The Role of Digital Transformation in Driving Enterprise Revenue Growth - A Case Study of Alibaba

Xiang Liu

doi:10.54097/mgegs738

Authors

Xiang Liu School of Business Administration, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-1881, United States

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54097/mgegs738

Keywords:

Enterprise Digitalization, Revenue Increment, Alibaba Group.

Abstract

Many enterprises face challenges such as long investment return cycles after digital transformation and operational difficulties caused by capital shortages. This paper selects Alibaba as the research object, integrates literature from the past five years and Alibaba’s financial report data from the past three years, and adopts a method integrating literature review and case data analysis to explore the strategies adopted by this company to successfully achieve revenue growth during its digital transformation process, thereby providing insights for other enterprises. The research results indicate that Alibaba’s core strategies fall into two categories. Firstly, it sells digital infrastructure in the form of cloud services, launching multiple hierarchical products including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS), and leverages business endorsements from large enterprises to expand market reach. This approach enables the long-term high-profit performance of computing power commoditization. Second, Alibaba uses its "Central Platform Strategy" to predict customer needs and address their key pain points, while utilizing visual dashboards to enhance merchants’ psychological satisfaction with services, thereby improving the unit traffic conversion rate. However, both approaches heavily rely on Alibaba’s early technological accumulation and market niche. Additionally, the company faces challenges in both legal and customer-related aspects. Based on these findings, this paper suggests that the government should link the intensity of digital transformation subsidies to enterprises’ post-transformation revenue growth. This measure will help enterprises overcome early financial pressures and encourage them to explore more optimal transformation paths.

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