Alibaba overtakes Walmart as world’s largest retailer

In a filing with America’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group announced that it had “become the largest retail economy in the world” at the end of its fiscal year on March 31, “as measured by gross merchandise volume (GMV) on its China retail marketplaces,” according to media reports.

At the time of filing with the SEC, Alibaba hadn’t yet declared its financial results for its last quarter and the complete fiscal year, but the announcement made it clear that it surpassed the $482.1 billion revenue reported by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. for its fiscal year ended January 31.

Two weeks prior to the SEC filing, Alibaba’s Executive Vice Chairman Joe Tsai announced in a blog post on March 21 that “with 10 days remaining in our fiscal year ending March 2016, Alibaba's China retail marketplace platforms surpassed 3 trillion yuan in GMV. That is about $476 billion in US dollars and, if the platforms we operate were a province, we would rank as the 6th largest provincial economy in China.”

Alibaba issued another statement saying its online trading volume had reached about 10 per cent of the total retail volume in China and directly generated 15 million jobs as well.

The Hangzhou-headquartered e-commerce major has already set itself the goal of reaching annual GMV of 6 trillion yuan by 2020.

For an e-commerce company like Alibaba, GMV is the total value of all products sold through its online platform, and is different from the company’s revenue, which would typically be calculated as a sum of the commission it earns from sales on its platform.