Jack Ma

Jack Ma is founder and chief operating officer of Alibaba Group.

Biography

Born in the city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, Ma graduated from Hangzhou Teacher's Institute in 1988 and became a lecturer in English and International Trade in the same university.

Ma first started building websites for Chinese companies with the help of friends in the US. Ma has commented 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.... We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved the Internet existed."

After a stint as head of the China International Electronic Commerce Center's Infoshare division, he founded Alibaba.com in 1999, a China-based business to business marketplace site which serves 12 million members from 200 countries.

In 2003, Alibaba launched Taobao.com, a consumer to consumer auction website similar to eBay, which also provided an innovative escrow-based online payment service, Alipay .

Ma remains as chief executive officer and chairman of board after Yahoo! acquired a 40% economic stake in Alibaba in exchange for $1 Billion USD plus all of Yahoo!'s Chinese-based assets , on August 11, 2005. Japan's Softbank will have a 27.4% in the new Alibaba company.

On 2007-06-11, at a press conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Hong Kong, called to discuss the highly successful Hong Kong Stock Exchange IPO, when asked whether Alibaba was an ethical trading company, Ma responded by announcing to the assembled journalists - and reiterating when queried - that he and his family have "sworn off Shark Fin Soup now and forever" , which he said was a result of finding out what the problems are.