Ma Yun (; born 10 September 1964), also known as Jack Ma, is a Chinese businessman and philanthropist. He is the founder of the Jack Ma Foundation, and co-founder of Alibaba Group and Yunfeng Capital. He is one of the richest men in China with a net worth of approx 27.5 billion.
After taking the gaokao three times, Ma earned a bachelor's degree in English from Hangzhou Normal University in 1988 and was assigned as a lecturer at Hangzhou Dianzi University. A pioneer of Internet business in China, he founded a translation agency in 1994 and launched its website the following year, before leaving his university position to run an online yellow pages service, which was acquired by China Telecommunications Corporation in 1996. Following an uneasy collaboration with the state-owned enterprise, Ma left the company in 1997 and went on to develop websites for China's Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. In 1999, he co-founded Alibaba Group, initially as a business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce marketplace and later expanded into a multinational conglomerate.
Ma has been the face of Chinese entrepreneurship. His influence declined after Chinese authorities halted the anticipated initial public offering (IPO) of his financial technology company, Ant Group, in 2020, following his public criticism of regulators for prioritizing risk aversion over innovation.
Early life and education Ma was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, on 10 September 1964. He became interested in learning the English language as a young boy and began practicing it with English-speaking visitors who frequented the Hangzhou International Hotel. At the age of 12, Ma bought a pocket radio and began listening to English radio stations frequently. For nine years, Ma rode on his bicycle every day to work as a tour guide of Hangzhou for foreigners in order to practice his English. He became pen pals with one of those foreigners, who nicknamed him "Jack" because he found it hard to pronounce his Chinese name. When Ma was 13 years old, he was forced to transfer to Hangzhou No. 8 Middle School as he kept getting in fights. In his primary school days, Ma struggled academically, and it took two years for him to gain acceptance at an ordinary Chinese high school, as he only got 31 points in mathematics on the Chinese high school entrance exam.
In 1980, while he was riding his bike to practice English with tourists, he met Ken Morley, who was traveling with his family with the Australia-China Friendship Society. Ken's son, David, became pen pals with Ma and kept in touch after the family left China. Years later, the Morleys hosted Ma in Australia, changing the course of his life completely. Ma later said: "Those 29 days in Newcastle were crucial in my life. Without those 29 days, I would never have been able to think the way I do today."
In 1982, at the age of 18, Ma failed the Chinese college entrance exam on his initial attempt, obtaining only 1 point in mathematics. Afterwards, he and his cousin applied to be waiters at a nearby hotel. His cousin was hired, but Ma was rejected on the grounds that he was "too skinny, too short, and in general, protruded a bad physical appearance that may have potentially ended up hurting the restaurant's image and possibly tarnishing its reputation."
In 1983, Ma failed his college entrance exam for the second time. However, his math score improved, increasing from his previous attempt to 19 points. The following year, Ma remained relentlessly determined to pursue higher education despite strong opposition from his family, who wanted him to choose a different career path. Undeterred, he decided to take the entrance exam a third time in 1984. On his third attempt, Ma scored 89 points on the math section, marking a significant improvement from his previous two attempts. Nonetheless, the minimum benchmark entrance requirement would have rendered Ma ineligible to be accepted into university, since his score was five points below the standardized minimum threshold for him to qualify.
However, Ma's academic fortunes changed since the enrollment target for prospective majors in Hangzhou Normal University's Department of English was not met, as some prospective students had the opportunity to be accepted and promoted into it, with Ma himself having ended up being promoted to the department's foreign language major. Having realized his aspirations to pursue higher education after enrolling at Hangzhou Normal University, Ma's academic performance began to improve substantially as he steadily achieved scholarly excellence over the course of his undergraduate studies. In recognition of his merits as evinced by his burgeoning academic achievements, Ma distinguished himself scholastically by consistently being ranked as among the top five students in Hangzhou Normal University's foreign language department due to the extensive English-language skills that he honed. He was also elected as the chairman of the student union and later became the chairman of the Hangzhou Federation of Students, serving in that capacity for two terms.
In 1988, Ma earned a BA degree in English from Hangzhou Normal University. After graduation, he became a lecturer in English and international trade at Hangzhou Dianzi University. Ma also claims to have applied to Harvard Business School ten times consecutively, being rejected every time.
