Jack Ma: biography, personal life, success story, photo

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:54

Perhaps now the most famous Chinese in the world, who has already left far behind the now rarely filmed Jackie Chan and is approaching comrade Xi in recognition. In order to finally gain a foothold in our minds, last year he starred in a kungfu film as a taijiquan master. Jacky Ma created the world's largest e-commerce company with a market capitalization of approximately $231 billion. On September 8, 2018, he announced that he was retiring and would now focus on teaching and philanthropy.

Early years

Ma Yun, real name Jackie Ma, was born on October 15, 1964 to a poor family of musicians in Hangzhou in southeast China. He has an older brother and a younger sister. He did not do well in school, failing elementary school, high school and college entrance exams several times.

Ma's childhood came at a time when the US began to cooperate with China. In 1972 the President of the United StatesRichard Nixon visited his hometown. The country began to open up, a lot of foreigners began to come, and at the age of 12 the boy decided to learn English. For the next eight years, almost every day, Ma would ride his bike to the city's central hotel to offer his services as a free guide to foreign tourists. For him, the main goal was to practice English with native speakers. One of the tourists he befriended and called him Jackie Ma.

After leaving school, he wanted to continue his education, because for a Chinese from a poor family, this is the only way to arrange his destiny. He failed the entrance exams twice, and only the third time, after hard preparation, he was able to pass the exams and enter the Pedagogical University in his hometown, where he studied English.

First job

After graduating from college in 1988, Jackie Ma sent out his resume to 30 different companies that had vacancies and were rejected everywhere. At that time, he had not yet decided who he wanted to become, so he responded to all more or less suitable positions, even seriously considering the possibility of becoming a policeman. One of the jobs he applied for was an assistant manager position at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. Out of 24 candidates, 23 were accepted and only Ma was rejected.

As a result, he got a job as a teacher at his native university, however, the salary turned out to be quite small - 12-15 dollars a month. He proved to be a talented teacher andloved his job. Jackie Ma has said in many of his interviews that he will return to teaching again someday.

Introducing the Internet

1995 in the biography of Jackie Ma became significant - he got acquainted with the Internet during a trip to the United States as an interpreter serving a Chinese trade delegation. The first Yahoo query he made was "beer". He was very surprised that there was not a single Chinese manufacturer in the search results. Other attempts to find something from China were also unsuccessful. And then Ma firmly decided to start an Internet company.

He was completely unfamiliar with either computers or programming, yet his wife and friends believed in him and raised a start-up capital of $2,000. They started the China Yellow Pages company, which develops websites. Subsequently, he recalled that he and his friends waited three hours for half a page to load. During this time, we managed to drink, watch TV and play cards. But he was still proud, because he proved that the Internet exists. Due to the extremely shy financial condition, the company's office was located in the apartment of its founder, Jack Ma. Three years later, the company's turnover was already 5 million yuan (about 800 thousand dollars).

Opening "Alibaba"

After working for a year at a government-owned e-commerce development company in 1999, he retired from government service todo business. 17 friends and just good acquaintances gathered in his apartment, whom he was able to convince to invest in a new project of an online trading platform called Alibaba. The site allowed manufacturers and suppliers to post their offers of goods that those who wished could buy directly. In total, it was necessary to raise 60 thousand dollars.

According to corporate history, Jack Ma came up with the name in a coffee shop in San Francisco. He used an analogy: in an Arabic fairy tale, a magic phrase helps open the way to treasure, so the company was supposed to become an entry into the global market for small and medium-sized businesses.

First dollar earned

For business development it was necessary to attract financing. By October 1999, the company had received $5 million in venture capital investments from the American bank Goldman Sachs and $20 million from the Japanese telecommunications company Softbank, which invests in high-tech projects. Jackie came to Softbank to ask for $5 million, but after 5 minutes of presentation, the owner of the Japanese company Masayoshi Son stopped him and said: "I will give you $20 million".

The company continued to be unprofitable until a system was developed to allow US customers to buy Chinese goods on the site. In 2002, Alibaba made just one dollar. On the day the company made its first profit, Jackie handed out cans of serpentine to all employees and threw a party.

A stunning success

In the early 2000s, after the success of the Taobao service, which managed to force its American counterpart eBay out of the Chinese market, and the subsequent rise in shares, Ma refused to sell this resource. He managed to negotiate with Jerry Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo, to invest in Alibaba in exchange for a 40% stake in the company. Yahoo earned $10 billion from this deal after the IPO.

Achieving impressive success, Jackie Ma decided to remain in the company only as chairman of the board of directors, stepping down as a director in 2013. In 2014, Alibaba held what was the largest initial public offering in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. The company planned to raise $1 billion for a 13% stake, but raised $25 billion. On this occasion, a grand celebration was held at the headquarters in Hangzhou

Private life

He met his future wife, Zhang Ying, when he was a university student. They got married in the late 80s, right after his graduation. For some time, the couple were engaged in teaching activities together. And when Jackie decided to go into business, his wife fully supported him. She says that she immediately appreciated the unbending character of her husband. Jacky Ma's success story has a significant contribution from Zhang Ying, who strongly motivated him to succeed.

The couple has two children - son Ma Yuankong and daughter Ma Yuanbao. The son is already studying at the University of California at Berkeley, where his father was a student of the coursestories. Until 2002, the wife worked as a top manager at Alibaba, until Jackie Ma asked her to switch completely to raising children.

He loves to meditate and practice taijiquan and is always accompanied by a coach when he travels. Ma reads and writes a lot of kung fu stories and sometimes plays poker.