Jack Ma is an example of a person who managed to achieve tremendous success without connections and influential parents. In his life, he had many times faced rejections: first when entering college, then when applying for a job. It is unlikely then that a simple but very persistent Chinese could imagine that after 30 years he would become the richest man in his country.
Childhood and early career
Jack Ma was born on September 10, 1964, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, his parents were musicians. At the birth of the future businessman, his name was Ma Yun, but he began to call himself differently when he made friends through correspondence with a foreigner. He called him Jack: the Chinese name was difficult to pronounce.
The boy wanted to learn English after American President Richard Nixon visited China. Ma started learning the language at a young age: at the age of 9, he even rode his bike to the nearest hotel to get live conversational practice. Jack began to drive tourist groups to better master a foreign language.
He tried twice to enter Hangzhou Teachers’ College, but failed the entrance exams – his weak point was mathematics. The venture succeeded only on the third attempt in 1984, and in 1988, Ma received a bachelor’s degree in English.
From 1988 to 1993 he taught a foreign language at the institute. In 1994, Jack founded his first translation company, Haibo. But soon an event occurred that drastically changed the life of a young entrepreneur.
Alibaba Group
In 1995, Jack Ma visited the United States on behalf of the Hangzhou City Government – and first encountered the Internet. There were very few Chinese websites, and he saw this as a great opportunity to make money. Upon his return, Ma founded China Pages, a company that created online business platforms and was one of the first in China. However, he left the company two years later, largely due to strong competition from Hangzhou Telecom.
From 1998 to 1999, Jack ran a government-backed Internet company in Beijing. But he understood that if he stayed in this place, he would miss out on the excellent opportunities that the Internet could give him. The entrepreneur was convinced that the worldwide network has a huge potential for business development.
In 1999, Jack Ma returned to Hangzhou, recruited a team, and founded the Alibaba Group, which launched a website to facilitate small business transactions. Organizations paid a membership fee to be certified as reliable sellers on this site. Companies that wanted to sell products to customers outside of China paid more.
In 2003, Jack created another platform – the consumer Internet market Taobao (which means “treasure hunt” in Chinese). At that time, the American company eBay, in cooperation with the Chinese EachNet, controlled 80% of the market. Ma believed that the requirement to pay users for transactions was their weak point and decided to play on this. Taobao did not receive money from site visitors – it earned money from online promotion and the sale of extra services.
In 2005, the Alibaba Group attracted the attention of the American Internet portal Yahoo !, which acquired 40% of its shares for an investment of $ 1 billion. In 2007, Ma managed to raise another $ 1.7 billion in a public offering in Hong Kong. Jack also received an offer to sell the company from his main competitor, eBay, but turned it down. By this time, Taobao’s market share was already 67%, and because of this, the American company even had to close its representative office in China.
In 2011, the successful site split into the following sites: the Taobao Marketplace, where people bought and sold goods, the Taobao Mall shopping portal, and the eTao shopping search engine. The business growth was overwhelming: in November 2012 alone, the Alibaba Group managed to bail out an unheard-of amount of 1 trillion yuan. In 2014, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange and raised $ 25 billion in investment, the best.
Until 2013, Jack served as President of the Alibaba Group. But even after leaving office, he remained chairman of the board of directors until September 2020.
At the moment, Ma is ranked 17th on the Forbes list: his fortune is estimated at $ 61.3 billion, and he is considered the richest man in China.
