“Nobody knows the future. You can only create the future”.
Is what (when asked if he’d do the same again) Jack Ma said 10 years after Yahoo had invested 1 billion dollars in Alibaba for a 40% stake, cash which helped him defeat eBay in China.
Alibaba is the inside story (written by investment advisor, Duncan Clark) about a man (Jack Ma) from modest beginnings founded and built one the world’s largest companies.
Right back from his childhood Ma showed his determination to succeed in learning to speak English, taking visiting tourists on paid site seeing trips around the city, to becoming life-long friends with an Australian family, who supported Ma and helped him understand his global opportunity.
Alibaba was his third and Ma felt his last opportunity to create a successful business, his other ventures had been premature for the rate of internet growth in China at the time.
But this didn’t stop Ma, he knew it was only a matter of time before the internet exploded in China.
The Alibaba model wasn’t new, as there were other companies in the West, already doing what Jack built, but not together and not in China.
Today, the Alibaba Group is a mix of eBay, Amazon, and PayPal, and accounted for 53% of all Chinese retail sales in 2020, with $109 billion in global revenues.
The book takes you through Ma’s struggles and shows how hard he and his team worked to overcome the massive obstacles put in his way.
Not to mention the battles he won with eBay and Yahoo along the way.
China has proved to be a tough market for most Western internet companies to crack, and this book explains why.
With eBay, Yahoo and Google all retreating. Some of it down to their own making and the rest being blamed on red tape and strict regulations halting their progress.
When asked why he chose Alibaba as the name Jack said: ‘Everybody knows what it relates too ‘open sesame, forty thieves and 1001 nights’ plus it’s an easy word to pronounce globally”.
Looking back Ma wasn’t ashamed to say. “Alibaba might as well be known as 1001 mistakes”.
‘Alibaba’ gets a thumbs up & 5 stars.
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