CRI听力:Taobao Marks 10 Years Anniversary

Alibaba's Taobao.com, the country's largest online shopping site, will celebrate its 10th anniversary since its establishment in the eastern city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.

Over the decade, e-commerce has gained a strong foothold in the Chinese market, Bringing in a new mode of shopping, particularly among tech-savvy youngsters.

According to statistics from the Commerce Ministry, it is estimated that China's online commerce industry raked in more than 1.1 trillion yuan, or 175 billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2012, up from 26 billion yuan in 2006.

Taobao alone features nearly one billion products and has nearly 500 million registered users.

It sells 48,000 products each minute.

Taobao's parent company, Alibaba Group, also owns Tmall, a popular business-to-consumer (B2C) portal like Amazon.

As the country's largest online shopping platform, Taobao brings not only a new lifestyle for shoppers but also work opportunities for the country's huge number of job seekers.

It has more than 8 million online vendors who create jobs for over 10 million, most of whom are self-employed.

The Booming e-commerce also boosted the fast growth of China's delivery business, with the number of delivery men in the country expected to reach 1 million by the year 2015.

Taobao delivers 20 million parcels every day, accounting for 70 percent of the country's total.

Last month, Alibaba invested 586 million dollars in Sina Weibo, the biggest of China's micro-blogging platforms.

Alibaba now is also branching into mobile software. In 2011, the company unveiled Aliyun, a mobile platform that could rival Google Android in China.
 
With Jack Ma now handing over the daily operations to a younger generation of leaders, investors and consumers now anticipate what changes it will bring to the company's future.

For CRI, I'm Ding Lulu.