Jack Ma, Alibaba founder and chairman, retires today. Today is the Teacher's day in China and also the 20th anniversary of Alibaba. It's a special day and also a memorable day for all Alibaba employees including employee No.1 Jack Ma.
Ma steps down as chairman today as he promised 10 years ago when he was 45. Just a few years back in 2013, he left his position as Alibaba CEO. His successor will be Daniel Zhang who is the current CEO of Alibaba. After today, Jack will start his new life outside of Alibaba as he mentioned. He would invest more effort and time on other areas like education, charity, environment protection and more.
Jack Ma started Alibaba with another 17 people in 1999 in Hangzhou, China. The company was trying to make small business do business easier. With the evolution of the past 20 years, they achieved what they wanted and did more than what they expected at that time. During the past 20 years, people see Alibaba built Taobao(C2C e-commerce), Tmall(B2C e-commerce), Alipay(Now Ant Finance), Aliyun(Alibaba Cloud) and other high value businesses.
The company went IPO in NYSE in 2014 and now has a market cap of USD 452 billion and Jack Ma is also one of the richest people in China.
In the future, Alibaba will continue to serve the society and help people ease their life. It will continue to flourish in the next 82 years at least as Jack Ma expected.
