Alibaba Intending to Dig Deep for E-commerce Gold

Alibaba Group executives frequently tell their employees that the company is sitting on a gold mine, a reference to the huge potential of the large amount of data that the company's e-commerce operations are gathering.

The country's largest e-commerce company, which operates the consumer-to consumer Taobao.com and business-to-consumer Tmall.com, has for years emphasized the potential of data mining. Indeed, every year Taobao.com hosts more than 100 million consumers and handles nearly 10 trillion yuan worth of transactions.