Jack Ma

Birthdate: September 10, 1964

Jack Ma (real name - Ma Yun) is a Chinese entrepreneur, founder of Alibaba Group.

Place of birth. Education.

Born on September 10, 1964, in Hangzhou into a family of musicians. At an early age, he decided to learn English and regularly rode his bicycle to a nearby hotel where he spoke with foreigners. To improve his conversational skills, he acted as a free tour guide for tourists.

He failed the college entrance exams twice. In 1988, he graduated from Hangzhou Normal University with a Bachelor’s degree in English Humanities.

Business.

In 1995, he went as a translator with a business delegation to Seattle, where a friend showed him the World Wide Web. Since his attempts to find information about China through the Yahoo! search engine showed that all necessary information was completely missing, Ma decided to start his own internet company and raised the required startup capital of two thousand dollars with the help of his wife and a friend.

Ma named the company that focused on creating websites 'Chinese Yellow Pages.' Due to extremely limited financial resources, the office was located in Ma's apartment. After three years, his company had a revenue of 5 million Yuan (approximately 800,000 dollars).

From 1998 to 1999, he headed the Chinese International E-Commerce Center.

In 1999, he left the civil service and founded Alibaba Group with 17 friends, designed as a platform for trade for small and medium-sized enterprises. The establishment of the company required 60,000 dollars. The name was chosen because of its easy pronunciation in every language and its widespread association with the fairy tale about treasure.

From October 1999 to January 2000, Alibaba received a total of 25 million US dollars in venture capital but continued to operate at a loss. The streak of failures ended after the company developed a system that allowed Chinese exporters to find customers in the USA. In 2003-2005, he founded companies Taobao (the Chinese equivalent of eBay), Alipay, and Ali Mama. Instead of selling Taobao, the company turned a profit and was successful. In 2013, he resigned as president of the company but remained chairman of the board.

Wealth. At the end of 2014, Jack Ma was ranked by Bloomberg as the richest man in Asia in the billionaire rankings. By the end of November 2018, Forbes estimated the entrepreneur's net worth at 35.8 billion US dollars, making him the richest man in China and the 15th richest person in the world.

Views. He is an active environmentalist. In 2009, Alibaba banned the sale of shark fin products on all its commercial platforms at his request. In 2010, after his resignation as president of Alibaba, Ma became chairman of the Chinese Council for Nature Conservation and committed to donating 0.3% of annual revenue to environmental protection programs.

Personal life. In the late 1980s, he married his classmate Zhang Wei. The marriage produced two children: son Ma Yuankun and daughter Ma Yuanbao.

On September 10, 2019, Jack Ma officially stepped down as chairman of the board of Alibaba Group.

09.09.2022