Jack Ma to resign as Alibaba’s Executive Chairman
September 17, 2019 Category IT & Telecom, Weekly
Jack Ma, the Founder of online retailer Alibaba Group, is stepping down as the company’s Executive Chairman. Ma retired on the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the country’s top e-commerce conglomerate as well as his 55th birthday, and handed over his position to Alibaba’s 47-year old CEO Zhang Yong. In a speech Ma made in August, he said that stepping down from the position did not mean full retirement or that he will stop entrepreneurship. Born in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, the business tycoon started up Alibaba in September 1999 and gradually molded it into China’s largest and most valuable internet company specializing in a variety of areas including e-commerce, online finance, retail and entertainment.
Jack Ma’s position as Alibaba’s “spiritual leader” would not change, Liu Xingliang, Director of the Beijing-based Data Center of China Internet, told the Global Times. “His influence will remain, and he will still steer Alibaba’s general strategy and business direction.” Alibaba’s success is attributed to Ma’s business acumen and to China’s opening-up policy. “Companies like Alibaba can pop up only under the condition of opening-up,” said Ye Hang, Economics Professor at the College of Economics of Zhejiang University, adding: “How can such private businesses start and grow, even beyond the border, in a planned economy?”.
Zhang Yi, CEO of Shenzhen-based iiMedia Research, said that the year 1999 saw the start of a strong, irreversible internet trend in China, with many talented Chinese people returning from the West to start internet entrepreneurship on the Chinese mainland. This societal change gave birth to e-commerce giants like Alibaba and Tencent. “The trend of the internet around 1999 is just like the trend of 5G today,” Zhang told the Global Times.
Along with the changing of the guard at the USD460 billion internet company, some doubt whether Alibaba can withstand competition from social e-commerce platforms such as JD.com and pinduoduo.com, because Alibaba lacks social networking tools. But according to iiMedia’s Zhang Yi, competitors might distract some users from Alibaba’s e-commerce sector, “but won’t threaten its predominance”. The U.S.-China trade war will benefit Alibaba by accelerating China’s technological development and opening-up, according to Zhang.
“The green mountain won’t change, the flowing water is endless. See you around!,” Jack Ma told the gala marking the company’s 20th anniversary and his own birthday, held at the Hangzhou Olympics Sports Expo Center with 60,000 people attending. Alibaba said its core mission was “to make it easy to do business anywhere”. The company aims to serve 2 billion consumers, create 100 million jobs and help 10 million small- and medium-enterprises become profitable by 2036. “Today marks not my retirement, but the beginning of a new corporate governance scheme for Alibaba and the next stage of the company’s development,” he said. He called on businesses to truly embrace sustainable development, inclusiveness and altruism, the three biggest factors for a successful business. Ma also said that the greatest chance for China to develop its economy was to boost domestic consumption and further embrace the market economy, as reported by the Global Times and the Shanghai Daily.
Alibaba also adjusted its six core values, including focusing on “customers first, employees second, shareholders third”; knowing that “trust makes everything simple”; remembering that “change is the only constant”; and that “today’s best performance is tomorrow’s baseline”.
Recently, Alibaba acquired NetEase Kaola, the cross-border e-commerce arm of NetEase, for USD2 billion. It will create an online marketplace for consumers seeking high-quality foreign products, and holding a more than 50% cross-border e-commerce market share in the country. Kaola will continue to operate independently under its current brand, while Alvin Liu, Tmall’s Import and Export General Manager, will serve as Kaola’s new CEO. Alibaba’s Tmall Global and NetEase’s Kaola are China’s largest and second-largest cross-border e-commerce platforms, holding 31.7% and 24.5% of the market respectively in 2018, according to the Beijing-based consultancy Analysys. Alibaba, together with Yunfeng Capital, a private equity firm backed by Jack Ma, will also invest approximately USD700 million in streaming music service NetEase Cloud Music.
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