The Centre for Accounting, Banking and Finance (CABF) parked under the Faculty of Business and Finance (FBF) organised a research talk titled “Alibaba’s Latest Technology - New Diverse Research Opportunities For Academics” on 1 March 2019 at Kampar Campus. The talk was delivered by FBF Department of Commerce and Accounting Assistant Professor Dr Mohd Nizam bin A. Badaruddin. Present at the talk were FBF lecturers.
Dr Nizam
Dr Nizam started his talk with some interesting facts and figures on the Alibaba Group such as Alibaba.com coming online in 1999 with several other websites such as Taobao, Alipay, Aliexpress and Tmall following suit. Such activities indicate the rising of the digital economy with Dr Nizam showing evidence of this during the 2018 Double 11 shopping festival which resulted in the delivery of more than 1 billion parcels. On the home front, Dr Nizam suggested opportunities to research on how to collaborate with different courier services in Malaysia to minimise operational costs.
Dr Nizam continued his talk with Alibaba’s commitment to education as an important component of its ecosystem with the set-up of Taobao and Alibaba Business Schools. Taobao Business School runs both offline and online training courses and has since trained over 10 million people through its online training platform. The Alibaba Business School has trained over 1,400 students. As a result, their students have achieved 150million RMB sales in 2017. Also, as part of the ecosystem, the concept of Taobao Village was developed. Housing more than 15,000 online entrepreneurship companies, revenue from these companies exceeded 2billion RMB in 2018.
Success stories are aplenty as Dr Nizam gave an account of the Graduate Entrepreneurship Trends with some individual companies making annual revenues in the region of USD10 – 12million selling apparel online to USD1million from online sales of phone accessories. Often offices were overflowing with goods waiting to be delivered. A particular success story stood out with Weiya, an internet celebrity, breaking sales records by selling agricultural products livestream and making USD10million in just five hours. These stories demonstrate the younger generation using current technology to integrate with traditional industries to remain innovative and competitive. As a result, jobs are generated from new business models created by digital technologies.
Dr Nizam delivering the talk
A review of technology trends is just as impressive. Tmall, a distribution platform, has been gaining increasing consumer exposure with international brands such as MCM, Moschino and Giuseppe Zanotti launching flagship stores on the platform. Cainiao became the first eWTP hub outside of China by cooperating with Malaysia to improve customs clearance capabilities. Alibaba Cloud provided cloud computing services and products that enabled customers to achieve fast, cost-effective and secure data migration from on-premise data centres onto the cloud. Other technology trends include Youku (a web streaming video service), Tmall Genie (an AI-powered voice assistant), Luban (an AI Graphic design tool), and Mybank (Alibaba’s affiliated internet provider of affordable microloans). Dr Nizam mentioned that the Fourth Industrial Revolution trend is signalling changes in the workforce with a resultant 4.5 million talent shortage and growth in e-commerce opportunities as indicated by mobile payments of USD9 trillion in 2016.
Dr Nizam concluded his talk with opportunities to research in the areas of digital ecosystem such as Malaysia’s readiness and the use of data analytics. Consultancy opportunities also abound in areas of consumer perceptions and the collaboration of courier services.
The interesting and informative talk was followed by a Q&A session.
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