Who is Jack Ma?
Jack Ma is a global ambassador of
Chinese business. He is the co-founder and former Executive Chairman of Alibaba
Group, which is a technological company.
He was born on 10 September 1964
in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China. His name was Ma Yun but he was nicknamed by his
foreigner friend as Jack Ma because he couldn’t pronounce his Chinese name.
Education and Career
He struggled in attending college
but after giving three attempts he was able to get into Hangzhou Normal
University and graduated in 1988. He did Bachelors of Arts in English.
Jack Ma had his own share of ups
and downs during his youth and even after that for many years. He shared that
he was rejected for many jobs and from getting into Harvard Business School.
He started his own company called
Hangzhou Haibo Translation Agency, when he first heard of Internet. He realized
that the Internet is a great way of spreading information about China and he
created a website for the same. It got popular and he received many responses.
In 1995, he and a computer
teacher named He Yibing, who opened the first office for China pages and he
started his second company. He got domain chinapages.com in US in April, 1995.
After he started earning great profits, he began building websites for Chinese
companies.
From 1998-1999, Jack Ma headed a
technological company established by the China International Electronic
Commerce Centre. After this, he returned to China and with his team, he founded
Alibaba, a China-based business to business (B2B) market place site.
Alibaba Group
The Alibaba program was aimed at improving
domestic e-commerce market and to overcome the challenges of World Trade
Organization (WTO). The Alibaba Co. became profitable after the three years of
its establishment.
In November 2012, the value of online
transaction of Alibaba Group increased by one trillion yuan. Then in 2014,
Alibaba Group became the largest technological company around the globe by
raising $25 billion as a public offering in New York Stock Exchange, which
founded to be the largest in Us history ever.
The nine major subsidiaries of Alibaba Group
are -
- Alipay
- AliExpress.com
- Alibaba.com
- Taobao Marketplace
- Tmall
- eTao
- 1688.com
- Alibaba Cloud Computing
- Juhuasuan
On 10th September 2018, he
declared that he will be stepping down from the position of executive chairman
of the Alibaba Group and that now he wants to step into philanthropy. He
finally stepped down the Alibaba board on September 30, 2019.
Public Reappearance of Jack Ma
The public disappearance of Jack Ma has been
noted by many news outlets from October 2020, majorly began when he did not
appear on his own Talent TV show. The speculations and rumours about his
absence from the public and granting shares in e-commerce were made.
The speculations included that he might be
lying low as per his own wish or maybe because of what he mentioned in his
speech at Shanghai Forum, about the Chinese regulators and banks. In his speech
he criticised them for having a “pawnshop mentality”.
Since then, he made his first public
appearance in January 2021 via a 50 seconds video call with the rural teachers.
Alibaba group has confirmed that the video call, of which he became a part of,
was an online ceremony for an annual event for rural teachers.
The news of his reappearance has brought all
the rumours to a rest and even Alibaba’s Hong-Kong listed shares jumped over
10% after the news came up in the media and took over the whole social media
and news channels as well.
All the news indicates that even giving up
his corporate position, Jack Ma still holds a significant position in the
Alibaba and Ant Group and even represents them globally.
Written By - Somya Jain
Edited By - Keerthana Lakshmi
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