Text: Crescent Moon
Alibaba is a pioneer in China's e-commerce industry, and Alibaba is not simply Taobao, on this question, the Wall Street Journal has made an answer, "Alibaba is a "complex" formed by Amazon, Yibei, PayPal, plus Google, including stores, search engines and banks and other businesses, is china's largest online business company to some extent."
The most surprising thing is that even though it has always been a leader in the industry, Alibaba's annual revenue growth is still very high, even more than 40%. You know, with Alibaba's total revenue of more than 700 billion yuan, it is undoubtedly extremely difficult to maintain rapid revenue growth. Based on this, Alibaba has been called the "revenue growth myth" of Chinese enterprises.
But this success is not easy to come by, if there is no original investor, Ali can not stand at all, then do you know who Ali's shareholders are? Ali's shareholder lineup is luxurious, including two, one is Japan's richest man Son Zhengyi, and the other is a vice-national figure Tung Chee-hwa.
In 1999, Alibaba had just been established for a year, which was the most anxious moment in Ma Yun's life, pulling 17 friends to raise 500,000 funds, which were quickly exhausted, and he urgently needed a sum of money to pull the company out of the mire. Through Tsai Chongxin's introduction, Goldman Sachs invested $5 million in Alibaba, and it was this $5 million that helped Jack Ma through the most difficult period in the early days of entrepreneurship.
Japan's Son Zhengyi, seeing the rapid development of China's Internet market, decided to visit Chinese companies and invested $20 million in Alibaba. Unexpectedly, it became one of the most successful investment cases in the world, and the harvest was very fruitful, Sun Zhengyi "graduated" from Ali in September 2020 and resigned from the board of directors of Ali, and in the same year, Ma Yun also resigned as chairman.
Sun Zhengyi and Ma Yun, two well-known entrepreneurs in the global business community, have achieved mutual achievements in the past 20 years, on the one hand, Sun Zhengyi trusts Ma Yun very much. Although SoftBank is the largest shareholder, it basically does not interfere with Ali's business activities, and lets the Ma Yun team do it, on the other hand, Ma Yun has really done a good job, making SoftBank earn a lot of money in the past 20 years.
Among Ali's directors, in addition to Son Zhengyi, the number of directors of Ali has been reduced from 11 to 10, and the number of directors of Ali's management has also been reduced from 5 to 4. According to the latest list of directors re-elected, Ant Group Chairman Jing Xiandong is no longer a director of Alibaba, and Tsai Chongxin, J. Michael Evans, and E. Brje Ekholm are re-elected.
Jing Xiandong is one of Ma Yun's right-hand men, chairman and CEO of Ant Group, and another successor selected by Ma Yun, responsible for the trillion valuation of Ant Group, and the withdrawal of Jing Xiandong can also be seen as another personnel earthquake. At present, Alibaba has not given a precise reason for Jing Xiandong's withdrawal from the board, but according to industry speculation, this may mean that Alibaba will further promote ant financial independence.
In addition to the first group of directors, Daniel Zhang, Tung Chee-hwa, Jerry Yang and Wan Ling MARTELLO are the directors of the second group; Wu Wei, Kabir MISRA and Guo Deming are the directors of the third group. Among them, especially Daniel Zhang is a big man who joined Alibaba as early as 2007, became CEO in 2015, and later became chairman of the board.
Wu Wei, who joined Alibaba with Daniel Zhang, became CEO in 2013 and a member of the board last year. J. Michael EVANS is the former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Group, one of Alibaba's earliest investors, predates SoftBank, who began serving as a director of Alibaba in 2014 and then joined Alibaba as president in 2015, mainly responsible for Alibaba's overseas business.
Kabir MISRA is a representative of SoftBank, Alibaba's largest shareholder, and last year, Son stepped down from Alibaba's board of directors and he continues to serve on Alibaba's board. In 2004, One of Yahoo's founders, Ghremy Yang, invested $1 billion in Alibaba and packaged Yahoo to give it to Alibaba, and Yahoo once held 40% of the shares, becoming the largest shareholder, and then gradually reduced its holdings, making SoftBank the largest shareholder.
Guo Deming believes that people don't know him very well, he was previously a vice president of Motorola, in 2007, Guo Deming became an independent non-executive director of Alibaba B2B listed companies, and in 2014, Guo Deming became a director of Alibaba Group.
There is also a very special independent director, who is the first chief executive of Hong Kong, who is now the vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and is at the level of vice-state. After Alibaba went public in 2014, he served as an independent director, and according to Hong Kong media reports, the appointment of Tung Chee-hwa as an independent director was mainly based on Tung Chee-hwa's strategic vision, as well as his connections and political and business relations.
During his tenure at the family-owned OOCL, he developed close relationships and connections with the mainland, the United States and Taiwanese political circles. In addition, there are also media reports that Yao Yunren, senior vice president of Alibaba and head of the institutional finance department, is the son-in-law of Tung Chee-hwa's sister Tung Chee-ping, so the relationship is very close.
Although Alibaba's largest shareholder and second largest shareholder are foreign companies, Jack Ma, as the core figure of Alibaba, once said: "We are not ordinary private enterprises, nor state-owned enterprises, but we define ourselves as China's "state-owned enterprises", and Alibaba has been quietly changing China in a calm way."
Ali received huge investments from Japan's SoftBank and Yahoo's U.S. by selling its shares, and soon opened up the distance with its competitors. After quickly occupying the market position, in order to continue to expand the scale, either into the shares or acquisitions, with strong capital rapid expansion.
However, today, China's e-commerce pattern is no longer dominated by Ali, before there is JD.com and then there is Pinduoduo, forming a "three-legged standing" pattern. In particular, Pinduoduo has shown an exponential increase in the number of users in just a few years, and the number of users has exceeded 800 million, close to Ali e-commerce, and Pinduoduo has also become the biggest winner in the sinking market.
According to Alibaba's latest quarterly earnings report, in the third quarter of this year, Alibaba's revenue was 200.6 billion yuan, lower than market expectations, and net profit was $28.5 billion, down nearly 40% year-on-year. The performance report is not good, on the one hand, the revenue is lower than expected, on the other hand, the profit has fallen sharply, which indicates that Alibaba's performance growth rate has slowed down.
After Ali announced the financial report, Ali's Hong Kong stocks and US stocks fell synchronously, falling by more than 10%, according to statistics, Ali's listed companies in the whole group evaporated 300 billion yuan of market value in one day. Behind the evaporation of market value, the "most seriously injured" is not Ma Yun, but the real major shareholder behind it.
Ma Yun has already announced his retirement and resigned from relevant positions, and at the peak of Ali's market value, Ma Yun has reduced his shares to cash out, even if Ali's market value has fallen sharply now, Ma Yun has no losses, and Ma Yun does not care about performance and stock price at present.
Due to the sharp decline in Ali's stock price this year, SoftBank Group lost money again, and in the latest quarterly financial report, SoftBank Group lost more than 800 billion yen, equivalent to 46.5 billion yuan, so Ali's crisis, in other words, also belongs to The Crisis of SoftBank.
The Internet environment is unpredictable, enterprises can only take countermeasures with changes in the environment, how to develop the situation in the later stage, but also need to see the 4th quarter of the financial report data, then what do you think Alibaba's future development trend will be?