Beijing: Jack Ma (pic), the unconventional billionaire founder of tech giant Alibaba and the totem of China’s entrepreneurial brilliance, has stepped out of the limelight since a Communist Party crackdown that chopped back his empire.
The most recognisable face in Asian business, Ma has seen his fortune fall by around half to an estimated US$25bil (RM109.9bil) after authorities pulled what would then have been the world’s biggest-ever IPO in 2020.
Chinese regulators torched the planned listing of Ma’s Ant Group in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and the following year hit Alibaba with a record US$2.75bil fine for alleged unfair practices.
A reshuffle of Ant’s shareholding structure will now see Ma cede control of the fintech giant he founded in 2014.
The 58-year-old will hold just 6.2% of the voting rights as the company moves to ensure “no shareholder, alone or jointly with other parties, will have control over Ant Group”, the firm said in a statement on Saturday.
It is the latest humbling of China’s former poster boy for enterprise, who in recent years has retreated from the public eye he once so relished.
A Communist Party member, Ma’s rags-to-riches backstory came to embody a self-confident generation of Chinese entrepreneurs ready to shake up the world.
Charismatic, diminutive and fast-talking, Ma was cash-strapped and working as an English teacher when someone showed him the Internet on a 1990s trip to the United States – and he was hooked.
He toyed with several Internet-related projects, before convincing a group of friends to give him US$60,000 to start a new business in 1999 in China, then still emerging as an economic giant.
Alibaba was the result, an e-commerce behemoth founded from his bedroom in the eastern city of Hangzhou that started an online shopping revolution and grew into a fintech titan.
The company changed the shopping habits of hundreds of millions of Chinese people and catapulted Ma to international stardom.
“The first time I used the Internet, I touched on the keyboard and I find, ‘Well, this is something I believe, it is something that is going to change the world and change China’,” Ma once told CNN.
In 2014, Alibaba listed in New York in a world-record US$25bil offering.
Ant is still the world’s largest digital payments platform, with hundreds of millions of monthly users on its Alipay app.
But any future listing appears a long way off, with fears persisting that its personal finance products reach too deeply into the pockets of ordinary Chinese. — AFP
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