JACK
MA the Richest Chinese
Ma Yun
Popularly known as Jack Ma is now officially richest man in China with net
worth USD 31 billion. Jack Ma is the founder and Executive chairman of Alibaba
group with alibaba.com which is largest B2B (Business to Business website) portal
with average more than 2 million unique visitors every day.
Jack Ma was
born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province in China on 10 Sept 1964. Unlike other
Chinese, he learned English at early age and practiced it with foreign tourists
coming to Hangzhou hotel which was 40 minutes away by bike
ride from his home. He used to give free guide services to tourist in exchange
of the benefit of speaking in English. After becoming BA in English he became
lecturer of English and international Trade in Hangzhou Dianzi University.
Later he graduated in Business in 2006 from Cheung Kong Graduate School of
Business (CKGSB) in Beijing.
About his
early life he said to an interviewer, Charlie Rose that after graduation he
applied for 30 jobs but got rejected from all of them including KFC. He said the fun about job in KFC, 27 guys
applied for Job and 26 got it except him. He also said that he applied to Harvard university for studies 10 times but
got rejected all the time.
In 1995 he
went to USA and first learned about Internet through his friends. He found on
internet that there was information about many products from around the world
but very little about Chinese products. He realized that though China makes
good products, they lack marketing due to access of internet or due to language
problem. He saw an opportunity in this.
He and his friends
decided to catch on this and developed the first small website about Chinese
products and within span of 3 hours he got response from many Chinese companies.
In April 1995 he, his wife and a friend created the first website called China
Yellow pages which gave a footing to him on Internet. In 1997-98 he headed an
information technology company established by the China International
Electronic Commerce Center, a department of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and
Economic Cooperation however he quit it in 1999 and return to his hometown.
There he started another Website helping Chinese small businessman with help of
18 friends.
In year 2000
he got a funding of USD 25 Million from Foreign Venture capital company. The program was expected to improve the
domestic e-commerce market and perfect an e-commerce platform for Chinese
enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to address
World Trade Organization (WTO) challenges. Ma wanted to improve the global
e-commerce system and from 2003 he founded Taobao Marketplace, Alipay, Ali
Mama and Lynx. After the rapid rise of Taobao.
eBay offered to purchase the company. However, Ma rejected their offer
and instead garnered support from Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang with a $1 billion
investment.
In 2014
Alibaba raised USD 25 Billion in IPO on New York Stock Exchange, the largest
initial public offering in US financial history and Yahoo gained USD $9.4 by
selling 140 million Shares even after retaining 383 million shares keeping 15%
stakes in Alibaba. The IPO opened at 68$ a share. The present price of Alibaba
is $123.22 per share.
Ma has often
been invited to lecture at universities such as the Wharton School at the
University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard
University, and Peking University.
Jack is
passionate about world commerce and especially ecommerce. He actively supports environment protection
and has earmarked 0.3% of the group’s annual revenue for environmental
protection. His portal which was earlier reported to sell fake Chinese products
has actively taken interest in delisting fake products from ecommerce platform
and thereby giving importance to copy rights and patents. He says banning such
products is the law and enforcement job to which their company helps.
Alibaba
enables third-party sellers in China to take their own businesses to the web.
The company only had 36,446 full-time employees, almost all in China, as of
March 31, 2016. But with more than 10 million active sellers as of 2015,
Alibaba estimates its China retail marketplaces "contributed to the
creation of over 15 million job opportunities."
In
comparison Amazon, had about 2,30,800 employees as of the end of 2015, though
it, too, creates other jobs through its sellers, contractors and supporting
services. Wal-Mart, which is strengthening its online presence, employs 2.3
million associates around the world, including 1.5 million in the U.S., as of
the end of fiscal 2016.
You must be
knowing that Alibaba does not have any warehouse, nor does it sells any product
itself but the third parties sell their products on its ecommerce platform.
This is called marketplace model. When an interviewer asked him why he can’t
imitate Amazon by selling himself on Alibaba? He said “our model is that we
encourage others to become big, we want them to grow. We are just enablers,
however in case of Amazon, it is like a music director, producer, artist and
publisher all by itself for a movie. Our business model fits us and we will
stick to that model”. He also said that when he met with a chief of Walmart on
WEF (World economic forum) he said that if walmart wants to expand, it has to
increase Warehouse capacity, staff, showrooms, Supply chain capacity etc. while
Alibaba has to increase a server space or has to add another server to develop
that much business.
His company
Alipay does financial services and also supports small and medium companies for
Microloan. He said that they have so much data with them about small
businesses, that if such a business apply for a small loan, after doing data
analytics on his data, they can decide within in two minutes whether to
sanction a loan to him and if so, within next minutes, micro loan up to USD
5000 is credited to its loaner’s account.
On 9th
January 2017, Jack Ma met then president elect Donald Trump who is well known
for his stand on “America First” about expansion of Chinese Online Ecommerce
companies in America and promised to create one million American Jobs in next 5
years. It was music to Donald trump who is fighting for lost American Jobs and
American businesses to foreigners. When asked how he will create those jobs, he
said Alibaba is for small businesses. There are lots of small businessman and
growers in Midwest America who are good at Garments, wine and fruits and
agriculture. They will sell their American products and services to China and
Asian countries through his ecommerce platform. He said he is confident to get these numbers.
In another
Interview he was asked, why America is lagging in world commerce and its
economy on downfall? He said, America has lots of potential however it wasted
its lots of money on world policing and billions of dollars are spent on wars.
If same money would have been used on improving infrastructure and Job
creation, the situation would not have arise. They do not have to blame others
but themselves.
Jack ma is
early investor in many Indian ecommerce ventures such as Snapdeal and Paytm.
Jack ma is also board member on Japanese Telecom, Internet and ecom giant
SoftBank. He achieved several awards and
accolades from various business magazines such as Fortune, Forbes, Business
week, Barron's and institutions around
the world for his contribution in world commerce with most prestigious World
Economic Forum selecting him as a "Young Global Leader" in 2005.
Jack ma will
be an inspiration to new generation as a Rags to rich model.
Compiled by
Madhav Bhole
(Source:
Internet)
