theceomagazine.com | 13UNCONVENTIONAL, DETERMINED, AND TAKING OVER
THE WORLD, ALIBABA CEO JACK MA ISN’T FINISHED YET.WORDS KATRINA YU • IMAGES GETTYH
e’s starred in his own martial arts movie, recorded a song with one
of China’s biggest pop stars and performed onstage dressed as
Michael Jackson, thrusting his hips to the tune of ‘Billie Jean’.
Jack Ma may not sound like the conventional business tycoon,
but it’s the same eccentricity that has helped create one of the biggest and
most disruptive tech juggernauts in the world.
Today, the 53-year-old is one of Asia’s richest men, known for a stunning
rags-to-riches story that epitomises the rise of China, globalisation and
entrepreneurship. Ma, a philanthropist with a penchant for performance, has
amassed a personal fortune valued at nearly US$41 billion; his ecommerce
platform Alibaba boasts a market capitalisation of around US$487 billion.
Founded in 1999 in an apartment in the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou,
Alibaba’s mission is to “make it easy to do business anywhere”. The company
runs China’s premier online shopping portals Taobao and Tmall, websites that
deal in everything from hairdryers to dairy products.
The fledgling company survived the dotcom boom and bust, emerging
with a record-breaking public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in- Today, Alibaba connects roughly 10 million merchants with 480 million
customers annually, and employs over 50,000 staff members worldwide.
The company’s revenue has skyrocketed in recent years, achieving a growth
of 2,272 per cent between 2010 and 2017.
But Ma is far from finished. “Compared to 15 years ago, we’re big. But
compared to what we’ll be 15 years from now, we’re still a baby,” he said during
an interview at Davos in 2015. Baby or not, he’s already built an ecosystem; the
company’s teams straddle the earth having bought stakes in everything from
online banks and movie studios to healthcare providers and food deliverers. »
Unstoppable
JACK MA
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