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Health is better than wealth [National, The (United Arab Emirates)](National, The (United Arab Emirates) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) As far as paydays before the weekend go, netting yourself US$18 billion (Dh66.11bn) on a Friday isn't too shabby. That windfall, when the Chinese internet giant Alibaba was floated on the stock exchange a week ago, has rocketed its co-founder, Jack Ma, to the top spot of China's wealthy elite. Ma is now, according to the annual Hurun Report (one of the most accurate and watched of all wealth assessments), China's wealthiest person, worth $25bn, and one of the richest people in the world. Not bad at all for a former English teacher who, only in 1999, had to borrow $60,000 "from about 80 friends" to start up his company. "When I graduated, I earned $20 a month, which was fantastic," Ma told delegates at the Clinton Global Initiative's 10th annual meeting in New York on Tuesday. "When you have one million dollars, you're a lucky person. When you have 10 million dollars, you've got trouble, a lot of headaches. When you have more than one billion dollars, or a hundred million dollars, that's a responsibility you have – it's the trust of people on you, because people believe you can spend money better than the others." If anyone would know about these pressures, it's Ma, and he does intend to spend it wisely. "We only eat three meals a day, we only sleep on one bed, how can you spend money? Where's the opportunity?" he asked rhetorically. The opportunity, to him, is clear: he wants to literally clean up his country within the next decade. "The polluted water, the air, unsafe food … 10 years later, millions and millions of people in China will have health problems. So we should invest money in that." He set up a charitable trust at the start of 2014, funded by Alibaba share options, and already it's worth $3bn. "If we don't give up, in 15 years China will have a change. We will have blue air, blue skies, clean water," he said. "People say: 'Forget about it, China is hopeless, there's no chance we can [tackle air and water pollution].' People said that about e-commerce in China 15 years ago." He has a point – and even if his efforts don't pay off, isn't it nice to know that someone with the financial clout to make things change is actually intent on doing so? The Alibaba group is a sprawling collection of online businesses, which started with just one: alibaba.com, a business-to-business portal that connects manufacturers in China with buyers in other countries. The site allows businesses around the world to find manufacturers in China and have wide ranges of goods produced and shipped or simply bought off the shelf. Alibaba also runs the online payment system alipay.com, which operates like PayPal and has a large stake in Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, and the online video site Youku Tudou, which is similar to YouTube. But why call it Alibaba? Hardly the most Chinese of names, is it? And what about the resultant, inescapable connection to "thieves"? "One day, I was in San Francisco in a coffee shop, and I was thinking Alibaba is a good name," Ma once offered by way of explanation. "And then a waitress came, and I said do you know about Alibaba? And she said: 'Yes.' I said what do you know about Alibaba, and she said: 'Open sesame.' And I said: 'Yes, this is the name.' Then I went onto the street and found 30 people and asked them: 'Do you know Alilbaba?' People from India, people from Germany, people from Tokyo and China … They all knew about Alibaba. Alibaba – open sesame. Alibaba – 40 thieves. Alibaba is not a thief. Alibaba is a kind, smart business person, and he helped the village. So … easy to spell, and global [recognition]. Alibaba opens sesame for small- to medium-sized companies. We also registered the name AliMama, in case someone wants to marry us." A moment of genius, perhaps, and while other dot-com industries floundered in the late 1990s, losing their trigger-happy investors countless billions, China was just getting started and Ma was able to continue surfing the wave of online innovation long after most others had crashed into the rocks. Juliana Liu, the BBC's Hong Kong correspondent, said this week that she first met Ma at a Beijing technology conference in 2002. "He immediately stood out among the young, energetic English speakers heading China's scrappy internet start-ups," recalled Liu. She said that, back then, his door was always open to the media and that he'd write his mobile-phone number on his business cards, always answering calls personally, despite his hectic schedules. "I rang him on a sweltering Friday in July 2003 when Alibaba announced it was entering a brand new market – online shopping. Two months earlier, it had launched a site called Taobao, which means 'digging for treasure'. The site provided a platform for buyers and sellers to meet online and trade with each other." Sound familiar? "To me," said Liu, "the business model sounded exactly like the established online auctioneer eBay, which had been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into building its China market. Alibaba would invest just $12 million, which would probably keep Taobao running for about three years. Jack said he welcomed eBay's challenge, even though he seemed hopelessly outgunned. But his was an entirely home-grown company and used local knowledge to its advantage. Rather than charge for listings, Taobao offered them for free, and still does." She remarked that, in its early days, Taobao managed to win over a specific audience (female office workers in their early to mid-20s) who like to shop for cosmetics and lingerie. "They still form the backbone of its business. The site did so well that, three years later, by the end of 2006, eBay decided to close its China operations." Since then, Taobao has become the jewel in Alibaba's crown and is now China's largest shopping website. Together with its sister site, Tmall, it handles more merchandise than eBay and Amazon combined. While the western world is just getting to hear about this prolific entrepreneur, taking on eBay in his home country and winning has made him a national celebrity. Ma, who turns 50 next month, was born Ma Yun in Hangzhou, in the Zhejiang province of China, to two performers of "ping tang", a traditional musical storytelling technique that was banned under the Cultural Revolution two years after his birth – life inevitably became tough for the family. From an early age, he desired to learn to write and speak English. He has said that he used to provide free guided tours around his home city for tourists, just to master the language. Despite failing the entrance exam twice, he attended what's now known as Hangzhou Normal University, graduating in 1988 with a bachelor's degree in English. He later became a lecturer in English and, prophetically, international trade, at Hangzhou Dianzi University. He says that he began building websites for Chinese companies with the help of friends in America, recalling "the day we got connected to the Web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house and [on a very slow dial-up connection] we waited three-and-a-half hours and got half a page. We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved the internet existed." China isn't the most open of countries, but it's believed that when Ma founded China Yellowpages in 1995, it was the republic's first internet-based company. Three years after starting that, Ma was head of an IT company set up by a department of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, giving him a grounding in the unusual way that China's political machine operates – advantageous in a country notorious for its stranglehold on the internet. According to Bloomberg, however, Ma shows little interest in technology. "He doesn't spend much time online and depends on a colleague to help him download US TV shows to his iPad," said the American publication. "Instead, he dabbles in traditional medicine and other pastimes. He's teamed up with the movie star Jet Li to spread awareness of tai chi and is so into the ancient Chinese martial art that he brings along a personal trainer when he travels." Environmentalism, as hinted earlier, is another passion. In 2010, Ma joined the global board of the Nature Conservancy. He also started boycotting shark-fin soup in 2007 and banned the sale of shark-fin products across Alibaba's portfolio. Ma, thanks to this week's news, is set to become internationally famous, yet so little is known about his private life. We do know he is married to Zhang Ying, whom he met while at university. "[He] is not a handsome man," Ying told Want China Times in 2013 "but I fell for him because he can do a lot of things handsome men cannot do." As for his future, Ma appears to have his mind and heart set on helping others. "The secret here is helping those who want to be successful," he said in New York on Tuesday. "Help young people. Help small guys. Because small guys will be big. Young people will have the seeds you bury in their minds and when they grow up they will change the world." [email protected] (c) 2014 s Abu Dhabi Media Company, All rights reserved. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info). |