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65иииятиивитвиииияивиии
DOI 10.47576/2712-7516_2021_2_2_6 UDC 330.18
TRANSFORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE FINANCIAL ECOSYSTEM OF THE "ALIBABA GROUP" CORPORATION IN THE POST-DEMIC PERIOD
Tang Zhenlian,
Master's student of the Department of Finance, Monetary Circulation and Credit, Ural State Economic University, Russia, Yekaterinburg, e-mail: zhenliantt@gmail. com
Razumovskaya Elena Alexsandrovna,
Doctor of Economics, Associate Professor, Professor of the Department of Finance, Money Circulation and Credit, Ural Federal University; Professor of the Department of Finance, Monetary Circulation and Credit, Ural State University of Economics, Russia, Yekaterinburg, e-mail: [email protected]
After the outbreak of a new coronavirus epidemic, the pace of development of the traditional sectors of the world economy, assuming a contact format of work, has seriously slowed down, while the Internet economy has begun to develop at an even faster pace. However, as the number of users increased and the epidemic slowed down, new challenges popped up, in particular, insufficient control over Internet operations became apparent. This challenge is at the center of attention not only of the state, but also of e-commerce companies such as Alibaba. In this article, the authors have made an attempt to analyze the development of the Internet commerce industry based on business and financial ecosystems. The object of the analysis is the Alibaba Group company, the subject is the models of business platforms implemented in Internet commerce. The result of the efforts of the authors was the presentation of a business map, a scenario of the workflow of the cloud platform of Alibaba and the "ecosystem map" of Alibaba and the mechanism of the financial ecosystem of the e-commerce company Alibaba. The presented results are intended to contribute to the stable and sustainable functioning of the e-commerce industry in two aspects: promoting innovation in digital infrastructure based on a business model combining online + offline in the field of retail and improving the cloud platform of the financial ecosystem. Taking into account the aspect of international cooperation in the work on the presented study, the authors hope that it will arouse interest in the Russian Federation, since the degree of integration of the countries of the world into the system of international online transactions in all areas - from trade to digital financial transactions will inevitably continue to grow, which means a collision countries with similar challenges.
Keywords: business and financial ecosystems; Internet commerce; Alibaba Pandemic.
УДК 330.18
ТРАНСФОРМАЦИЯ И РАЗВИТИЕ ФИНАНСОВОЙ ЭКОСИСТЕМЫ КОРПОРАЦИИ «ALIBABA GROUP» В ПОСТПОДЕМИЧЕСКИЙ ПЕРИОД
Тан Чжэньлянь,
магистрант кафедры финансов, денежного обращения и кредита, Уральский государственный экономический университет, Россия, г. Екатеринбург, e-mail: [email protected]
Разумовская Елена Александровна,
доктор экономических наук, доцент, профессор кафедры финансов, денежного обращения и кредита, Уральский федеральный университет, Россия, г. Екатеринбург; профессор кафедры финансов, денежного обращения и кредита, Уральский государственный экономический университет, Россия, г. Екатеринбург, e-mail: [email protected]
После вспышки новой коронавирусной эпидемии темпы развития традиционных отраслей мировой экономики, предполагающие контактный формат работы, серьезно сократились, при этом интернет-экономика стала развиваться еще более быстрыми темпами. Однако по мере увеличения количества пользователей и одновременном замедлении эпидемии возникли новые вызовы, в частности, стал очевидным недостаточный контроль за интернет-операциями. Этот вызов находится в центре внимания не только государства, но и компаний интернет-коммерции, таких как Alibaba. В статье авторами предпринята попытка проведения анализа развития индустрии интернет-коммерции на основе бизнес и финансовых экосистем. Объектом анализа выступает компания «Alibaba Group», предметом - модели бизнес-платформ, реализуемые в интернет-коммерческой деятельности. Результатом усилий авторов стало представление бизнес-карты, сценария процесса работы облачной платформы Alibaba и «карта экосистемы» Alibaba и механизма финансовой экосистемы компании интернет-коммерции Alibaba. Представленные результаты призваны способствовать стабильному и устойчивому функционированию отрасли интернет-коммерции в двух аспектах: содействие развитию инноваций в цифровой инфраструктуре на основе бизнес-модели, сочетающей «онлайн + офлайн» в области розничной торговли, и совершенствование облачной платформы финансовой экосистемы. Учитывая аспект международного сотрудничества при работе над представляемым исследованием, авторы надеются, что оно вызовет интерес и в Российской Федерации, поскольку степень интеграции стран мира в систему международных онлайн-операций во всех сферах - от торговли до цифровых финансовых транзакций - неизбежно будет продолжать расти, что означает столкновение стран со схожими вызовами.
