Nearly 40,000 Alibaba employees gathered for the 18th anniversary celebration in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province on September 8th, 2017. Chairman of Alibaba Group Jack Ma said he had spent 870 hours on flights for the past year, approximately one-tenth of a year, and that all the Alibaba employees flew a total of 68 million hours, equivalent to 77 years.

Jack Ma believed that Alibaba has now become a new type of economy. "The former economies were defined by their geographic location: the Yangtze River Delta economies, the Pearl River Delta economies, the Californian economy, but today the new economy was born on the Internet.” said Ma.
 
He was hoping that Alibaba, being the world’s 21st largest economy at present, could rise to the world’s 5th largest economy within the next two decades, serving 2 billion consumers and turning into a platform with 10 million profitable small and mediumsized enterprises.
 
Jack Ma stated three words: “idealism”, “trust” and “humility” in his speech. “What has enabled us to do so well for the past 18 years is our idealism”, Ma said. "My greatest concern is that our employees will lose idealism when they only look on what they have achieved, and if so, Alibaba is just like a money-making machine. If we lose our idealism, our ambitions, we become dull…We can lose everything else, but never idealism."
 
“We put customers first - all the time. Without customers, there is no Alibaba,” Ma said. “We have to live up to their trust. Only then, can we go further.” Customers’ trust is the most precious; trust is the most expensive and most vulnerable thing in the world.
 
When it comes to humility, Ma said that the last thing he heard people saying was that Alibaba's employees are now complacent, they believe that they can do anything. “Stay humble, don’t be complacent. Only in that way can Alibaba become a great company."