Keywords: Alibaba, Jack Ma, Chinese e-commerce
How Alibaba’s Jack Ma Is Building a Truly Global Retail Empire
By Adam Lashinsky - Fortune
March 31, 2017
Jack Ma is one of China’s richest men, with a fortune
valued at nearly $30 billion. As executive chairman of Alibaba Group, he leads
the dominant force in Chinese e-commerce, a company with a market value of $264
billion and some 450 million customers. A global ambassador for Chinese
business, he spent 800 hours aloft last year-visiting princes, Presidents, and
Prime Ministers and lots of mere businesspeople too. “A professional pilot
cannot travel that much, or so I’m told,” he boasts.
Even so, the
rich and powerful people who meet with Ma tend to come away from the experience
with a fresh nugget of information, either about him or about the still poorly
understood digital conglomerate he started with a bunch of friends 18 years ago
in the provincial coastal city of Hangzhou. Jim Kim, a physician who is the
president of the World Bank, met Ma four years ago over a dinner lasting more
than three hours and was startled to find the billionaire wearing sandals,
holding Buddhist prayer beads, and sitting cross-legged on his chair. Kim was
so taken with Ma’s passion for facilitating global trade by focusing on
small-business people that he’s rethinking his international development
organization’s approach.
Others are moved
by Ma’s humanity. Jean Liu, president of Chinese ride-hailing startup Didi
Chuxing, has known Ma for years and considers him a mentor. (Alibaba is a Didi
shareholder.) She recently learned, through family connections rather than from
Ma, about how he repeatedly visited a seamstress he had met after learning she
was ill. Says Liu: “He genuinely cares about the people around him.”
Then there’s the
President of the United States, who met Ma for the first time a few weeks
before his Inauguration. “Trump didn’t know that much about Alibaba,” reports
company president Michael Evans, a former Goldman Sachs banker and Asia hand
who helped set up the powwow. “He was fascinated to hear that Chinese consumers
are interested in buying from U.S. small businesses. I don’t think that had
occurred to him.” Ma used the sit-down to make a bold promise-that Alibaba
would help create 1 million jobs in the U.S. over five years. The pronouncement
was music to the President-elect’s ears. “It was a great meeting,” he declared
before the cameras in the lobby of Trump Tower, a beaming Ma beside him. “Jack
and I are going to do some great things.”
President Trump
isn’t the only one who could stand to learn more about Alibaba. Despite its
heft in China and the blockbuster 2014 public offering that raised $25 billion
on the New York Stock Exchange and introduced Alibaba to Western investors,
Ma’s company remains a mystery to most non-Chinese. There’s a simple reason for
that: Few outside the world’s second-largest economy are Alibaba customers. Ma
is aware of this knowledge gap. It’s part of what drives him to keep logging
frequent-flier miles to educate people about his company and his plans.
To realize his
vision-which relies on technology to buy, sell, finance, and deliver goods on
Alibaba’s digital platforms around the world-Ma has been busily recasting
himself of late as a global leader. Already he is the first Chinese business
executive who can claim to have transcended his homeland for the world stage.
In his travels, Ma promotes the lowering of trade barriers, touts his own brand
of philanthropy, and supports causes such as primary-school education. His
version of globalization is carefully calibrated and expansive enough to be
consistent with the goals of his own President, Xi Jinping, as well as with Trump’s
America-first positioning. Read more on Yahoo! >>>
