The Sunday Mail
Jack Ma (Ma Yun) is a Chinese entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist.
He co-founded and is now executive chair of the Alibaba Group. The group is a multinational technology conglomerate.
Jack Ma was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China on September 10 1964. He has an older brother and a younger sister.
He grew up in a period during which communist China became more and more isolated from the West. His family did not have a lot of money when Jack and his siblings were young. As a child, one of Jack’s hobbies was catching crickets. He could tell their species and size simply by hearing their sound.
American president Richard Nixon visited Hangzhou in 1972. It was Jack’s hometown and this event made it a popular tourist destination. As a teenager, Jack used to get up early to ride his bicycle 70 miles to Hangzhou’s most famous hotel.
There he offered to give tours of the city in exchange for English lessons. He got his nickname Jack from one of those tourists.
Jack Ma wanted to go to college, but found this very difficult in his youth. Chinese admission exams take place only once a year, and he failed them twice. Ma attended the Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute (now called Hangzhou Normal University) and graduated in 1988 with a BA in English.
After graduating, he applied for various jobs only to be rejected many times.
Finally, he was hired as an English and international business teacher at Hangzhou Dianzi University. Ma first learned about the Internet in 1994. In 1995, he went to the US with friends, where they introduced him to the Internet. The first search Ma entered was ‘beer’.
He was surprised that the results did not include a Chinese beer brand.
That’s when he decided to start his own internet business for China. Next, he tried to find more general information about China, but was again surprised to not get any results. He and a friend decided to create a website related to China. The website was launched at 9.40am and very soon Jack received emails from a number of Chinese investors who wanted to get in touch with him.
That was the moment he realised the Internet had something amazing to offer.
In April 1995, Ma, his wife Cathy and a friend had raised US$20 000 and started their first business. The business focussed on creating websites for companies and he named it ‘China Pages’. In three years, the company had earned 5 million Chinese yuan, which would have been equivalent to US$800 000 at that time. Four years later, after his first two businesses, he invited 18 friends to his apartment to convince them to invest in his idea for a virtual marketplace called ‘Alibaba’.
The website lets exporters post products that customers can order directly.
The service soon becomes known all over the world. In October of 1999, the company raised US$5 million from Goldman Sachs and US$20 million from SoftBank, a Japanese telecom company that invests in tech businesses. The team stayed together.
At an employee meeting, Ma says, ‘We are going to make it because we are young and will never ever give up.”
Jack Ma believed it was important to maintain a pleasant work environment.
Not long after he starts ‘Taobao’, which was similar to eBay. One of the things that stands out is that he makes his team do handstands during breaks to keep their energy level up. In 2005 Yahoo invests US$1 billion in Alibaba in exchange for 40 percent of the shares.
That turned out to be a win for both Yahoo and the company, as the shares are now worth US$10 billion. To Bloomberg Jack Ma once said that he knew Alibaba had become a success when a client offered to pay his restaurant bill. ‘I am one of your clients of the Alibaba group, and I have made a lot of money. And I know you have not gotten anything out of it,” said the client.
‘I will pay the cheque for you.’
Alibaba became one of the most valuable technology firms in the world after getting the full US$25 billion in the largest share offering ever in the financial history of the US. Ma was the executive chair of the Alibaba Group, a holding company with nine large subsidiaries: Alibaba.com, Taobao Marketplace, Tmall, eTao, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Juhuasuan, 1688.com , AliExpress.com, and Alipay.
In November of 2012, the online transaction volume of Alibaba exceeded a trillion yuan. Since 2016, Ma is the owner of Château de Sours in Bordeaux, Chateau Guerry in Côtes de Bourg, and Château Perenne in Blaye, Côtes de Bordeaux. On January 9 2017, Ma met with American president Donald Trump in Trump Tower to discuss a potential one million job openings for the coming five years.
This was the result of Alibaba’s interest in the country. On September 8 2017, to celebrate the 18th anniversary of Alibaba, Ma came on stage and gave a Michael Jackson-inspired performance. During the 2009 Alibaba anniversary event, he performed part of ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight’, dressed as a heavy metal singer.
That month, Ma partnered with Sir Li Ka-shing in a joint venture to offer a digital wallet service in Hong Kong. On September 10 2018, Ma announced that he would be stepping down as executive chair of the Alibaba Holding Group in the following year. – toolshero.com