Business career Early career According to Ma's autobiographical speech, after graduating from Hangzhou Normal University in 1988, Ma applied for 31 different odd entry-level jobs and was rejected for every single one. "I went for a job with the KFC; they said, 'you're no good, Ma told interviewer Charlie Rose. "I even went to KFC when it came to my city. Twenty-four people went for the job. Twenty-three were accepted. I was the only guy [rejected] ...". During this period, China was nearing the end of its first decade following Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up.
In 1994, Ma heard about the Internet and also started his first company, Hangzhou Hope Translation Agency (), and launched its website the next year. In early 1995, he travelled abroad to the United States on behalf of the Hangzhou municipal government with colleagues who had helped introduce him to the Internet. Although he found information related to beer from many countries, he was surprised to find none from China. He also tried to search for general information about China and again was surprised to find none. So he and his friend created an "ugly" website pertaining to information regarding Chinese beer. He launched the website at 9:40 am, and by 12:30 pm he had received emails from prospective Chinese investors wishing to know more about him and his website. This was when Ma realized that the Internet had something great to offer. In April 1995, Ma, along with his business partner He Yibing, a computer instructor, opened his second company, Hangzhou Hope Computer Services (). One of China's earliest Internet start-ups, the company ran a website, China Pages (), as an online yellow page service. On 10 May 1995, the pair registered the domain chinapages.com in the United States. Within a span of three years, China Pages cleared approximately 5,000,000 RMB in profit which at the time was equivalent to US$642,998 (approximately $1.18 million today).
Ma began building websites for Chinese companies with the help of friends in the United States. He said that "The day we got connected to the Web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house", and on a very slow dial-up connection, "we waited three and a half hours and got half a page", he recalled. "We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved the Internet existed".From 1998 to 1999, Ma headed an information technology company established by the China International Electronic Commerce Center, a department of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. In 1999, he quit and returned to Hangzhou with his team to establish Alibaba, a Hangzhou-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. In October 1999 and January 2000, Alibaba won a total of a $25 million foreign venture seed capital from the American investment bank, Goldman Sachs and the Japanese investment management conglomerate SoftBank. The program was expected to improve the domestic Chinese e-commerce market and perfect an e-commerce platform for online Chinese enterprises to establish a presence for themselves to compete, especially fostering the growth of Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well as addressing challenges surrounding China's entrance into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Eventually, Alibaba began to show signs of profitability three years later as Ma wanted to improve the global e-commerce system. Since 2003, Ma established Taobao Marketplace, Alipay, Ali Mama and Lynx. After the rapid rise of Taobao, American e-commerce giant eBay offered to purchase the company. However, Ma rejected their offer, instead garnering support from Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang who offered a $1 billion investment in upfront capital for the potential purpose of expanding Alibaba's corporate operations.
Chairman of Alibaba Group
From 1999, Ma was executive chairman of Alibaba Group, which has remained one of China's most prominent high-technology holding companies in the two decades since it inception. It has nine major subsidiaries: Alibaba.com, Taobao Marketplace, Tmall, eTao, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Juhuasuan, 1688.com, AliExpress.com, and Alipay. At the annual general meeting of shareholders for Alibaba.com in May 2010, Ma announced Alibaba Group would begin in 2010 to earmark 0.3% of annual revenue to environmental protection, particularly on water- and air-quality improvement projects. Of the future of Alibaba, he has said, "our challenge is to help more people to make healthy money, 'sustainable money', money that is not only good for themselves but also good for the society. That's the transformation we are aiming to make." In line with that objective and long-term strategic reasoning, Jack Ma in July 2017, appointed Kuo Zhang as the President of Alibaba.com. His responsibilities include representing Alibaba.com on global trade, small-business growth, tariffs, artificial intelligence, and cross-border commerce. Recent media coverage indicates that Kuo Zhang is advocating for Alibaba.com's continued support of small and medium-sized businesses in regions like the US and Europe. In news reports, he explains how AI tools like Accio Work can simplify product discovery, supplier selection, and cross-border transactions.He explains how these technologies could be ways to reduce barriers for smaller firms while also promoting growth.