Watch this space: All eyes on Ma’s future

Jessica Rudd describes Alibaba founder Jack Ma as the ‘Willy Wonka of Chinese e-commerce’.

Jack Ma, chairman of Alibaba.

Jessica Rudd describes Alibaba founder Jack Ma as the “Willy Wonka of Chinese e-commerce”.

Rudd, an ambassador for Alibaba in Australia after setting up a business exporting Australian goods to China, is a great fan of the 54-year-old Ma, who yesterday announced plans to step down in 2019 as executive chairman of the e-commerce giant he founded 20 years ago.

“He had an impossible vision in a market full of hurdles,” Rudd told The Australian yesterday from Shanghai.

“But he believed in it and executed it.

“He has had a bigger impact on Chinese culture in the last 20 years than anyone else — and he’s not done.

“Watch this space,” she said, echoing the words of many others who are looking forward to what the energetic Jack Ma will do next.

Ma, who has an estimated net worth of more than $US40 billion ($56bn), has already indicated his passion for philanthropy and education, harking back to his time as a young English teacher before he founded Alibaba in his apartment in Hangzhou in 1999.

In recent interviews he has told of his admiration for Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has set up his own foundation that focuses on global healthcare issues and has been urging the world’s billionaires to give away most of their money.

Ma set up Alibaba as a global platform for overseas companies to be able to buy Chinese-made components.

Zhejiang province, where he is from, was an entrepreneurial manufacturing hub specialising in goods from buttons, zippers and cigarette lighters to industrial components.

The business took off at a time when Western manufacturers were looking for Chinese inputs. In recent years it has expanded dramatically, selling consumer goods to China’s growing middle class, who have become addicted to buying on their smart phones.

In recent times it has expanded globally, with Alibaba doing deals with Australia Post and other companies to sell Australian consumer products on its specialist platforms, including Tmall Global.

Ma stepped down as chief executive of Alibaba in 2013, moving back to the role of executive chairman, before the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014.

It is now worth more than $US420bn, with some 86,000 employees around the world, including an office in Melbourne that he opened last year.

Ma credits a visit he made to Australia as a 21-year-old student in 1985 for changing his life.

It came about as a result of a chance meeting in Hangzhou with an Australian family from Newcastle on holiday in China.

Eager to practice his English, Ma, then 15, would hang around the tourist areas in the lakes of Hangzhou to meet foreigners. There he met Ken Morley and his son David, becoming great friends with the family, who urged him to visit Australia.

Ma eventually came in 1985 but only after a long process.

He gave an insight into his extraordinary energy and determination at a speech to the University of Newcastle in June last year, announcing the $26m Ma and Morley scholarship for students at the university to visit China.

It was almost unheard of at the time for a young Chinese to leave the country. Ma took six months to get a passport and then travelled north, more than 160km, to apply for a visa at the Australian consulate in Shanghai.

There he was told he would need to go to the Australian embassy in Beijing.

He travelled north by train, staying in an “underground hotel” in the Chinese capital where he was refused a visa nine times.

With Morley making representations on the Australian side, Ma returned a 10th time to the embassy to finally be given a visa.

He then spent 29 days staying with the Morley family in Newcastle, which opened his eyes to developments in the West.

His experience in Australia and ongoing support saw him visit the US a few years later. He discovered the internet and realised its potential for connecting China with the rest of the world.

Ma’s connection with the Morley family has left him with a soft spot for Australia.

He personally welcomed the first group of 30 scholarship students from the University of Newcastle to Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou earlier this year.

Freed from the full-time demands of running Alibaba since 2013, Ma has travelled the world, becoming a global evangelist for world trade.

While the US and China are engaged in a bitter trade war, Ma expounds on a world where people will connect and trade with each other online — largely through their phones.

Ma has expounded his passion for education in recent times, with scholarships to train teachers in the poor areas of rural China.

He plans to visit South Africa soon to look at setting up training institutes to encourage entrepreneurialism in young people.

“I still have lots of dreams to pursue,” he told his staff in a personal letter yesterday.

“Those who know me know I do not like to sit idle.”