Jack Ma was born in a middle-class family on 10 September, 1964 in Hangzhou, China. He began learning and practising English at a young age. He used to ride 27km on his bicycle to give tourist tours of the area to practice English for years.
Foreigners found it hard to pronounce his Chinese name Ma Yun, and they gave him the name Jack.
Later on, Jack Ma struggled to attend college. Also, Chinese entrance exams are held only once a year. He failed two times. The third time he passed and completed a bachelor of arts in English. Afterwards, he had a job as an English teacher.
He applied for more than 30 jobs but got rejected. One of the famous incidents was a KFC job interview, and among 24 people, he was the only person who was rejected. He also applied 10 times to Harvard, but all the times, his application was rejected.
On 28 June, 1999, Jack Ma and his team of 17 friends and students founded Alibaba.com in his Hangzhou apartment. It is China’s B2B marketplace site.
Alibaba.com is one of the most famous e-commerce websites and it is one of the most profitable websites in the world. In net profit, it earns more than Amazon. In the beginning, it was a business to business website. But today, it is business to consumer.
In September 2014, Alibaba group made its initial public offering on the New York stock exchange. In 2014, it was the largest ever (IPO). The company was valued at $168 billion dollars. After getting successful in e-commerce, Alibaba company expanded in different sectors like fintech, healthcare, video streaming, card computing, sport, news media websites, etc.
Jack Ma founded the Ant Group. It was made in 2012 to run a service called Alipay which is a digital payment service. It became so successful that it has one billion users. Also, before September, he was the richest man in China.
His Mistake
On 24 October, 2020, he criticised Xi Jinping’s government. He criticised the financial regulatory system. He said that the Chinese government believes in zero risk, e.g. they won’t give loans without worthy collateral in fear that the loan is not returned.
Jack Ma believes in a free market economy. Due to China’s policies, innovation is restricted.
On 5 November, it was planned that Ant group company would have the initial public offering on Chinese stock market. The company expected that its valuation would be more than $300 billion.
After a week, the Chinese government changed its rules and regulations. According to new rules, Ant group was disqualified from initial public offering.
Days after, the country’s top market watchdog called out Alibaba company for not following the anti-competition practices. They launched their investigation on Alibaba. They said that Alibaba was not following anti-monopoly rulers and was violating them.
Experts believed that the Chinese government was afraid that Alipay was growing a lot and that money was moving away from Chinese banks and into Alipay. The Chinese government didn’t feel good that a private company was taking control of the money. Due to this regulatory crackdown, the share market value of Alibaba fell by 17% in the month of December.
It was also noted that Jack Ma was being defamed by the trolls in the Chinese IT cells. Recently in December, Chinese websites and Chinese government IT cells portrayed him as a vampire.
Jack Ma also created a talent show, Africa’s Business Heroes. He was not present at the finale. There were a lot of speculations. Some newspapers reported that, according to sources, Jack Ma was lying low. While some speculated he was prisoned after 24 October, he didn’t post anything. In his last post he criticised the Chinese government.
There was similar news in September 2019. Jack Ma retired from Alibaba. He officially handed his helm as the company’s chairman to his successor Daniel Zhang. But he appeared during the 2020 China Green Companies Summit on 29 September, 2020 in Haikou, Hainan Province of China and gave a speech.
Revenue growth to slow to 19% in the financial year ending March 2022 (FY22), from 41% in FY21, and further slowed down to a low-teens rate in FY23 due to macroeconomic dare and firm competition in China.