Jack Ma:Why the richest Chinese man disappeared

The Alibaba Group is based in China and specializes in e-commerce, Internet and technology. There belong the largest business-to-business (B2B, i.e. trade agreement between businesses) company on the planet which is Alibaba.com (you can find everything from blouses to tractors), the largest C2C (customer-to-costumer) company which is Taobao and the largest business-to-consumer (B2C) company which is Tmall. In other words, everything related to buying and selling on the internet is managed - with enormous success - by this group, whose online sales and profits exceed the total of those of the American retail stores (Walmart, Amazon and eBay) combined. from 2015 to date.

In 2020, the group was rated the fifth largest company in the world, in terms of artificial intelligence. In the same year, profits reached 58,725,000,000 euros. Shoppers had exceeded 100,000,000 on average every day and the giant had created 40,000,000 jobs for the Chinese.

The biggest (most profitable) day in the history of the site remains Single's Day (rival of Valentine's Day) of 2016:in a 24-hour period sales reached close to 19 billion.

How the name came about

It all started in Jack Ma's apartment, on 6/28/1999, where together with 17 of his friends and students, they decided to create something that didn't exist until then:to 'open' the small and medium business market.

One of the regular guests at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said in 2018 that "nobody can stop globalization or trade. Globalization has done a great job in the last 30 years. It made many countries rich, but of course it also created many problems. Young people didn't have many opportunities, small companies didn't have many opportunities. Developed countries were ignored. But we are talking about just 30 years. Today we have better technology, better knowledge about globalization. It is my generation's responsibility or opportunity to improve it. Tell me:how can you stop her? If we don't change education, we're going to be in trouble. What we teach our children is from the previous 200 years. So you can't teach them to compete with machines. We have to teach something unique, that the machine will never be able to catch us '".

As the founder had said "one day I was in a coffee shop in San Francisco and I was thinking that Alibaba is a good name. When the waitress came to order, I asked her if she knew who Ali Baba was. He answered 'yes'. I asked her to tell me what she knew about him. He told me 'sumami open'. That was the moment I decided on the name. Then I left the store and as I walked down the street, I asked the same question (you know Ali Baba) to 30 passers-by - people from Germany, India, Tokyo and China. Everyone knew him. Additionally, the name was easyto spell ". He registered it. Not only him. “I also bought Alimama in case someone wanted to 'marry' us .

Jack Ma was born as Ma Yun on 10/15/1964, in the capital and most populous city of Zhejiang, Hangzhou with 10,360,000 inhabitants - the southeast of the country. It is also one of the top 100 financial centers in the world. This was learned much later by our man, who grew up very poor in communist China (of complete isolation from the West) in a family of five. His parents were traditional musicians.

As a child, although he was skinny, he did not hesitate to pick a fight with anyone who dared to annoy him. "I was never afraid of people bigger than me ". His hobbies included collecting crickets and 'making' them fight.

In 1972 President Nixon visited his city which then became the destination for all tourists. As a teenager he went every day to the main hotel in the area and offered tours to guests in exchange for English lessons. For nine years, every day he took his bicycle and traveled a distance of 27 kilometers to do the tours. One of the foreigners he served suggested that they correspond. He also 'baptized' him Jack, because as he told him his normal name could hardly be pronounced by foreigners.

The only way to claim his life, being poor, was to study. It took him three years to pass the exams that gave him a place at the University (Hangzhou Normal University which 'turns out' teachers and professors). In 1988 he became an English graduate. After graduation, he began teaching the language at the local university, for $12 a month.

He has said that he had gone through a few interviews for jobs, without success (one was at KFC), while he had sent ten applications to Harvard Business School. Rejected all ten.

In 1995 he made his first trip to the USA, as a business translator who had to claim a payment he had not received. It was then that he was introduced to computers. The first word he searched for was 'beer'. He was surprised to find that no one from his own country appeared before him. Then he decided to build an Internet company in his country. The first two attempts were unsuccessful. After four years of trying, one day he invited 17 friends to his apartment to convince them to believe in his new vision:an online marketplace where exporters could list their products and customers could buy them directly.

