Jack Ma’s First Appearance in 3 Months Causes Alibaba Shares to Jump

Jack Ma, Alibaba’s billionaire founder has made his first public appearance in three months after his controversial speech in October 2020. The billionaire was seen speaking to 100 hundred rural teachers via a video chat. This caused Alibaba’s shares to soar by 8% in Hong Kong.

According to Techcrunch, the recording of the call was first posted on a news portal sponsored by the Zhenjiang government, the eastern province where Alibaba is headquartered, and a spokesman for the Asian e-commerce giant verified the video.

After media revealed in December that he missed the taping of a Television show he produced, rumours swirled around Ma’s whereabouts. In recent months, Ma, known for his passion for the limelight, has steadily seen his e-commerce empire Alibaba and fintech giant Ant Group in the gunsight of the Chinese government.

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Ma’s last  public appearance was at a conference where, in front of a room of high ranking officials, he criticised China’s financial regulatory system. According to reports, his controversial comment caused the Chinese regulator to suddenly suspend the initial public offering of Ma’s Ant Group, which would have been the largest public share sale of all time.

Since then, under the supervision of the government, Ant has focused on organisational restructuring and regulatory enforcement. Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce site, was also not left out as market regulators launched an inquiry into its alleged monopolistic activities, 

Some argue that the recent clampdown on Jack Ma’s internet empire signals Beijing’s growing anxiety with the country’s super-rich and private-sector power brokers.

“Today, Alibaba and its archrival, Tencent, control more personal data and are more intimately involved in everyday life in China than Google, Facebook and other American tech titans are in the United States. And just like their American counterparts, the Chinese giants sometimes bully smaller competitors and kill innovation,” wrote Li Yuan for the New York Times.