Jack Ma

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Jack Ma

Jack Ma (Chinese: 马云; pinyin: Mǎ Yún; born November 1964) is founder and chief operating officer of Alibaba Group.

[edit] Biography

Born in the city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, Ma graduated from Hangzhou Teacher's Institute in 1988 (he initially failed the entrance exam twice) and became a lecturer in English and International Trade in the same university.

Ma first started building websites for Chinese companies with the help of friends in the US. Ma has commented that "The day we got connected to the Web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house," and on a very slow dial-up connection, "we waited three and a half hours and got half a page.... We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved the Internet existed."^{[original research?]}

After a stint as head of the China International Electronic Commerce Center's Infoshare division, he founded Alibaba.com in 1999, a China-based business to business marketplace site which serves 12 million members from 200 countries.

In 2003, Alibaba launched Taobao.com, a consumer to consumer auction website similar to eBay, which also provided an innovative escrow-based online payment service, Alipay (necessary in China, where credit and debit cards are not widespread).

Ma remains as chief executive officer and chairman of board after Yahoo! acquired a 40% economic stake (35% voting rights) in Alibaba in exchange for $1 Billion USD plus all of Yahoo!'s Chinese-based assets (formerly known as Yahoo! China - valued at approx. $700mm), on August 11, 2005. Japan's Softbank will have a 27.4% in the new Alibaba company.

On 2007-06-11, at a press conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Hong Kong, called to discuss the highly successful Hong Kong Stock Exchange IPO, when asked whether Alibaba was an ethical trading company, Ma responded by announcing to the assembled journalists - and reiterating when queried - that he and his "family have sworn off Shark Fin Soup now and forever" (echoing Yao Ming's famous declaration, which angered Guangzhou's fin traders), which he said was a result of finding out what the problems are.