Jack Ma and the recent events

  • After months away from public view — which fuelled speculation — Chinese billionaire Jack Ma resurfaced on January 20, and was seen addressing rural educators at an event that was streamed live.

JACK MA NOT SEEN

  • Ma was not seen in public after he delivered a speech at a conference in Shanghai in October 2020.
  • In the speech at the conference, he had severely criticised the market regulation system put in place in China, called the banks ‘pawnshops’, and and suggested that the system “stifled business innovation”.
  • The absence came to notice early in January, when Ma didn't appear in the final episode of Africa’s Business Heroes, a TV show in which he was to be a judge. 
  • The Alibaba Group, which Ma co-founded more than two decades ago, cited a scheduling conflict as reason for his absence.
  • However, the absence was seen with suspicion as it had come at a time when Ma and his companies were facing a crackdown from Chinese regulators.

CRACKDOWN ON ALIBABA 

  • Ma had founded Alibaba Group in June 1999.
  • In 2016, he became the richest person in Asia. 
  • In 2019, he stepped down from the board of Alibaba.
  • In 2020, Chinese officials opened an antitrust investigation into Alibaba Group, which led to a $140-billion decline in the group’s market value. 
  • At the same time, government officials continued to circle Ant Group, the fintech arm that Ma had spun out of Alibaba.
  • In November, China’s market watchdog quashed Ant’s planned blockbuster IPO, weeks after Ma's speech in Shanghai. 
  • An initial public offering (IPO) refers to the process of offering shares of a private corporation to the public in a new stock issuance. 
  • Public share issuance allows a company to raise capital from public investors.

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