Jack Ma, the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, is enjoying himself in a special way this Tuesday on his 55th birthday. He is leaving the post as president of his corporation to focus more on education as a philanthropist To take care of. Ma is followed by Daniel Zhang, a longtime companion. The outgoing Alibaba founder will remain a member of the Board of Directors until a shareholder meeting in 2020.
At the head of the controlling body is Daniel Zhang, born in 1972 in Shanghai, who previously served as Group CEO. Zhang, who studied finance at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, became the 2007 Chief Financial Officer of Taobao. This is a belonging to the Alibaba Group platform, which has similarities with the American provider Ebay. Four years later, Zhang became president of Tmall. Alibaba only sells branded goods on this platform. In 2013, he joined the Alibaba Group Chief Operating Officer, before following Jonathan Lu two years later and becoming Group CEO. Zhang celebrates Singles’ Day, celebrated annually on November 11, where Alibaba and several other competitors are offering discounts to its customers. In the past year alone, the e-commerce group spent 213.5 billion yuan within 24 hours.
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A year ago, Ma informed the workforce in a letter about the move, saying the succession plan was the next step in a company that had once been dependent on a few heads. However, Alibaba now lives on the organization and culture of a steady development of talent.
Alibaba Announces Executive Chairman Succession Plan: CEO Daniel Zhang will succeed Jack Ma as Chairman of the Board one year from today. Jack will serve out his full board term and remain a lifelong member of Alibaba Partnership. Read letter from Jack Ma: https://t.co/wMSZPiWVVw pic.twitter.com/iUIRqmrlbV
— Alibaba Group (@AlibabaGroup) September 10, 2018
In the future, when Ma becomes a philanthropist, he will be more concerned with education, and he will return to his origins, having started as an English teacher. In 1995, he gave up his job in order to devote himself entirely to the Internet business model, which at that time was still completely unknown in China. The turnaround should pay off: Jack Ma is now one of the most influential and prosperous Chinese. His fortune is estimated at more than $ 38 billion.
Jack Ma was born in the capital of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou, not far from Shanghai. When he was twelve years old, the Cultural Revolution instigated by Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic, began to dislodge the country; The Chinese education system was also on the ground. Such experiences may have led him to turn more to education and thus to the future of his country.
Regardless of his future work, Ma has succeeded in shaping his hometown of Hangzhou, where Alibaba is headquartered. It is one of the most modern metropolises in China. Ma has inspired many entrepreneurs with his work in the megacity. It’s full of startups; Exchanges with the university are considered excellent, and the authorities have a reputation for being particularly quick and efficient in approving new companies. In Hangzhou and many other parts of China, many young entrepreneurs are now trying to follow in their footsteps and fulfill their Chinese dream.
What courage and visionary force Ma has showed in 1995. At that time, he decided to no longer work as a teacher, but to found with China Pages own Internet company. Ma was one of the first Chinese to be active in this field. However, he left the startup again in 1997 to help the Chinese Ministry of Commerce with the development of websites for about two years. In 1999, this period also ended in government service, and Ma founded Hangzhou Alibaba. The young company initially focused on business-to-business (B2B), which is the business relationship between two or more companies.
Alibaba History: 20 Years in 3 Minutes. From e-commerce to New Retail, a look back at two decades of major milestones for the company. pic.twitter.com/TlijjTBNPP
— Alibaba Group (@AlibabaGroup) September 10, 2019
Contributing to the rise of Alibaba was Taiwan-born Joseph Tsai, who graduated from the elite Yale University in the US and initially worked as a lawyer in the United States before moving to private equity. Since 1995, Tsai has worked for the Swedish company Investor AB in Hong Kong. And at that time the roads of Ma and Tsai intersected. Lawyer Tsai quit his well-paid job and built up the legal structure of Alibaba for little money. The two charismatics also succeeded in gaining Goldman Sachs and the Japanese Softbank Group as investors.
Alibaba’s rise to become a global corporation under Jack Ma
In 2003, Alibaba’s triumphal success began with the Ebay-like platform Taobao, where business people offer their products. At that time, the Chinese site of Ebay still dominated the business in China. Ma and his team were not deterred. In 2005, he said at a conference that the days of Ebay in China are numbered. How right he should have turned out to be a year later, when the American company turned its back on the Chinese market.
Despite the quick success, Ma continued to improve on improving Taobao and Tmall. In the first version, the customers paid for the goods on receipt with cash, which turned out to be too complicated. A first relief presented Alibaba in 2004 with Alipay. However, in this version only transfers with the computer were possible. In order to increase credibility and strengthen customer confidence in the system, Alibaba only obliged them to pay when they were satisfied with the delivery. The breakthrough came five years later, when the mobile version of Alipay came on the market. More than half a billion customers now use Alibaba’s digital wallet.
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Tencent as a bitter competitor
The A of Alibaba is one of the three letters that make up the acronym BAT for China’s top three technology companies; the B comes from the Google-like search engine Baidu, the letter T by Tencent. And with this technology company, which comes from the southern Chinese metropolis of Shenzhen, Alibaba now delivers a fierce battle in various fields. Both companies are expanding their “super apps”.
According to the consulting firm McKinsey Alipay already has 90 offers installed. There are health, news, games and video apps. Users shop, order food, communicate with each other, sign up for insurance and do banking. The number of offers in the Tencent app Wechat combined offers are more than 40. Thus, there is hardly any incentive for the users to leave the “super apps” that work smoothly on the operating systems Android and iOS.
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