When the thin man in the silver-coloured windbreaker walks on to the stage, a roar goes through the crowd. Then he starts singing: “Friends, we have walked together all our lives, but those days are over,” and the audience goes crazy. 那个身穿银色风衣的瘦削男子走上舞台时，人群发出一阵轰鸣。接着，这个男子开始演唱：“朋友一生一起走，那些日子不再有，”观众的兴奋情绪达到极点。
But this is not a pop concert. The 40,000 people in the Yellow Dragon Stadium in Hangzhou on Friday night were Alibaba Group employees and their family, and the man on stage was Jack Ma, saying farewell to the business he founded that has now grown into one of the world’s largest ecommerce companies. 但是，这并不是一场流行音乐会。上周五晚聚集在杭州黄龙体育馆的这4万人，是阿里巴巴集团(Alibaba Group)的雇员及其家人，而台上那人是正在告别该集团的马云(Jack Ma)，他创立的这家企业已发展壮大，成为全球最大电子商务公司之一。
At 48, Mr Ma has handed the job of chief executive to Jonathan Lu, his trusted lieutenant and 13-year Alibaba veteran, and gone into semi-retirement as executive chairman. 现年48岁的马云将首席执行官的职位交给自己的亲信、为阿里巴巴效力13年的公司元老陆兆禧(Jonathan Lu)，自己继续担任执行董事长，由此进入半退休状态。
The change at the top comes as the group is preparing what could become one of the largest-ever internet initial public offerings. A listing in the US, expected at the end of this year or in early 2014, would allow Alibaba to buy back up to half of Yahoo’s 24 per cent stake in itself and raise $60bn or more from public investors. 高层换人之际，阿里巴巴集团正准备进行首次公开发行(IPO)，这可能成为史上规模最大的互联网企业IPO之一。预计该集团将在今年底或2014年初在美国上市，使其能够购回雅虎(Yahoo)所持其24%股份的至多一半，并从公开市场投资者那里募资至少600亿美元。
Mr Lu inherits a formidable business. Alibaba operates the world’s largest online marketplace for trade between companies. It has also built an unrivalled online retail platform in China. Taobao.com, the group’s eBay-like consumer-to-consumer website, accounts for 90 per cent of China’s online retail transaction value in this segment. 陆兆禧继承了一家令人敬畏的企业。阿里巴巴集团运营着世界上最大的企业对企业(B2B)在线交易市场。它还打造了中国首屈一指的在线零售平台。淘宝网(Taobao.com)是阿里巴巴集团旗下类似于eBay的消费者对消费者(C2C)网站，在该板块占有中国在线零售交易价值的90%。
TMall, its business-to-consumer platform, accounts for half of online business-to-consumer sales in China by transaction value, according to McKinsey. 麦肯锡(McKinsey)数据显示，阿里巴巴集团旗下的企业对消费者(B2C)平台天猫(TMall)，按交易价值计算占中国在线B2C销售的一半。
“The market share concentration and power they have is unique – you don’t have that in any other market in the world,” says Zia Daniell Wigder, an ecommerce analyst at Forrester Research in New York. “他们拥有的市场份额集中度和实力是独一无二的——你在世界上其他任何市场找不到这样的例子，”纽约Forrester Research电子商务分析师齐娅?丹尼尔?维杰(Zia Daniell Wigder)表示。
That market power was reflected in Alibaba’s most recent results. Revenues rose by 80 per cent year on year to $1.84bn in the final quarter of 2012, and net profit surged by 156 per cent to $650m, according to a Yahoo filing last week. 这种市场实力反映在阿里巴巴集团的最新业绩上。雅虎最近提交的监管申报文件显示，2012年末季阿里巴巴集团营收同比增长80%，至18.4亿美元，净利润同比飙升156%，至6.50亿美元。
But the big question is where Alibaba can go from here. 但是，真正的问题在于阿里巴巴下一步能走向何方。
