Alibaba's Tmall Chief Establishes Ambitious 3-Year Plan

HANGZHOU, China — One of Jack Ma's closest lieutenants just laid down a plethora of ambitious goals for Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

Jiang Fan, who runs the company’s two biggest e-commerce businesses, wants to double transaction volumes on its Tmall service in three years. Alibaba doesn’t disclose dealings over the platform, which helps brands and companies sell goods to 600 million-plus buyers, but it’s one of the single largest online retailers in China’s $1 trillion e-commerce arena.

China's largest company, which also operates the Taobao platform for smaller merchants, is trying to revive growth as its home economy decelerates. Beyond investing in cloud services and making inroads into international markets such as Southeast Asia, Alibaba is also intent on becoming the window through which brands from Valentino to L'Oréal sell stuff to an increasingly affluent middle class. Alibaba, JD.com Inc. and other Chinese platforms are also hawking everything from American cherries to Australian baby formula.

Shares in the company rose 1.2 percent in New York, their biggest gain in more than a week, while the market stood little changed.

To achieve its goals, Tmall must incubate another 100 new brands that do annual business of 1 billion yuan apiece, Jiang said in a statement. The service has drawn more than 100 million new buyers over the past year alone, a pace that will be sustained, he added.

“We’ll bring a new wave of user benefits, and catch a rising tide of growth,” Jiang was cited as saying. After running Taobao for more than a year, the executive added responsibility for Tmall to his duties in March.

By Lulu Yilun Chen with assistance from Gao Yuan; editors: Robert Fenner, Peter Elstrom and Edwin Chan.