Jack Ma
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jack Ma (Chinese: 马云; pinyin: Mǎ Yún; born October 15, 1964) is founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Alibaba Group.
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[edit] Early life
Born in the city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, Ma graduated from Hangzhou Normal University in 1988 (he initially failed the entrance exam twice) and became a lecturer in English and International Trade in the same university.
Ma first started building websites for Chinese companies with the help of friends in the US. Ma has commented that "The day we got connected to the Web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house," and on a very slow dial-up connection, "we waited three and a half hours and got half a page.... We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved the Internet existed."[original research?]
[edit] Career
After a stint as head of the China International Electronic Commerce Center's Infoshare division, he founded Alibaba.com in 1999, a China-based business to business marketplace site which serves more than 40 million members from more than 240 countries and territories.
Ma now serves as chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group, which is a holding company with five major subsidiaries -- Alibaba.com; Taobao, Alipay, Alisoft and Yahoo!Koubei.
Alibaba.com, which went public in Nov. 2007 as the second-biggest Internet IPO in history after Google, and trades in Hong Kong under the symbol 1688.HK, is the world's largest business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform, and features marketplaces in English, Japanese (along with investor Softbank) and Chinese. Alibaba.com is making a new push into global markets in 2009, including plans to spend upwards of $30 million in marketing in the US and UK to drive greater buyer interest by appealing to existing small business owners and newly minted entrepreneurs looking to connect with suppliers from around the world.
In 2003, Ma's Alibaba launched Taobao.com, a consumer to consumer auction website that is equivalent to eBay and Amazon.com with parts of Wal-Mart.com and Facebook mixed in, which also provided an innovative escrow-based online payment service, Alipay (necessary in China, where credit and debit cards are not widespread). Taobao last year became the largest retailer in all of China, and has a 75 percent-plus share of the Chinese-domestic online consumer market. It serves nearly 100 million registered users and more than 1.5 million sellers have opened up stores on Taobao. Last year's annual transaction volume on Taobao (gross merchandise volume or GMV) reached nearly $15 billion in 2008, exceeding the largest off-line retail chain in China. According to a government ministry, Taobao's GMV equaled approximately one percent of China's total retail trade in 2008. Alimama (www.alimama.com), an online advertising exchange and affiliate network for more than 400,000 publishers in China, was merged into Taobao in 2008. At the time of the merger, Taobao reported that it reached break-even status.
In addition to support transactions on Taobao, Alipay has become the leading third-party online payment platform in China, and its provides a safe, secure way for consumers to purchase goods and services on the Internet. Alipay has a more than 50 percent share of the total market of Internet users in China, and earlier this year announced it had topped more than 150 million registered users. Alipay provides an escrow payment service that takes funds from a buyer, alerts the seller the funds are in escrow and once it learns the buyer is satisfied releases the funds to the seller. It has been credited with significantly accelerated the growth of consumer e-commerce in China.
In 2007, Ma's Alibaba Group founded Alisoft, which offers business management "Software as a Service (SaaS)." Through self-built and third-party applications, Alisoft provides small and medium sized businesses with low-cost financial management tools, and as a result now commands more than 40 percent of the Chinese SaaS market.
In late 2008, Ma merged Yahoo!China, which Alibaba acquired as part of the investment of Yahoo! in Alibaba Group in 2005, with Koubei, another Group company to create a platform (Yahoo!Koubei) designed as a classified listings service focused on the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The idea behind Yahoo!Koubei is the ability to use the net to help people looking for products and services in a locality find those who are offering the same. Yahoo!Koubei is expected to have a positive impact on employment as well as the ability to find goods, professional services, apartments to let, etc.
Ma remains as chief executive officer and chairman of board after Yahoo! acquired a 40% economic stake (35% voting rights) in Alibaba in exchange for $1 Billion USD plus all of Yahoo!'s Chinese-based assets (formerly known as Yahoo! China - valued at approx. $700m), on August 11, 2005. Japan's Softbank will have a 27.4% in the new Alibaba company.
[edit] Recent Accomplishments
In May 2009, Ma was honored by Time magazine with inclusion into the Time 100 list of the world’s 100 most influential people. In reporting Mr. Ma’s accomplishments, Adi Ignatius, former Time senior editor and editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review, said, “Meeting Jack Ma, you might be forgiven for thinking he's still an English teacher. The Chinese Internet entrepreneur is soft-spoken and elflike — and he speaks really good English. But as founder and CEO of Alibaba.com, Ma, 44, runs one of the world's biggest B2B online marketplaces, an eBay for companies doing international trade. Alibaba and Ma's consumer-auction website, Taobao.com, did so well that in 2006, eBay shut down its own site in China.”
Among Ma’s accomplishments in the past 12 months: • He was the first major world business leader to predict the economic downturn in a memo to staff in July 2008, which was subsequently made public • He proactively took decisive actions to steer his company through a crash in China exports such as reducing prices for export supplier customers; acting is a middleman to connect small and medium sized companies with lenders • He led the creation of employment opportunities worldwide on the Alibaba.com and Taobao platforms, as well as forged ahead in 2009 with the hiring of 5,000 new employees globally • He has built a reputation for having world-class vision in terms of how Alibaba Group businesses are operated, including an adherence to a vision, values and mission-based culture as well as the requirement that each of Alibaba Group’s five business units must incorporate corporate social responsibility into their business models
[edit] Views
On 2008-06-11, at a press conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Hong Kong, called to discuss the highly successful Hong Kong Stock Exchange IPO, when asked whether Alibaba was an ethical trading company, Ma responded by announcing to the assembled journalists - and reiterating when queried - that he and his family have "sworn off Shark Fin Soup now and forever" (echoing elite basketballer Yao Ming's famous declaration, which angered Guangzhou's fin traders), which he said was a result of finding out what the problems are. In December 2008, Alibaba Group revised its listing policy and banned the sale of shark fin products on all of its e-commerce platforms.
At the Alibaba.com Annual Shareholders Meeting in May 2009, Ma, who is chairman and non-executive director of the publicly traded arm of the Group, encouraged those in attendance including shareholders, customers and students from two Hong Kong universities, to take matters into their own hands and take action in the form of starting businesses to cope with the economic downturn rather than waiting for government or business to help them. He reminded everyone that the great fortunes of the world were made by people who saw opportunties that others didn't, and he noted that the aftermath of the recent global recession would be no different in terms of exposing new ways of doing business. Ever the professor, he also took the unprecedented step of attempting the galvanize the students in attendance to their professed interest in business by awarding each one with 100 shares of Alibaba.com stock. He told them he hoped this award would deepen their interest in business and entrepreneurship and that they would all come back to next year's meeting as voting shareholders.
[edit] External links
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Wikinews has related news: Founder of Alibaba Group Jack Ma talks about e-commerce in Taiwan |
