How did a man become the richest man of China starting his career from $15 a month?

MRIDUL BANSAL

The greatest empires are sometimes born out of smallest of ideas. The empowering success of Alibaba Group is a live testament to this statement.

Jack Ma (aka Ma Yun) is the actual mind and backbone  behind Alibaba Group.Comming from a local background, Jack Ma in initial years of his life faced failure at each and every point of his life. He was born in a poor family, and the only way he could get ahead was education. After High School, he applied for college and failed twice in entrance exam. After the third try he got into the college and graduated the College. After College, he applied for as many jobs as he could but unfortunately (or now we can say fortunately) he couldn’t get even one job. After getting dozens of rejections he was forced to work as an English teacher at a salary of $12 a month, in a local University. Jack had no experience in Computers, but he was always interested in the idea of it. The Idea of Alibaba came into his mind when he made his first online search “beer”. He was shocked when no Chinese beer turned up in the results. It was then he decided to start an Internet Company for China and that changed his life forever.

Thus came into existence,Alibaba Group Holding Limited, an e-commerce company from China which provides C2C, B2C, and B2B Sales Services via a web portal. E-Payments, Data-Centric Cloud Computing Services and Search Engine for Shopping are the Other Services Provided by the Alibaba Groups. In 1999, Jack Ma along with his 17 friends launched Alibaba.com, a B2B portal for Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers. By October 1999, Alibaba had raised $5 million from Goldman Sachs and $20 million from Softbank. The Alibaba Team remained close-knit. Jack Ma always maintained a sense of fun at Alibaba. When the company first became profitable, Ma gave each employee a can of Silly String to go wild with.  These were the ocassions that kepy the company's moral hig and by 2012, two of Alibaba’s portal handled $170 million in Sales and on 19 Sept 2014 Alibaba was evaluated at $231 billion.

In 2003, Alibaba founded Taobao as a direct competition to eBay. And now Alibaba Group is more successful than eBay and Amazon put together. In the year 2004, a payment portal, Alipay that allowed customers to receive goods before payment was released to the sellers which were an instant Success. In the year 2005, Yahoo invested $1 billion in exchange for about 40% stake in Alibaba. This was huge for Alibaba, because at that time Alibaba was trying to compete with eBay in China. Another  big moment of celebration for Alibaba came in 2005 when it was successfully listed on the HongKong Stock Exchange.

In September 2008, Alibaba Successfully launched Alibaba R&D Institute. In 2010, Alibaba came with the shopping search engine E-Tao and in 2011 group launched mobile operating system developed by its cloud computing team.

Alibaba’s first IPO took the US market by storm in September 2014, making the founder-Jack Ma richest Man of China.

Jack Ma though being the main pillar and Chairman of the Alibaba Group lacked the technical knowledge and thus  was never the typical CEO, due to which he stepped out giving the position to Jonathan Lu in 2013.

At the time of first IPO, Jonathan Lu quoted-” We are able to get this profits and business in past 15 years because we always kept our customers as our first priority and this is the simple secret of success of our company.”

Instead of learning from other people’s success, learn from their mistakes. Most of the people who fail share common reasons (to fail) whereas success can be attributed to various different kinds of reasons.” – Jack Ma