Beijing (September 08, 2018): Popular Chinese company, Alibaba Group’s co-founder Jack Ma, plans to retire from the e-commerce company, to focus on philanthropy in education.
Jack Ma was born on 10 September 1964 in Hangzhou, China. 54 years-old Jack’s real name is Ma Yun. He loved to speak English since childhood, and to practice the language he used to travel to Hangzhou Hotel daily, which was a little far from his place.
Before working for the E-commerce giant, Alibaba, he worked as an English teacher to a university, where he was paid 12 dollars per month.
In 1999, he returned to Hangzhou with his team to found Alibaba, a China-based business-to-business marketplace site in his apartment with a group of 18 friends. He started a new round of venture development with 500,000 yuan. However, today Alibaba.com is considered as one of the top e-commerce websites.
China’s biggest e-commerce firm, it now has more than 66,000 full-time employees, according to the company’s latest annual filing. The company had a market value of about $420 billion as of Friday’s close.
Ma also controls Ant Financial, which was valued at about $150 billion after a recent fundraising round. Ma is China’s third-richest person with a net worth of $36.6 billion, according to Forbes magazine.
Ma is stepping back at a tricky time for Chinese tech firms. The Chinese government has increasingly sought to regulate the industry where Alibaba and Tencent Holdings Ltd are fighting a fierce competition for the country’s consumers. Trade tensions also present a new challenge for Chinese tech firms, especially those like Alibaba which are expanding overseas rapidly.
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