Ключевые слова: бизнес и финансовые экосистемы; интернет-коммерция; компания «Alibaba»; пандемия.
Due to the outbreak of the new coronavirus infection COVID-19, the Chinese city of Wuhan was closed on January 23, 20202 «to combat the epidemic», and on January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the epidemic a global health emergency. The entire world economy, national economies of all countries of the world have suffered to one degree or another. Traditional industries such as catering, retail, tourism and others involving physical contact have suffered severe economic losses. The conditions of isolation, at the same time, contributed to the passive development of the Internet industry - the provision of remote communications helped people to work and just live. Education of all levels, communication, remote work and entertainment and, of course, the whole range of consumer, investment and other financial transactions gave a tremendous impetus to the Internet finance industry: from electronic products represented by mobile banking to lending platforms represented by p2p, including the universal financial Internet-
platform «Ant Finance». Remote transactions have become an alternative that provides users with a fundamentally new system of interaction, which, as expected, has brought a wide range of new transactional risks associated in part with the use of network equipment, in part - with the lack of skills of such communications by people, responding - with gaps in the regulation of the domestic and global Internet-industry. These risks are grouped by the authors into three categorical groups:
1. Insufficient level of development of technical means. During the epidemic, the Internet + economy - online work and online consumption and online life, became a new point of economic growth, stimulating the development of all types of remote transactions. However, compared to the developed regions of the world, the less developed ones faced difficulties in technical means and technologies due to the lack of adequate resources and geographic disadvantages, as well as the lack of network hardware to provide remote communications.
Developed regions also face problems in the field of technology and industrial innovation, mainly - lack of free capacities, overloading of existing ones.
2. Volatility of custom «waves». With the gradual slowdown of the epidemic, the explosive growth of the Internet economy began to stagnate. On the one hand, there is a reduction in user groups. Firstly, this is a category of elderly people, since they do not often use the Internet, preferring traditional consumption. Some Internet-based projects followed. When people get back on track, such projects will be forced to stall, and their respective customer groups will plummet as well.
Secondly, there is a reduction in the scale of traditional services. For example, the online education of schoolchildren and students in China turned out to be limited to the Chinese software JingDong, which before the outbreak of the epidemic was used by 15 to 20 million people, and at the end of March 2020 exceeded 300 million users. The situation with remote work became a problem of a similar scale, when it turned out that the existing facilities were not capable of simultaneously providing hundreds of millions of online communications. During the period of the epidemic, many companies increased their technical capacities, which in the post-epidemiological period turned out to be unclaimed: a significant number of users abandoned a number of remote transactions.
3. Lack of control and supervision. Some lag in legislative oversight in the regulation of the Internet industry, including commerce, creates a significant uncertainty in relations between its participants. Firstly, they lack awareness and discipline, and besides, they generate bad behavior. The type of one-to-many online sales model focuses on the formation of competition for the product being sold and the conditions for its delivery, so dumping occurs, causing impulsive consumption. When consumers disclose significant differences between an online and offline product, their brand loyalty declines. In addition, consumers are not aware of the protection of their rights and the high risks of personal information leakage, which reduces trust both in individual sellers and in the Internet industry as a whole. According to the China Consumer Association's 2019 «100 Apps Evaluation Report on Personal Information Collection and Privacy Policy», 91 apps have
the problem of requesting excess personal information about users, and nearly half of the apps (46) do not follow standard privacy principles.
