Alibaba Group is setting its sights on a new part of China’s four trillion US dollar retail sector, department stores, after conquering China’s grocery deliveries business. 

According to a Bloomberg’s report, Alibaba, one of the Chinese e-commerce giants, which is also venturing into cloud computing and entertainment, is increasingly looking at traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. 

Started in Ma’s apartment in 1999, Alibaba is worth 458 billion US dollar. With less than a month after closing the 13.7 billion US dollar deal with Amazon, the executives discussed Alibaba’s strategy for dealing with competition, its vision on data and challenges the company will face. 

Ma said Alibaba would need to embrace a different mindset given its current size, and move away from its asset-light approach to grab a bigger share of global trade.  

“I think when you are young, tiny, a light model is good. When you are strong, big -- think about it -- you need heavy things. There is no heavy is good, or light is good -- a mix is good. To be efficient, you need to connect light and heavy models. But with Alibaba’s size today, you should not leave the heavy model to others, it’s something you have to do because the infrastructure you are building up, you have to invest,” Ma said in an interview with Bloomberg. 

Over payments, cloud computing and financial services, Alibaba is increasingly finding itself in competition with Baidu and Tencent, another top two Chinese e-commerce firms, which are recongised as BAT in China

Alibaba is also battling Amazon as it seeks growth in Southeast Asia, with e-commerce in Indonesia alone projected to reach 65 billion US dollar by 2020 from 8 billion US dollar, according to a recently released report from Macquarie Research. 

“I’ve been saying this again and again internally. Alibaba going outside China is not about globalizing Alibaba. We are globalizing e-commerce infrastructure. We are trying to build the infrastructure of online payments. We are trying to build an infrastructure of logistics, and we are trying to build an infrastructure of cloud computing,” he said, adding, “we are interested in the cross-border trading and e-commerce.”  

According to JPMorgan’s report, Alibaba is already China’s biggest cloud-computing provider, with the unit projected to make up 15 percent of Alibaba’s revenue by 2021.  

“I don’t know how we can make money out of data. Data is so important for human development in society. It’s gonna be as precious as oil in the last century. So we have to work that out,” he said.