City profile

Jack Ma

China’s richest man is famous for being “the charismatic English teacher” who created Alibaba – the “Amazon of the East” – from a tiny Hangzhou apartment in 1999, said Celia Hatton on BBC News. But Jack Ma is fast gaining new renown as a hero of the crisis. Alibaba has become “the driving force” behind an operation to ship life-saving medical supplies to more than 150 countries – many, such as those in Africa, “elbowed out of the global brawl” for Covid-19 kit. “One world, one fight!” Ma, worth $41bn, declared on Twitter. But his “bold venture into global philanthropy” raises new questions. Is Ma “the friendly face of China’s Communist Party”, or an independent player? And if the latter, will his profile “put him in the cross hairs of the jealous leaders at the top of China’s political pyramid”?

China’s largest e-commerce firm had its sights on global expansion long before the crisis, said Ryan McMorrow and Nian Liu in the FT. But Alibaba’s “new-found PPE proficiency” – acting as “a crucial middleman between Chinese factories and immense global demand” – has accelerated that vision at the expense of Western rivals such as eBay and Amazon. Global consumers, turning to its AliExpress platform for the first time, are discovering “what else it has to offer”: traffic has been particularly strong in southern Europe

– sales jumped by 20% in Spain in the first quarter. And Alibaba is also gearing up to challenge Amazon and Microsoft in international cloud computing markets. Whatever Ma’s motivations, he is, as his biographer Duncan Clark points out, the master of “entrepreneurial soft power”.