On the other hand, the Internet industry is highly competitive because the barriers to entry and exit into this industry are extremely low. This not only promotes competition, but also the introduction of innovative technologies and products that meet the increasingly demanding needs of customers. This does not mean that there is no monopolization in the Internet space as a tendency of economies of scale, on the contrary, in order to strengthen their position, companies grow on the Internet with «detrimental marginal effects» through mergers, acquisitions, alliances, etc.
A special form of the Internet industry, without which online commerce cannot develop, is constituted by various forms of Internet financing. To support the sustainable and healthy development of the Internet economy, it is necessary to rely on the opinions of scientists studying the dilemmas of the development of modern fintech. Thus, Chen Xiaodong (2021) believes that the development of Internet finance in China has an impact on all physical, contact industries and requires the regulation of substantive, regulatory, trade and technical risks. Other scholars investigate Internet finance from the perspective of latent monopolization and, based on an analysis of the characteristics and functions of monopolies, form a governance structure for the symbiotic development of Internet platforms and the financial industry at the legislative, sectoral and regulatory levels. Another scientific position comes from building a financial ecosystem in the Internet space on the principle of organizing business ecosystems, based on credit, payment systems, cloud computing, big data, etc.
The financial ecosystem of the Alibaba Group just has these principles - it is based on the trinity of «service, payment and lending», therefore it exists and develops as a financial ecosystem that has overcome the surge in consumer and financial demand in the pandemic period, having managed to stabilize after and acts as a locomotive for the development of the modern Internet economy. The Internet economy is being actively researched during its formation and transformation from a theoretical standpoint, with a completely definite practical implementation.
The Internet economy brings together the companies of the Internet industry in the field of innovative technologies, business models and corporate strategic development.
It is obvious that all processes in the Internet economy, as in reality, are accompanied by financial relations - the Internet financial ecosystem, into which business ecosystems are integrated. The development of these processes is based on general theoretical aspects:
1. Evolutionary. According to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, biological species are changeable - their organisms evolve because external conditions and competition make them fight for survival. Those of them that can adapt to their natural environment survive, others are eliminated. It can be said by analogy that the evolutionary process is also inherent in the business ecosystem - changes in the systemic environment are equivalent to a catalyst for the continuous evolution of organisms under conditions of natural selection. Development of the Internet financial ecosystem Alibaba Group, with its huge number of users, financial capabilities and constantly updated user technologies, has gradually grown from an emerging platform into a leading Internet company in China and the world.
1. Evolutionary. According to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, biological species are changeable - their organisms evolve because external conditions and competition make them fight for survival. Those of them that can adapt to their natural environment survive, others are eliminated. It can be said by analogy that the evolutionary process is also inherent in the business ecosystem - changes in the systemic environment are equivalent to a catalyst for the continuous evolution of organisms under conditions of natural selection. Development of the Internet financial ecosystem Alibaba Group, with its huge number of users, financial capabilities and constantly updated user technologies, has gradually grown from an emerging platform into a leading Internet company in China and the world. Now it attracts financial institutions and corporate clients, building and developing an internal corporate business ecosystem that is constantly strengthening and expanding. Advances in commercial technology have led Alipay to become the main industry for the Alibaba Group since its formal establishment in 2004. Now, its payment technologies have also evolved from online banking to QR code payments to the current
advancement of fingerprint payments, face identification, and more. During the epidemic, Alibaba Group provided medical personnel from various countries with a range of advanced cloud-based technologies that have helped fight the coronavirus pandemic. Alibaba Cloud has developed a new set of artificial intelligence diagnostic technologies that can diagnose abnormal computed tomography images within 20 seconds with 96 % accuracy.
2. Symbiosis. All living organisms form symbiotic chains through energy flows capable of storing and transmitting information. Likewise, Internet companies have gradually formed symbiotic chains - a business ecosystem, mainly through the sharing of resources and the distribution of benefits. Internet company Alibaba includes its core business, service platform Taobao, payment platform Alipay as a bridge between sellers and buyers, and acts as a credit intermediary, providing buyers with guaranteed payments and increasing sales for sellers. As a credit platform for Ali Micro Loans, the company provides funds in accordance with the credit status for individuals and legal entities in the format of «purchase + payment + credit». This format can well be considered a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship for the sharing of resources and the complementarity of business - in fact, a financial ecosystem.
