Recently, some netizens met Jack Ma in a hotel in Melbourne, Australia, and in the photo, he was wearing cloth shoes and playing with his mobile phone and drinking Coke. Today, photos of Jack Ma and his foreign friend's family were also posted on social platforms.
An Alibaba insider confirmed Ma's news in Australia to the first financial reporter, but did not disclose information about his trip.
In Australia, this foreign friend has been friends with Jack Ma for more than four decades, and they are the Morley family, who took a photo with Jack Ma, a middle school student, by West Lake 43 years ago.
In the summer of 1980, Jack Ma, who was looking for foreigners to practice English by West Lake, met the Morley family from Australia by chance. Ma Yun was 15 years old and a middle school student. Since then, Jack Ma and the Morley family have become pen pals, and the two sides often correspond. When the elder Morley wrote back to Ma Yun, he often corrected Ma Yun's grammatical errors.
In 1985, Morley Sr. encouraged Ma in a letter and invited him to travel to Australia.
Ma Yun once recalled that although he finally went to Newcastle after seven visa applications, it was the time spent in Australia when he was young, and the local culture, scenery and people completely changed his view of the world.
After returning to Hangzhou, the two sides not only maintained correspondence, but the elder Morley also supported Ma Yun, who was studying at Hangzhou Normal College, and for more than two years, the Morley family sent Ma a total of 200 Australian dollars.
More than a decade later, Ma went to Australia again in 2017 to reward Ken for his mentorship and support with a $26 million (US$20 million) scholarship program. At that time, the University of Newcastle in Australia announced that Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma set up the "Ma & Morley Scholarship Program" through the Jack Ma Public Welfare Fund with 26 million Australian dollars. This is the largest donation ever received by Newcastle University.
Ma said the scholarship will be used to "support people who want to see the world for themselves, experience it, think about it with their own heads." ”
He was still at Newcastle University, saying, "Those 29 days in Newcastle were crucial in my life. Without those 29 days, I would never have thought like I do today." It is said that in Ma Yun's house and office, there has always been a place where he and the Morley family have been photographed.
The specific itinerary of Jack Ma's trip to Australia is not yet known. However, according to public reports, in the past year, Ma Yun has visited many agricultural research institutions such as the Netherlands, Japan, Southeast Asia and Thailand to investigate agricultural and fishery technology, and appeared on the streets of Hong Kong to buy New Year goods during the Spring Festival, and has repeatedly said that agricultural science and technology and rural education public welfare are the focus of his next work.