Moguls: China’s internet rock star
Jack Ma, the charismatic chairman of Alibaba, China’s e-commerce juggernaut, finally passed the torch last week, said Venus Fang in Bloomberg.com. Twenty years after he started Alibaba out of his shared apartment in Hangzhou, Ma had “become the face of Chinese business even while a member of the ruling Communist Party.” A former English teacher, Ma built Alibaba into a “$460 billion titan.” Though not generally accessible by U.S. consumers, Alibaba’s marketplace reaches more than 650 million Chinese buyers and dominates China’s internet retail business. Living up to his over-the-top reputation, Ma went out playing an electric guitar onstage at a fete inside the 80,000-seat Chinese Olympic Stadium. But don’t expect this to be the last we hear of him, said Li Yuan in The New York Times. Ma is still a lifetime member of the Alibaba Partnership, the group that holds the licensing Alibaba needs to operate in China, and he also controls the parent company of Alipay, the critical online payment system. It’s enough to make you wonder how much the 55-year-old Ma is actually relinquishing.
Ma’s successor may be his polar opposite in temperament, said Peter Elstrom and Lulu Yilun Chen in Bloomberg Businessweek, but his vision is just as expansive. Daniel Zhang, a former financial auditor who joined Alibaba in 2007, is so “slight and softspoken” that he was once mistaken at Alibaba’s headquarters for the janitor. He wants to push Alibaba “deeper into fields including finance, health care, movies, and music.” His biggest initiative, Freshippo, is a chain of 150 retail spaces “that would combine a grocery store, a restaurant, and a delivery app” and could deliver anywhere within 1.9 miles in just 30 minutes. However, simply defending what Ma has built will be a challenge for Alibaba, said Nina Xiang in the Nikkei Asian Review (Japan). “Pinduoduo, a four-year-old business combining social networking with group buying, is the newest threat,” while Alipay has been losing ground to Tencent’s We Chat Pay. And while Ma, though a Communist Party member for decades, kept the government at arm’s length, other tech entrepreneurs have developed closer relationships with Chinese government officials.
Ma’s succession plan is important to China, said the South China Morning Post (China) in an editorial. The country hasn’t had “hundreds of years’ experience developing corporate governance and culture.” The first private entrepreneurs arrived in the 1980s. Many of them are still in place. With China’s economy struggling, “the government has become more supportive of the private sector,” but generational transition is still largely uncharted terrain. “By handing over the reins,” Ma can show that “an orderly approach and refreshed vision” is a sign of the nation’s progress.