Who is Jack Ma?

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2023

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jack Ma is China's best-known entrepreneur, an English teacher who became a billionaire, after he founded the e-commerce giant Alibaba.

However in June 2021, Chinese regulators halted the dual stock market debut of his digital payments company Ant Group - an affiliate of Alibaba - in Hong Kong and Shanghai, citing "major issues" over regulating the company. Mr Ma has been laying low ever since.

In January 2023, it was announced that Mr Ma would give up control of the Chinese fintech giant.

So who is Jack Ma? And what does the future hold now? In November 2022, Business Daily’s Rahul Tandon spoke to Brian Wong, a former Alibaba executive and special assistant to Jack Ma at Alibaba who has recently written a book about his time with the company.

He talks about his relationship with Mr Ma, what he was like to work for, and what he thinks the future could hold.

Producer/presenter: Rahul Tandon

(Photo: Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group, speaks during opening ceremony of the 3rd All-China Young Entrepreneurs Summit 2020 in Fuzhou, China. Credit: Lyu Ming/China News Service/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Business Daily with me, Rahul Tandon, where today we're talking about this man.
0:08.8	Jack Ma is the founder and former chairman of the Alibaba Group, which is one of the world's biggest tech companies.
0:14.9	So how did an English teacher found one of the most successful tech companies on this planet?
0:20.1	We're going to be talking to somebody who knows him very well.
0:23.3	He didn't come from the technology background.
0:25.4	He wasn't like a finance guy.
0:26.9	He sort of left the experts to do the work they needed to do.
0:30.3	And that was Jack's strength.
0:31.7	He's leading people in the same direction and getting them all on board.
0:34.9	We're talking about Jack Ma with the former Alibaba executive Brian Wong.
0:39.6	That's all coming up on today's program.
0:44.4	So I applied jobs for 30 times got rejected.
0:48.4	I went for a police.
0:49.7	They said, no, you're not good.
0:50.9	I went to even the KFC.
0:53.6	When KFC come to China china come to my seat 24 people
0:58.6	went for the job 23 people accepted i was the only one guy and we went for police five people
1:06.7	four of them accepted i was the only guy did i receive received. Jack Marr there, and in this program,
1:12.1	we're going to talk quite a lot about him. He is one of the great entrepreneurs of our time,
1:17.8	but as you heard there, he wasn't always so successful. He's gone on to build one of the
1:24.2	world's largest e-commerce companies, which of course is Alibaba.
1:28.8	We're going to hear from someone who knows him very well, shortly, work closely with him.
	...

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