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Success of Jack Ma

Jack Ma founded Alibaba in 1999 with the goal of facilitating international trade for small and medium enterprises in China. He saw the potential of the internet to connect Chinese businesses to global markets. Despite initial rejections, Alibaba grew to dominate e-commerce in China, driving out competitor eBay. Ma successfully reorganized Alibaba when its international expansion faltered, and later listings on the NYSE made it a hugely successful, multibillion dollar company and turned Ma into a billionaire. Ma remains committed to using Alibaba's influence and technology to help small businesses worldwide succeed in global trade.

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113 views2 pages

Success of Jack Ma

Jack Ma founded Alibaba in 1999 with the goal of facilitating international trade for small and medium enterprises in China. He saw the potential of the internet to connect Chinese businesses to global markets. Despite initial rejections, Alibaba grew to dominate e-commerce in China, driving out competitor eBay. Ma successfully reorganized Alibaba when its international expansion faltered, and later listings on the NYSE made it a hugely successful, multibillion dollar company and turned Ma into a billionaire. Ma remains committed to using Alibaba's influence and technology to help small businesses worldwide succeed in global trade.

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biswas
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“Success of Jack Ma”

Jack Ma intends to use the internet and Alibaba’s


influence to facilitate more globalized trade across
borders beyond China and to help SMEs (Small and
Medium Enterprises) across the world. Ma vows that
helping SMEs to succeed is much like a religious calling
for him.

Frustrated with his lack solid employment opportunities


after graduation in the early 1990s, Ma relied on his
English to teach at the local university he had attended a
few years prior and to start a translation service
business. Upon his first visit to the United States in the
1995 as a translator, Ma got introduced to the Internet,
and to his shock after looking up beer from various
countries, he learned that there was none from China (a
country of about a Billion people) on the World Wide
Web. Ma immediately saw the potential business opportunities of the internet and how it could
facilitate the way small and medium Chinese enterprises could do business with the rest of the world.
Then, he and his friends decided to lunch a site about China and Chinese products online, known as
“Chinapage”, that listed Chinese businesses and their products. Within the same day, he began to
receive emails from people around the world requesting that they partner up. That experience taught
Ma about the incredible power of connectivity, especially how the internet can greatly impact global
trade, especially for SMEs.

Later, believing that "Chinapage" will get better funding, Ma partnered with a government entity that
had majority control. Unfortunately, that entity brought along the rigid bureaucracy that stifled away
many of Ma's visionary projects and frustrated him, which led to Ma’s eventual departure. Thereafter,
Ma took up a government job for a short period at the ministry of foreign trade and economic
cooperation in the latter half of the 1990s. There, he also built important connections with influential
people that would later impact Ma’s life and business venture, one of whom is the founding member
of Yahoo, Jerry Yang. Jerry would eventually get yahoo to invest USD 1 Billion in Alibaba in 2005.

In 1999, after leaving the government job, Ma took a second bite at internet-based business ventures
by grouping 18 people (including himself and his wife) at his home and sold them a dream to found
Alibaba with the goal of facilitating international trade for small and medium ventures based in China.
Alibaba was born out of Ma’s unfulfilled dream of using the internet to facilitate business activities for
Chinese SMEs and frustration with the bureaucrats he worked with in the preceding joint venture
(Chinapage), where his suggestions to use the internet to facilitate trade of Chinese made products in
the international market were repeatedly rejected.

In the early stages of the Alibaba, Ma tried to raise funds in Silicon Valley, the tech hub in the United
States and was met with denials, and his business model was criticized to be unprofitable and
unsustainable by many at the time. Eventually, Ma succeeded in getting Goldman Sachs and Softbank
to invest USD 5 Million and USD 20 Million in Alibaba, respectively.

In 2003, still unprofitable with Alibaba, Ma and his team lunched an online auction site named
“Taobao.com”, charging zero commission, and took on a multinational e-commerce giant, eBay, which
already had the lion share of the Chinese online auction market. Determined to win against eBay,

Bishwash Gupta
BIM 7th Sem
Taobao remained a commission-free marketplace for millions of online traders, and that did put
Alibaba under significant financial strain. To stay afloat while maintaining the platform's commission-
free policy, Ma and his team began offering peripheral value-added support services (e.g. custom
webpages to online merchants) for small fees. Ma and his team won the Chinese market in less than
five years, and eBay subsequently withdrew from China. Jack Mack reflected on this challenging period
on a YouTube video of his interview with Charlie Rose, stating “If eBay are the sharks in the Ocean, we
(Alibaba and Taobao) are the crocodiles in the Yangtze River.” Since then, Alibaba has created many
subsidiaries through organic growth (such as Tmall and AliExpress) and acquisitions.

As the "dot com" boom period came to an end after 2000, Alibaba faced serious challenges due to its
aggressive expansion into international markets (which Ma admitted to be a mistake). Jack Ma
successfully reorganized the company's operations, including closing many international branches and
focusing on strengthening Alibaba's position in the Chinese market. Thereafter, Ma expanded the
services of Alibaba and reengaged its international expansion strategy.

After Ma and Alibaba reorganized their operations and made their Mark by driving eBay out of China
after just few years in business, with the help of Jerry Young of Yahoo, Ma succeed in getting Yahoo
to invest a sizable USD 1 Billion for a 40% stake in Alibaba in 2005. Besides getting crucial funds to help
Alibaba to execute its international growth strategy, that Investment earned Alibaba (a six-year-old
company) a valuation of USD 2.5 Billion.

In 2014, in what turned out to be the largest initial public offering to date, Ma and his team successfully
raised in excess of USD 20 Billion for Alibaba by listing it in the NYSE stock exchange in the United
States. That made Alibaba, a 15 years old e-commerce company that has its origins outside of the
United States, one of world's largest companies as measured by its market capitalization that was
approximately USD 200 Billion. Ma and his team are turning Alibaba holding group into a massive
conglomerate by acquiring many smaller companies from technology related to logistics and beyond.

Bishwash Gupta
BIM 7th Sem

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