Jack Ma, China’s richest man and founder of Alibaba Group recently made headlines when he visited Kenya and Rwanda with 38 fellow Chinese billionaires, all no doubt poised with expensive fountain pens, ready to ink billion dollar deals.
But Ma’s story to success is an incredible one. He is a true rags-to-riches story. He grew up poor in communist China, failed his university-entrance exam twice, and was rejected from dozens of jobs, including one at KFC, before finding success with his third internet company, Alibaba.
According to Forbes, he’s worth an estimated US$29 billion (Shs104 trillion which is bigger than Uganda’s economy), which includes his 7.8% stake in Alibaba — China’s answer to Amazon — and a nearly 50% stake in payment-processing service Alipay. Uganda’s economy is valued at just US$27 billion.
Jack Ma — born Ma Yun — was born on October 15, 1964, in Hangzhou, located in the southeastern part of China.
He has an older brother and a younger sister. He and his siblings grew up at a time when communist China was increasingly isolated from the West, and his family didn’t have much money when they were young.
Ma was scrawny and often got into fights with classmates. “I was never afraid of opponents who were bigger than I,” he recalls in “Alibaba,” a book by Liu Shiying and Martha Avery.
Still, Ma had hobbies just like any other kid. He liked collecting crickets and making them fight, and was able to distinguish the size and type of cricket just by the sound it made.
Ma was once teaching English for a measly monthly salary of US$12 (Shs43,000), but has since risen to the club of the world’s wealthiest.
After President Nixon visited Hangzhou in 1972, Ma’s hometown became a tourist mecca. As a teenager, Ma started waking up early to visit the city’s main hotel, offering visitors tours of the city in exchange for English lessons. The nickname “Jack” was given to him by a tourist he befriended. He taught himself English.
It is a lesson that would see him get a trip to the United States as a translator. It was while on his US visit that he was first introduced to the internet by a friend. The friend told him that he could find just about everything on the internet. However, when he did an online search of ‘beer’, there was no single Chinese beer in the search results.
In fact there was nothing from China.
“It was then that he decided to found an internet company for China,” said Business Insider.
So, when he returned home, he started China Pages, a directory of various Chinese companies looking for customers abroad, and some say, the country’s first internet business. It flopped.
But he did not despair. Four years later, Jack Ma gathered 17 of his friends in his apartment and convinced them to invest in his vision for an online marketplace he called ‘Alibaba’.
This site, he told them, would allow exporters to post product listings that customers could buy directly.
Alibaba, the Chinese version of Amazon, is today a giant in e-commerce. Known today as Taobao, it is a marketplace for almost everything – from watches to cars, handbags and houses.
In 2014, Alibaba, through an initial public listing offer (IPO) that attracted about US$150 billion, Jack Ma retained a small stake of about eight per cent in the company that he helped to found.
He also maintains a 50 per cent stake in payment processing service Alipay, two investments that have made him one of the richest people in the world.
The IPO pushed him to the pinnacle of China’s billionaires, a result that also saw Jack Ma shower his employees with newfound cash.
He is said to have told his employees to use the newfound wealth to become “a batch of genuinely noble people, a batch of people who are able to help others, and who are kind and happy.”
Unlike his business rival Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, who graduated from Princeton University with Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, Jack Ma had no experience with computers or coding.
But the man with an unrivalled passion for the internet is fun to be around, his wife and employees have attested to this.
“[He] is not a handsome man, but I fell for him because he can do a lot of things handsome men cannot do,” his wife Zhang Ying, a teacher whom he met at school, was quoted as saying.
They have two children — a daughter and a son. He likes reading and writing kung fu fiction, playing poker, meditating, and practicing tai chi.
