SHANGHAI/NEW YORK -- Alibaba Group Holding built its empire on China's e-commerce market, but the company is laboring to end its reliance on online sales as the economy teeters by following Amazon's lead into cloud services.
"I always check Alibaba first to check prices or see what is popular now," said Li Mei, a 28-year-old woman in Shanghai. For her, like many Chinese, a life without Alibaba is unimaginable. The e-commerce websites now draw more than 600 million users per year.
