The Alibaba Group, which owns Taobao.com and its business-to-consumer (B2C) counterpart Tmall.com, announced last year that the transaction volume of its two platforms has reached one trillion RMB yuan (about 161 billion U.S. dollars) by the end of November 2012, ranking after east China's Guangdong, Shandong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang Province in terms of social consumption goods retail volume as compared to the number of year 2011.
By far, the two platforms of Alibaba Group have created a total of 4 million direct jobs, promoting the development of new industries such as express-delivery, finance, IT service and models for online shops.