Alibaba is not a private enterprise, but a wholly-owned enterprise of legal persons from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Major shareholders include SoftBank Group, Yahoo, Jack Ma, Joseph Tsai, Daniel Lu and other senior executives. The approval authority is the Hangzhou High-tech Zone (Binjiang) Market Supervision and Administration Bureau. It was established on September 9, 1999, with its headquarters in Hangzhou, registration number: 330100400015575, registered capital: US$596.9 million, and the total number of employees as of June 2018: 86,833.

Alibaba has formed a complete business ecosystem through the deposition of its own e-commerce platform and the diversion of traffic through ports such as UC, AutoNavi Maps, and Enterprise Weibo, focusing on the core business of e-commerce and the financial business that supports the e-commerce system, as well as supporting local life services, health care, etc., including games, videos, music and other pan-entertainment businesses and smart terminal businesses. The core of this business ecosystem is data and traffic sharing, the foundation is marketing services and cloud services, and the integration of effective data is Alipay.