Alibaba Group held 2016 Yunqi Conference in Yunqi Town

From October 13 to October 16, the world’s largest ecommerce group Alibaba staged the group’s 2016 Yunqi Conference. One of the biggest technology and computing conferences in the world, the event was held in Alibaba’s hometown of Hangzhou, in China’s prosperous Zhejiang province. Over 40,000 professionals attended this year’s conference and more than 7 million people watched the conference proceedings live online.

The Yunqi Conference (Yunqi roughly translates to ‘Living in the Cloud’) is Alibaba’s annual opportunity for all the group’s business units to meet with many Alibaba partner companies. The attendee numbers are startling when the invitation-only nature of the event is taken into consideration. In addition to senior representatives of every Alibaba business unit, more than 400 technology and internet companies from all over the world participated.  Effectively, Yunqi is the physical manifestation of the entire massive Alibaba ecosystem.

During this year’s conference, 102 summits and symposia were held, and for the first time, Yunqi featured a Websites & Domain Names stream. A number of Allegravita clients, such as .CLUB Domains, GMO Registry (home of .shop domains), and MMX (home of .vip, .law, .work and more than 20 other top level domains) were invited to attend, exhibit and present to the massive Alibaba audience.

These leading domain name registries all presented strongly at the conference and substantially built on their already excellent commercial momentum in the world’s biggest domain name market, China. Allegravita’s China director and co-founder Raymond Li and Senior In-Market Account Manager Alex Zhou supported our domain registry clients throughout the four days of the conference.

Raymond Li commented, “This year’s conference attracted an unprecedented amount of people outside of the domain name industry. We are happy to see that lots of people have so much interest in new top level domain names.”

In the opening session of the domain name stream, held on the first day of the conference, the Aliyun’s Director of Domains Charles Wang talked up the company’s domain aftermarket trading platform with a speech that demonstrated how to “make domain trading as easy as shopping on Taobao”.

Conference attendees showed strong interest in the new gTLDs offered by MMX, GMO and .CLUB, and all three registries posted spectacular growth in social media subscriber numbers.

Alibaba Yunqi 2016 is the seventh annual Yunqi conference, and growth from 2009 (with only 400 attendees) to this year’s 40,000 mirrors the rapid development of the Chinese internet economy.

Allegravita is proud to be a leading supporter of China’s internet and domain name economy. With offices in Beijing, Guangzhou, Tokyo, New York City and Los Angeles, Allegravita supports more international domain name businesses than any other consultancy in the world.