Jack Ma Yun is a Chinese
business tycoon, billionaire, invester and philanthropist. He is the co-founder
with his other friends and former chairman of Alibaba Group of multinational
technology and e-commerce. Beside of Alibaba, he is also established Ynfeng
Capital a private equity firm. He promotes an open and market driven economy.
Jack Ma was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China on 10 Sep 1964. He started studying English in his early age with English tourists who would stay in Hangzhou Internal Hotel at that time. Jack Ma used to ride 27 km on his bicycle to company tourists during visit at the area for practice spoken English. During this practice, a foreigner tourist became his pan pal friend and gave a nickname “Jack” to him due to facing difficulty in Chinese name pronunciation.
Jack Ma told that in 1988, after
obtaining graduate degree from Hangzhou Normal University, tried to get a job
in different places and applied 31 companies but rejected from everywhere. He
applied in KFC when newly opened in his city and 24 applicant came for job
unfortunately 23 hired and Jack Ma again rejected.
At last, Jack Ma got
information about internet and make research how internet works. Then he
started his first company in 1994 named Hangzhou Haibo Translation Agency.
During 1995, he got opportunity to went to United States of America with the
help of municipal government with colleagues who helped to him that how
internet works. However, he searched information about beer on internet but he
found beer from many countries but no one from China. Again he searched about
general information about china and find nothing that make him surprised. Then
he and his friend decided to create a website. In first attempt they created a “bad
shaped” website containing information about China. They uploaded website at
09:40 AM, and by 12:30 PM he received emails from different Chinese investor
for information about him. This incident proved him that internet is a great
place for business. In April 1995, Jack Ma and a computer teacher “He Yibing”
opened fisrt office for China Pages and Jack Ma started their second company. He
registered chinapages.com in America in May 1995. During three years, company “China
Pages” earned equivalent to US$800,000.
During 1998 to 1999, Jack Ma become head of an information technology company founded by China International Electronic Commerce Centre, a department of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. After that Jack stopped working there and returned to Hangzhou with his team to found Alibaba, a Chinese business to business marketplace wite in this apartment with a group of 18 friends.
In October 1999 and January
2000, Alibaba got a total of US$25 million foreign venture capital investment
from “Goldman Sachs” and “Softbank”. This platform was developed for domestic
e-commerce market and for Chinese enterprises SMEs (Small and medium sized enterprises)
to cater World Trade Organization (WTO) issues. After struggle of three years,
Alibaba Group became profitable. Jack Ma again wanted to start more e-commerce
platforms and in 2003, he founded Taobao Marketplace, Alipay, Ali Mama and
Lynx. The newly established companies started grow quickly specially Taobao,
e-commerce company eBay offered Jack Ma for purchase the Taobao. But, Jack Ma
rejected offer of eBay and asked support from Yahoo co-founder “Jerry Yang”.
It was estimated that
Alibaba was raising over US$25 billion in an initial public offering (IPO) on
the New York Stock Exchange during Sep 2014. Alibaba achieved goal to become to
technology company in the world after raising US$25 billion, the larges initial
public offering in US financial history.