Other players are challenging its dominant position in its home market. They include 360buy, which accounted for almost a fifth of China’s online retail transaction value in 2012 according to iResearch, and Suning, an electronics retailer with a massive bricks-and-mortar presence that is now aggressively expanding online and branching out into other products. 在本土市场，竞争对手正在叫板该集团的霸主地位。这些竞争对手包括京东商城(360buy)——艾瑞咨询(iResearch)的数据显示，2012年京东占有中国在线零售交易价值的近五分之一；另外还有苏宁(Suning)——拥有庞大实体店网络的电子产品零售商，目前正积极向网上业务拓展，并涉足其他产品的销售。
Although Alibaba dismisses the idea that it is under threat, it is looking far ahead to defend its turf. The company has launched its own mobile operating system to build a closer relationship with consumers, as they start shopping increasingly on mobile devices. 虽然阿里巴巴集团否认自己面临威胁，但该集团为了守住自己的地盘正把目光投向未来。它已推出自己的移动操作系统，以求与消费者打造更紧密的关系。目前中国消费者日趋使用移动设备购物。
Taking a page out of Amazon’s playbook, Alibaba is also rapidly expanding its cloud computing business. 阿里巴巴集团借鉴亚马逊(Amazon)的战略，也在快速扩张其云计算业务。
By the end of this year, the company expects half of the bandwidth used for its cloud operations to be serving outside customers, according to Wang Jian, head of the unit. “Eventually, our target is to have 5 per cent of all computing power in China by the number of servers shipped,” he says. 据阿里云计算总裁王坚介绍，该公司预计，到今年底，其云计算业务所用带宽的一半将是为外部客户服务。他表示：“最终，我们的目标是按照发运的服务器数量计，拥有中国全部计算能力的5%。”
Alibaba is also on the acquisition path. On Friday, it agreed to acquire a 28 per cent stake in Autonavi, the company behind China’s most successful mobile map app. Through the investment, Alibaba hopes to expand its mobile commerce capabilities, for example to be able to show the physical location of vendors on Juhuasuan, its Groupon-like daily deals site, or Taobao, the consumer-to-consumer platform. 阿里巴巴集团还踏上了收购的道路。上周五，该集团同意收购高德(Autonavi) 28%股份，后者是中国最成功的移动地图应用的开发商。阿里巴巴集团希望借助这项投资扩大自己的移动商务能力，例如显示集团旗下类Groupon团购网站“聚划算”或C2C平台淘宝网上商家的实际地理位置。
Only 10 days earlier, Alibaba agreed to buy an 18 per cent stake in Sina Weibo, China’s largest Twitter equivalent. The tie-up will allow Alibaba to make the ads that are a major source of its revenue much more targeted. 最近，阿里巴巴集团还同意收购中国最大微博网站新浪微博(Sina Weibo) 18%股份。这一结盟将使该集团得以大幅提高广告的针对性；广告是该集团的一大营收来源。
Alibaba executives say a few more deals like this are to come, as the company continues to build an ecosystem around ecommerce. “We are acquiring the capabilities to provide and crunch the data needed for that,” says Mr Wang. “The traditional economy was centred on industry, powered by electricity. In the new economy, we will provide the equivalent to electricity.” 阿里巴巴集团高管表示，随着集团继续围绕电子商务打造一个生态系统，未来还会有几笔类似的交易。“为此，我们正在获取必要的数据提供与处理能力。”王坚表示，“传统经济以工业为核心，由电力驱动。在新经济中，我们将提供等同于电力的东西。”
But what unsettles outsiders more is the question whether Alibaba will take its ecommerce machine global. In 2004, just a year after its establishment, Taobao had already surpassed eBay in China – a development that eventually ruined the US company’s retail business in that market. 但是，令外界更加不安的问题是，阿里巴巴集团会否让自己的电子商务机器走向全球？2004年，开通仅一年的淘宝网就已超越了eBay的在华业务——这一发展最终毁掉了eBay这家美国公司在中国市场的零售业务。
