Chinese Whispers: How China's richest man flew too close to the sun

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

Ant Group is the business magnate Jack Ma's fintech subsidiary, the company behind the ubiquitous 'Alipay' app, which has one billion users. Last week, it was due to begin trading on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges. Set to raise US$37 billion, it would have been the biggest IPO ever. But at the eleventh hour, the Chinese government scuppered the plans with crippling new financial reforms. So why won't China allow this homegrown fintech champion to go global? Rumours abound that Ma stepped on the wrong toes. Cindy Yu speaks to Duncan Clark, author of Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built, on this episode.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode, I'll be talking to
0:14.3	journalists, experts and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and
0:19.6	more. There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge
0:23.5	and some context as well.
0:25.5	How do the Chinese see these issues?
0:29.9	Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, China's answer to Amazon,
0:34.3	is a regular Chinese success story.
0:36.8	He's first on China's rich list and 21st on Forbes's
0:40.0	list of most powerful people in the world, but has he flown too close to the sun now? In the last
0:46.1	five years, a jewel in Mars Crown was Ant Group, the financial services company that spun off from
0:51.6	Alibaba. You might know it as Aliipay. But these days, Ant is about
0:56.1	much more than just easy digital payments. The launch of its Hua Bei, meaning just spend, and
1:01.6	just borrow, functions a few years ago have moved it solidly into the fintech sector.
1:07.9	AliPay now has 1 billion users and it was on the cusp of going on to the stock market.
1:12.6	It would have been pulling off the biggest initial public offering ever, with a listing that was
1:16.8	valued to raise 37 billion dollars, and a valuation that would have been bigger than even
1:21.7	JP Morgan. It would have been a homegrown organic national champion in the fintech world,
1:26.6	a nod to the prowess of Chinese tech startups.
1:29.8	But on the eve of going public, a dramatic 11th hour intervention from the very top of the Chinese Communist Party scuppered everything.
1:37.8	New regulations were rushed into place and now, and Group's IPO faces a six-month delay, if not more.
1:44.1	Speculation is running wild at the flamboyance of Jack Ma irritated the wrong people in Beijing.
1:49.7	So what exactly happened?
	...

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