Jack Ma Plans to Step Down as Chairman Next Year

Jack Ma, who is the charismatic co-founder of China’s largest e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, will resign as chairman in one year to focus on philanthropy and education. He will hand the reins to the trusted lieutenant Daniel Zhang.

Ma had just turned 54 on Monday. He has long flagged his intentions to step back, having insisted that Alibaba management should be relatively young and his retirement  is not expected to affect the handling and operations of the company.

However, it is still extremely rare for a founder of big and transformative tech firm, particularly one with a cult-like status like Ma, to retire quite early.

“There’s only Bill Gates who has done the same. No other tech founder in the world has just reigned like that at the top,” stated Rupert Hoogewerf, Shanghai-based founder of the Hurun Report, which releases an annual influential list of China’s richest people.

Hoogewerf added that in China, Ma was a figure like no other, with friends ranging from movie stars to billionaires moguls, though he usually outshone them all.

“He’s the big one; he’s the one that brings them together,” he added.

Ma will step down as the chairman in exactly one year on September 10, 2019 and complete his current term on Alibaba’s board of directors following the company’s annual general meeting in 2020, the company stated. He relinquished the role of executive in the year 2013.

Zhang, who is 46 years old, has been CEO since 2015 after having served as chief operating officer and is known as a key architect of Alibaba’s “Single’s Day,” the November 11 event that has since become the world’s largest online shopping event. Zhang, who is a former accountant, will also continue as the company’s CEO.

“Under his stewardship, Alibaba has seen consistent and sustainable growth for 13 consecutive quarters… Starting the process of passing the Alibaba torch to Daniel and his team is the right decision at the right time,” said Ma in a letter that was released by the company.

Ma was a former English teacher with no technical background. He co-founded Alibaba in 1999 with 17 others and has since become one of China’s richest people with a net worth of $36.6 billion.

The company, which was founded at a time when the industry was still dominated by the state-backed firms and entrepreneurship was treated as a risky career path, has grown to have more than 66,000 full-time employees. It has a market value of around $420 billion.

“He put a human face on technology, and took China onto the global stage, not as a state-owned enterprise, crucially,” explained Duncan Clark, who is the managing director at Beijing Tech advisory BDA and the author of “Alibaba: The House that Jack Built.”

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