Jack Ma: The Chinese E-Commerce Pioneer

Jack Ma is world-renowned for his vision of facilitating access to technology and trade. His Alibaba Group operates one of the largest online trading platforms in the world. His initial conditions were rather difficult: he grew up in modest conditions, and as a student, he had difficulty learning. Jack Ma often tells a story about how he fell through the university entrance test several times and how it took him four years to pass the Chinese entrance exams.

Rise in E-Commerce

The trip to the United States changed his life. Jack Ma became more interested in the Internet there and was surprised that there was no information about Chinese beer and no general information about his land, China. So he and his friend created a website with information concerning Chinese beer, and soon he received emails from potential Chinese investors. At that point, Ma realised that the Internet offered great opportunities.
In 1999, he founded Alibaba as a B2B marketplace website, which he launched in his apartment with a group of 18 friends. A year later, Alibaba received USD 25 million in venture capital from US investment bank Goldman Sachs and Japanese investment conglomerate SoftBank. Platforms such as Taobao Marketplace, Alipay, Ali Mama, and Lynx were some of Jack Ma’s successful companies. Following the rapid rise of Taobao, the American e-commerce giant eBay offered to buy the company. Ma rejected the offer, however, and instead won the promotion of Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who offered an investment of USD 1 billion in immediate capital for the potential expansion of Alibaba’s corporate activities.

Listing restricted

Ant Group is a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group. According to Wikipedia, it is the highest-rated financial technology company in the world. With a value of USD 150 to USD 200 billion, it is also the most valuable unicorn startup in the world. Canadian blogger and journalist Cory Doctorow believes that Ant’s business model is to provide expensive microcredit and then sell it as securities to speculators.

In 2020, the Chinese government stopped plans for an initial public offering called for the digital payment solutions company Ant Group. The planned publication of Ant Group was expected to be the largest in the world, with USD 35 billion. According to Chinese bankers and officials, financial stability was the objective behind the intervention. Since Jack Ma did not appear for a longer time in public, some commentators speculated that Ma may have been a victim of forced disappearance, while others speculated that he could be voluntarily lying low.

Alibaba Group was transformed into a holding company in March 2023. Their subsidiaries were divided into six independent companies. Separate listings of the units are possible, according to the management. The move is intended to enable the business sector to “be more agile”, according to the official explanation.

Asia’s Philathrop No. 1

At the Alibaba General Meeting in May 2010, Ma announced that from 2010 onwards, the Group would contribute 0.3% of its annual turnover to environmental projects to improve water and air quality. In 2019, Forbes named Ma on its list of “Asia’s 2019 Heroes of Philanthropy” and awarded him the Malcolm S. Forbes Lifetime Achievement Award for his work supporting underprivileged communities in China, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East.
Jack Ma is the founder of the Jack Ma Foundation, a philanthropic organisation focused on improving education, the environment, and public health. In 2008, Alibaba donated USD 808,000 to victims of the Sichuan earthquake. Some years later, Alibaba launched a nonprofit organisation, the Hong Kong Young Entrepreneurs Foundation, which supports Hong Kong entrepreneurs to help them grow. In 2015, the company funded the rebuilding of 1,000 houses damaged by the earthquake in Nepal and raised money for another 9,000. In the same year, Jack Ma also founded a business school named the Hupan School in China.