Jack Ma prepares for life after Alibaba BLOOMBERG
Jack Ma, China’s richest man, is laying the groundwork for a future away from Alibaba Group Holding, the company he co-founded and turned into an e-commerce juggernaut.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV, the Alibaba chairman said he is dedicating more of his time and fortune to philanthropy with the creation of a foundation in his own name focused on education, following in the footsteps of fellow billionaire Bill Gates. Ma, who turns 54 on Monday, has a net worth of more than $40 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
While Ma sees himself as an accidental executive who only entered the business world with Alibaba’s founding almost 20 years ago, he has become one of China’s most recognised corporate leaders. Even after stepping down as CEO in 2013, the former English teacher remains the public face of a firm with a market value of more than $400 billion and interests spanning e-commerce and Hollywood film production to cloud computing and online payments.
“There’s a lot of things I can learn from Bill Gates. I can never be as rich, but one thing I can do better is to retire earlier,” Ma said in the interview. “I think some day, and soon, I’ll go back to teaching. This is something I think I can do much better than being CEO of Alibaba.”
When asked if that could happen this year, Ma shrugged and smiled. He didn’t indicate if he would give away his money or put it into a trust as other billionaires have done.
“You’ll know very soon. I’ve prepared a Jack Ma Foundation,” Ma said. “All these things that I’ve been preparing for 10 years.” Ma was born in September 1964 to Chinese traditional musician-storytellers living in Hangzhou, an ancient capital that’s become a global high-tech hub and bastion of entrepreneurship, in part because of Alibaba’s base there. He started Alibaba.com in 1999 as a business-to-business marketplace, backed by $60,000 from 18 co-founders.
With savvy deals and an investment from SoftBank Group, it’s now morphed into a behemoth that can make or break brands. Its customers use its e-commerce platforms to order products that last year saw package deliveries reach 55 million a day. Ma also controls Ant Financial, the online financial platform that runs China’s largest mobile payment system and money-market fund. The business has 870 million users via payment system Alipay and its affiliates.
Alibaba has one of the strongest management teams in corporate China and even if he steps down, Ma is likely to still have a role in setting top level strategy, said Brock Silvers, managing director of Kaiyuan Capital.
A focus on education wouldn’t surprise keen followers of Ma, who has spoken frequently of its importance to him and some of his shortcomings as a student, including failing China’s national university exam twice.