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BEIJING. Jack Ma, the most iconic of Chinese billionaires, it will recover billions with the Ant Group IPO, new record in the track record of this young “retired” protagonist of a lightning-fast career.
The fortune of the former English teacher, who owns 8.8% stake in Ant Group, is expected to rise to $ 71.1 billion, after the launch of this online payment giant, the largest in history.
Jack Ma, 56, would therefore be classified in the 11th place in the list of world billionaires calculated by the financial agency Bloomberg.
Retirement is a good measure for the Hangzhou native, as when he announced two years ago that he would be leaving the leadership of Alibaba, he was then the 19th-century fortune in the world, holding $ 40,000 million.
But its investments in the e-commerce sector, in a country where liquidity is on the verge of disappearing, have only appreciated in recent years, especially with the coronavirus epidemic that has caused online shopping to skip.
Jack Ma (whose Chinese name is Ma Yun) has decided to give up his profession as a university teacher after discovering the Internet and the possibility it offers companies to trade their goods online.
After being turned down by US investors in 1999, But he borrowed $ 60,000 from friends to launch Alibaba, which operated from an apartment in Hangzhou.
The company, which is still based in Ma’s hometown, originally allowed businesses to sell products online to each other, but it soon transformed in China’s largest digital retail market.
But he quickly understood the potential of smartphones and pioneered electronic mobile payment, now ubiquitous in China, with his Alipay service, earning a reputation as a visionary.
Eccentric and member of the Communist Party
Contrary to the state-owned conservative corporations or manufacturing firms that dominated the Chinese economy in the early 2000s, Jack Ma championed unstoppable diversification, drawing inspiration from the giants of Silicon Valley (Amazon, eBay and Google).
The take-off of Alibaba’s online trading platforms forced eBay to virtually withdraw from the Chinese market in 2006, giving way to its rival.
Jack Ma is known for his eccentricities in a rather serious Chinese business world. Much admired by his employees, he has often been compared to Steve Jobs, the legendary co-founder of Apple, although his style is more relaxed.
Adept of tai chi, in 2017 he appeared with martial arts stars in a film promoting this Chinese gymnastics. And he usually refers to the precepts of this martial art as a management and control technique.
He is also a member of the austere Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in power.
From Davos to Wall Street, he was confronted with personalities from the world and promised Donald Trump to create one million jobs in January 2017, when the American billionaire was preparing to enter the White House. He then withdrew that promise, under the topic of Trump’s trade war against China.
Ant Group’s IPO in Hong Kong and Shanghai allows this Jack Ma creature to break another record, after Alibaba’s 2014 Wall Street unveiling ($ 25 billion) was overthrown by Saudi Aramco last year. ($ 29.4 billion).
Superstitious, the Chinese billionaire has a soft spot for the number 8, a synonym for luck in Cantonese. Despite being retired, the eight is still present in his life ever since Ant stock was launched for HK $ 80 in Hong Kong and Yuan 68.80 in Shanghai.
AFP agency
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