Alibaba’s Lazada Plans Europe Push to Challenge Amazon, Zalando

In 2016, Alibaba won a foothold in Southeast Asia by taking control of Lazada. Just a year later, co-founder Jack Ma declared Alibaba could some day become the world’s fifth-largest economy, serving some 2 billion people — a boast that was covered widely at the time but has rarely been mentioned since Covid-19, a punishing government crackdown and economic downturn extinguished its once rapid pace of growth. Ma himself became a target of Beijing, which killed Ant Group Co.’s IPO after the billionaire publicly criticized China’s state-dominated banking system in 2020.