Alibaba Recognized as Most Admired Internet Company in China

Alibaba Group Holding, the prominent e-commerce leader, has earned the title of the world’s most admired Chinese internet and retail company. This recognition comes from the latest rankings published by Fortune, a well-known US business magazine. The ranking is timely as Alibaba launches a new artificial intelligence (AI) model to compete with DeepSeek, one of China's rising start-ups.

Based in Hangzhou, Alibaba, which also owns the South China Morning Post, has secured the third position in the internet service and retail segment of Fortune’s 2025 list of the World’s Most Admired Companies. It stands just behind American giants Amazon.com and Alphabet. Notably, Alibaba has risen five places from last year, when it was ranked eighth.

Although Alibaba achieved an impressive rank in its category, it did not enter the top 50 of the overall most admired companies list. The top spots in this comprehensive ranking were occupied by tech heavyweights such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Berkshire Hathaway.

Apart from its accolade, Alibaba is positioned alongside an increasing number of Chinese firms that are heavily investing in AI technologies. Recently, Alibaba's cloud computing and AI division, Alibaba Cloud, introduced an upgraded version of its Qwen model. This new Qwen 2.5-Max is said to have "comprehensively outperformed" the previous V3 model released by DeepSeek last December, which has received comparisons to the advanced features found in OpenAI products.

DeepSeek has garnered global attention for its innovative open-source reasoning model, named R1. The company claims that R1 possesses capabilities similar to OpenAI’s proprietary GPT models in several aspects, and it does so at a significantly lower cost.

The competition between these tech giants illustrates the rapidly evolving landscape of AI technologies in China, where firms are striving for innovation and excellence.

Alibaba, technology, competition