3. Variety. Internet finance is mainly made up of a large user group, financial institutions represented by online banks and corporations, which are still very weakly regulated by law. At the current stage, the Internet finance ecosystem is expanding the circle of users, so, according to data published by the Chinese food delivery platform Meituan, after the lifting of restrictive measures, the share of orders of middle-aged and elderly people has increased significantly compared to the previous pre-quarantine period. In addition, the number of corporate users, both sellers and buyers, continued to increase after lockdown. In industries such as medicine, food, building materials, entertainment and some others, new models of online sales are emerging - food delivery platforms have launched «contactless delivery» services to ensure security. The geography of Internet services continues to expand: cities of the second and third level, which have a less developed network infrastructure, professionally less qualified technical staff and a relatively smaller market,
have begun to expand. This makes the Internet economy more prosperous in cities of the second and third tier, which is especially true in the field of education and health care. According to the DingTalk Research Institute, populated areas and areas of the third and even fourth levels have the greatest potential, in which Internet financing is replacing traditional financial institutions -banks, insurance companies, investment funds and traditional trade.
After analysing the internal and external environment of the Alibaba Group corporation on the basis of its operational structure «service platform + payment platform + credit platform», combined with the characteristics of «evolution + symbiosis + diversity» in relation to the Internet finance industry, the authors move on to building a structure financial Internet ecosystem. At the first stage of construction, the authors proposed the business ecosystem of the corporation «Alibaba Group» (Figure 1).
Figure 1 - Alibaba Business Card
As shown in Figure 1, the internal structure of the Alibaba Group includes a primary evolutionary division of the business into retail and non-retail categories. The retail business segment mainly includes some application platforms represented by the company-to-company (B2B) and company-to-person (B2C) e-commerce models.
In the non-retail segment, user products and services are developing and actively transforming: entertainment, education, digital platforms, cloud services and other user-generated content.
Later, Alibaba Group established and focused on the development of three main platform businesses: Taobao, Alipay and Ali Micro Loans. By creating these three platforms, the Alibaba Group realized the complementarity of business models based on resource sharing and information exchange. In 2003, a dedicated consumer-oriented website, Taobao, was created, which the reputable British magazine
The Economist called «China's largest online marketplace.» Taobao very quickly brought together many users and stimulated the development of the entire Alibaba Group. In fact, the evolutionary stage of symbiosis has begun.
Already in December 2003, the Alibaba Group Corporation established the Alipay online payment platform, which performs the function of guaranteeing payments and all other financial transactions (including lending) between sellers and buyers. The development of this platform led to its transformation in 2010, a microfinance platform was created for individual entrepreneurs, small and micro businesses -«Ali Micro Loans», without a mortgage and loan guarantee. The platform assumes the authentication of customer information using Internet technologies, its collection and storage for the formation of credit histories of individuals or companies. This situation for the provision
of appropriate funds. In 2013, Alipay launched Yu'ebao, an asset management service with an ultra-low threshold of one yuan deposit and a claim of «100 % compensation for stolen goods», which attracted users to transfer unused funds from Alipay to Yu'ebao. in order to acquire
financial products for the management of funds placed in the Tianhong Fund. Such a diagram of the processes of «docking» of platforms within the framework of the Alibaba Group corporation is shown in Figure 2.
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Figure 2 - Diagram of the work process of the cloud platform of the corporation «Alibaba Group»
Within the Alibaba Group cloud platform, users can choose from different financial products, their combinations and deployment scenarios. In the process of interaction of several applications, the exchange and analysis of the integrated information flow of data on the financial resources of users takes place. Alibaba Group's products and application scenarios are primarily developed along five dimensions: third-party payments, investment and asset management, finance and credit, insurance and crowdfunding, which are sufficient to meet the universal financial services needs of all users. For example, users can apply for loans with an online bank operated by Alibaba Finance and receive real-time loan disbursements based on consumer credit ratings. Users no longer need to
contact other banks and wait for results.
