here that can serve a certain number of small stores, you give me the goods, and I will negotiate a longer payment period and better procurement conditions in three months, and become another wholesaler. Alibaba is committed to being a platform, and we hope that this platform is more inclusive and can better integrate and play a common role with your existing systems.

At the same time, we also hope to be able to give our tens of millions of partners, shop owners in cities and villages across the country, to return to Alibaba's original aspiration of "making it easy to do business anywhere", and make it easier for them to do business. No matter how big the store is, whether it is a chain or not, they will have the same ability and vision, the same transparency as all the thousands of large retailers. As long as they are willing, they can understand the needs of local users and buy the most marketable and suitable products from all over China through such a platform.

At the same time, it not only meets local needs, but also, with the support of the big data platform, can share more information and further create demand. This is what I have been saying at Alibaba. Alibaba, we build such a platform, build this infrastructure, use this big data, and combine it with business. It is definitely not just to meet the existing needs of users. The most important thing is to create users' previously unstimulated needs through deep insights into users. When such needs are stimulated, our entire economy can develop, society can progress, and consumption can truly upgrade. In this process, I think our Retail Link can play such a very good role.

Of course, I'd also like to share with you that the rapid growth of Retail Channel from its construction to its current state is also the result of what we at Alibaba Group have been thinking about: how to make ourselves more inclusive and open internally, so that each business segment can fully leverage their respective resource advantages and capability advantages to form a synergy.

So today, many of our business partners who cooperate with Retail Connect, including our partners, know that this business was built by drawing on the best talents from Alibaba's iron army of B2B business group.

At the same time, based on such a team that focuses on execution and is good at expansion and fighting tough battles, we have completed the entire thinking based on a large amount of Taobao data, especially on the retail platform. After nearly ten years, many brand friends today and everyone present have been cooperating with Alibaba and Tmall for nearly ten years. In the past ten years, many of our collaborations have been based on how to start expanding a new sales channel through the Internet platform and how to better serve consumers online.

Today we can create a new topic, which is not only about upgrading a retail platform, but also about upgrading a channel platform and building a brand new channel operation platform. I think we hope that through the incubation of such new businesses, we can generate more chemical reactions between our various business units and teams.

In fact, I think business, especially when facing the future, first we talked about e-commerce and we said it was a combination of E and C. This e-commerce is e-commerce in a broad sense. E-commerce is definitely not just retail. E-commerce must be through the consumer operation platform, payment, logistics, and cloud computing platform required for e-commerce. An operation platform for a retail channel like the one we have newly established today will enable all participants, all our partners in all aspects of our business, to reconstruct the entire channel relationship and the entire channel operation mode based on future needs and the future needs of our common users.

Maybe one day, even today we haven't come up with a better word to express what this is. Today we call it a channel, but in the future I think we will be more network-based, changing a tree-like channel relationship into a network-based cooperative and sharing relationship.

We still need local service providers, and we still need partners in our cities like the ones we are working with today. We still need local logistics partners, financial service partners, including investors and backers, and various partners. As long as everyone can bring their core competitiveness into play and create value for customers and business links, everyone can find a place in this.

This is what Alibaba hopes to promote the construction of such an emerging infrastructure, and it can also drive it, because it can benefit our consumers in many areas of non-central cities across the country. Because this will eventually form a real meeting, what kind of meeting? It is the entire consumer operation platform, which is mainly a one-person operation platform. At the same time, we have established such a retail system today, which is an operation platform for the circulation of goods. In the end, people and goods will be combined in our various types and formats of small stores, and chemical reactions will occur. It can also realize what you may have heard me talk about, in a new sense, the reconstruction of people, goods and places driven by big data. This is what we have been trying in new retail.

Today, Retail Link is still an infant. We are indeed developing very fast, and we have received a lot of support and response from our partners. Everyone is so excited and participating so enthusiastically that we can feel everyone's common vision for this business transformation.

So I would like to thank our partners and customers of Retail Link and Alibaba for many years, including many partners and friends from all over the country, who are here today and those who are not. Thank you for your support. Innovation always comes at a price, and it is definitely not smooth sailing, but I think we are in the best era today. Our business and our technology are perfectly integrated, which enables it to create new life. I think this is the consensus of all of us. Let us work together to make the next 18 years a success and pursue such a new retail dream, new economy, and new business dream together. Thank you.

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