The third time was the lucky one. Alibaba.com has also been successful overseas, mainly due to very 'low' prices due to four factors:labor costs, electricity costs, 'cutting' packaging and removing money that others invest in 'aggressive' marketing.

By October 1999 Goldman Sachs had invested 4 million euros in it and (Japanese telecommunications company) SoftBank 16,300,000 euros. The company remained the same, determined never to quit. The first time the business became profitable, Ma gave each employee a can of Silly String. Don't know what it is? Let me show you.

In the early 2000s, Ma decided to create eBay's competitor (Taobao). During breaks from work, he made all his friends (and now colleagues) do vertical and stay with their heads on the floor for a few minutes 'to keep their energy up'.

He also told them other things. As he later said many useful things all over the planet. Among the leading examples is the following:“When you are 20 to 30 years old, you have to follow a good boss. Join a good company so you can learn how to do things right. When you are 30 to 40 years old, if you want to do something on your own, do it. You still have room to lose, to fail. When you are 40 to 50 my advice is to do things you are good at. Not the ones you find interesting. From 50 to 60 spend time educating young people, the next generation. When you are over 60, it is useful to stay with your grandchildren.

"I never thought I would be a CEO, let alone a good CEO. One of the things my teachers taught me was that a teacher always expects his students to be better from him. If you don't think this way, you will be a tragic teacher".

In 2005 Yahoo! to buy 40% for $1,000,000,000 (€820,000,000). Ma confessed that 'I knew I had succeeded when I was eating at a restaurant and someone offered to pay my bill, saying 'I am an Alibaba customer and I have made a lot of money. I also know you don't make much money, so I want to pay for your food.'

In 2013 this man stepped down as CEO. He retained the position of executive chairman. On 19/10 2014 the group entered the stock market under the name 'BABA'. The 150 billion IPO was the largest 'offering' in the history of the New York Stock Exchange.

Note:IPO refers to the first time a company 'issues' shares in public circulation (see listed on the stock exchange). The acronym refers to the words 'Initial Public Offering'. The most important reason for the existence of this story is to raise more equity capital, through the public offering of shares. There are many others. For example, if the original shareholders want to exit. This was not the case with Alibaba Group.

On that day (of the IPO) Ma became the richest man in China, with a fortune reaching 25 billion - today his 'value' is 40 billion. His habits did not change:he continued to enjoy reading books, writing kung fu novels, playing poker, meditating and practicing tai chi. At the company's annual parties he was among those who appeared on stage to entertain the crowd (ie, the 20,000 employees). After the illness of a relative of his wife, the infection also made him an environmentalist - he "holds" various posts in organizations, while also making donations.

In September 2019, he left all posts and remained the person (not company) who has the most shares (5%).

"You don't have to be smart to be successful"

The line he has repeated the most is "you don't need to be smart to be successful. I didn't have a clue about technology or management at first. You don't need to know a lot. You just have to be able to find those who they're smarter than you. For too many years I did just that. After I found them, my job was to make them work together. And if that happens, everything becomes easier. Dumb people can work together easily. Smarts can nevercooperate ".

Incidentally, he kept his family out of the limelight. He had met his wife Zhang Ying at university. She had said 'he is not a handsome man, but I fell in love with him because he could do many things that handsome men could not'. They became parents of two children.

Apparently he made extreme purchases. Because he could, he bought a jet worth close to 50,000,000 - which was used by other executives of the company, but mainly by him. This year he was on the panel of the TV show Africa's Business Heroes (aimed at talented potential entrepreneurs), until November when he was replaced. No one explained why. Many wondered what happened to him.

A few days earlier (at the end of October), he had made the speech that caused a world sensation in Shanghai. He had blasted China's most powerful economic lawmakers and members of the country's biggest state bank, saying they were "dangerous, stifling innovation and clinging to a 'pawnshop overseeing China's financial system' mentality." ". Apparently they called him.