The external environment of the corporation «Alibaba Group» includes the entire range of relations between participants in socio-economic ecosystems, implemented within the framework of the cloud platform. The structure of the external environment includes customers, partners and competitors such as Jingdong, jointly forming an economic ecosystem; the social ecosystem includes the political, cultural and legal environment; a natural ecosystem is the territorial spread of the platform to the second, third and fourth levels of settlements, as well as climatic and geographic uncontrollable factors. These three ecosystems form the overall ecosystem structure of the Alibaba Group Corporation.
Figure 3 - Alibaba Group Ecosystem Structure НАУЧНО-ПРАКТИЧЕСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ
The scientific basis for the formation of the financial ecosystem of the Internet-commerce corporation «Alibaba Group» was laid in 1993 by the famous American economist S. Moore, who discovered that the activities of economic and public organizations are similar to the processes in the ecological system in biology. It was S. Moore who first put forward the concept of «business ecosystem» in the «Harvard Business Review», defining it as an economic union based on the interaction of organizations and individuals (organisms in the business world). To each «organism» S. Moore assigned the performance of different functions - games - in the business
ecosystem, which determine interdependencies, interdependencies and cause symbiosis. Since then, research on business ecosystems and issues related to their development has made significant progress, which has expanded the structure of business ecosystems to include, in addition to «natural» producers and consumers, communicators represented in modern systems by infrastructure actors and fintech; at the same time, the role of another «organism» - the regulator, whose functionality is also realized through financial technologies (Figure 4) - is strengthening.
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Figure 4 - Mechanism of the financial ecosystem of the e-commerce company Alibaba
Figure 4 shows the mechanism of interaction between the «organisms» of the ecosystem of the Internet commerce corporation «Alibaba Group», which includes financial technologies that provide financial transactions. Thus, Internet technologies unite all parties to the relationship: consumers, manufacturers, lenders and the regulator on a platform that provides data processing and storage through cloud technologies.
In the post-epidemic period, the development of the Internet industry in many areas, including financial, the Alibaba Group is building on the
principle of «three-in-one»: evolution, diversity and symbiosis. Three aspects have become the directions of sustainable post-pandemic development:
1. Fostering the development of digital infrastructure that is designed to stabilize everyday life: the security of consumer transactions and financial transactions. Implementing security requires significant investment in creating new infrastructure, which is physically insufficient in remote and less integrated regions of China in technical innovation. The indisputably of
the advantages that technology provides is obvious - modern interaction between everyone: people, companies, government agencies is impossible without the presence of a regional digital infrastructure. China is following the path of accelerated large-scale deployment of 5G networks, which is certainly costly and technically not realizable in a local format: the capacities of 5G networks can only be expedient when they are used by large businesses and financial ecosystems - only then their creation and maintenance can be expedient and economically justified. From the standpoint of an evolutionary concept, this is symbiosis - sharing of resources, information exchange and complementarity. The creation and strengthening of technological innovation develops new capabilities of modern digital infrastructure.
2. The combination of the «online + offline» model interaction format not only does not interfere, but on the contrary - contributes to the development of many industries, and mainly -retail trade and financial transactions. The diversification of existing communication models and the creation of a new e-commerce model «O2O» gave a powerful impetus to the development of contact retailing and banking without reducing the online segment of these industries. This is partly explained simply: the data that transaction participants use in any
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3. Improvement of the system of regulation and promotion of healthy competition in order to create conditions for sustainable development of the economy. The authors are convinced that only by creating a transparent network ecosystem can the economic and social benefits of Internet communications be used for all users in society without exception. On the one hand, it is necessary to modernize cyberspace management capabilities and improve relevant laws to effectively protect users. On the other hand, it is quite obvious that more attention should be paid to the development and improvement of antitrust legislation to ensure the healthy development of small and medium-sized enterprises on the Internet space, the coordination of competitive advantages.
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