Jack Ma, ‘the richest man in China’, is not called Jack Ma. And he is no longer the richest man in China. He was born in 1964 with the name ‘Ma Yun’, with the last name in front, as in most Far Eastern nations. Changing the order and adopting an Anglo-Saxon name is just a Chinese custom when interacting with Westerners.
And the truth is that Ma began to interact with them very early on: at the age of 12 he became interested in learning English and decided to buy a radio to listen to stations in that language, and visit the Hangzhou International Hotel daily to offer free tours to tourists in exchange for speaking to him in English. She did this for 8 years straight.
However, his story of a ‘self-made successful man’ has several ‘blots’ that he himself has never hidden: he had to take the university entrance exams three times of Hangzhou Teachers, failing the first two (he was terrible at math). In fact, he failed the third time as well, but having come close to the cut-off grade, he was able to enroll when enrollment for the English teacher’s degree fell short of expectations.
Once in college, however, his grades were remarkable, and Ma managed to become president of the student council. And, already graduated, for 5 years, he managed to occupy a teaching position. But his streak of bad luck was not over: the salary was miserableand decided to apply for jobs outside of the university setting.
Jack Ma when he gave free tours to tourists to learn English. Image from the documentary ‘Crocodile in the Yangtze’.
He was rejected at 30 companies where he applied for a job. He himself recounted that when KFC opened its first location in his hometown, he was the only one of 24 applicants not to get hired. Let’s add to that that the police also rejected him. Y Harvard, where he applied for a place on a dozen occasions.
Eventually, he set up a Chinese-English translation agency, his first company. And that led him to visiting the United States for the first time in 1995, at the age of 31. And there she heard about the Internet for the first time.. He says that the first thing he searched on the Net of Nets was “Chinese beer”, discovering to his surprise that there was no information about it. In fact, there was generally little information about China.
So he asked a friend for help to create a flimsy website for his agency and was surprised when, after a few days, he had already received several emails. This ‘Internet’ thing had potential.
In 1995, Internet connections had been released in China for only two years, but Ma decided create a new company, China Yellowpages (a directory of various Chinese companies looking for clients abroad), which also became China’s first Internet company.
From failure to success with Alibaba
China Yellowpages was a flop. But Ma knew she had hit on something big, and she had an idea in mind.: An e-commerce website where Chinese exporters could post product listings for buyers to browse. So, in 1999, he thought of a term known and easy to pronounce in any language (‘Alibaba’) and he corralled 17 friends and acquaintances in his apartment until he could convince them to become co-founders.
In those dot-com rush days, it took only a few months before Ma was able to raise $5 million from Goldman Sachs and another $20 million from Japan’s SoftBank to launch his dream business venture. When the ‘bubble’ burst, Alibaba was not one of the victims (although it was forced to lay off its entire workforce outside of China in 2001).
Originally Alibaba worked only in the field of B2B commerce. Then it began to diversify: AliExpress was his answer (low cost, yes) to Amazonselling directly to the consumer. Taobao, your alternative to eBay. Before that I had released Alipay, your own PayPal. It has, of course, dozens of other subsidiaries.
The success of all these businesses ranked Ma at the top of the Hurun list, the Chinese equivalent of the Forbes list, for three years in a row (2018, 2019 and 2020). With the arrival of her coronation, Ma began to step aside from her: in 2018 she announced her intention to Resign as CEO of Alibaba Groupa measure that became effective on September 10, 2019, Alibaba’s 20th anniversary day.
He was succeeded in that position by Daniel Zhang, who was already CEO of the group and had created a reputation for himself by becoming the creator of ‘Single’s Day’, one of the major online shopping events in China. As is customary in these cases, Ma said she was retiring to pursue philanthropy and education.
And so, we come to October 24, 2020. Jack Ma’s second-biggest creation, financial services conglomerate Ant Group, is on the verge of going public: the IPO was going to be the biggest ever (it was valued at $35 billion. In this triumphant context, Ma comes upand gives a lecture to the Chinese financial elite in which commits the imprudence of criticizing his government to put spokes in the wheels of free business growth.
We have come across the PCCh, friend Sancho
A few days later, the Chinese government suspended Ant Group’s IPO. Later, she would impose a large antitrust fine to Alibaba, worth 2,818 million dollars (the largest in the history of China). And Jack Ma’s hair was not seen in public for 11 months, in a case that is powerfully reminiscent of Peng Shuai, the tennis player who disappeared from the face of the earth for several months after accusing her of sexual abuse on social networks. a former vice president of China.
During that time, Ma only ‘reappeared’, in January 2021, with a recorded speech. aimed at the winners of an award given by their foundation. After that time, he began to be seen in various places abroad (the first, Spain, in September 2021) but now maintaining a very low public profile… no statements, no business events, nothing.
In reality, Ma only handed the Chinese regime something that they had planned to do long before: ‘to put in vereda’ to its great technologicalwhich the Chinese Communist Party sees as driving a ‘distraction economy’ and, more importantly, as a counterbalance to the power of the party itself.
That is why, in the last two years, we have seen how China has taken measures to the detriment of some of its biggest technology companies… and has favored some of its rivals, theoretically more inclined to follow government ‘directions’. In that time, Ma has ‘off a cliff’ on the Hurun list: 4th place in 2021, 9th place in 2022.
At last, this past week it has been made public that Ma has been self-exiled from China for half a year, living in Tokyo (Japan) with his family. With this transfer, he would seek to move away from Xi Jinping’s “strong hand” against business leaders and, perhaps, also from the stifling anti-COVID measures that have already generated the most relevant street protests in decades.