Alibaba Read online

  Contents

  Maps

  Introduction

  Chapter One The Iron Triangle

  Chapter Two Jack Magic

  Chapter Three From Student to Teacher

  Chapter Four Hope and Coming to America

  Chapter Five China Is Coming On

  Chapter Six Bubble and Birth

  Chapter Seven Backers: Goldman and SoftBank

  Chapter Eight Burst and Back to China

  Chapter Nine Born Again: Taobao and the Humiliation of eBay

  Chapter Ten Yahoo’s Billion-Dollar Bet

  Chapter Eleven Growing Pains

  Chapter Twelve Icon or Icarus?

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Maps

  Introduction

  Alibaba is an unusual name for a Chinese company. Its founder, Jack Ma, a former English teacher, is an unlikely corporate titan.

  Yet the house that Jack built is home to the largest virtual shopping mall in the world, soon to overtake Walmart in the amount of goods sold. The company’s IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014 raised $25 billion, the largest stock market flotation in history. In the months that followed, Alibaba’s shares soared, making it one of the top ten most valuable companies in the world, worth almost $300 billion. Alibaba became the most valuable Internet company in the world after Google, its shares worth more than Amazon and eBay combined. Nine days before the IPO, Jack celebrated his fiftieth birthday, the soaring value of his stake making him the richest man in Asia.

  But since that peak Alibaba’s life as a publicly listed company has not gone according to plan. Its shares fell by half from their post-IPO peak, even briefly falling below the initial offer price. Investor concerns were sparked in early 2015 by a surprising entanglement with a government agency over intellectual property, then fueled by the slowing Chinese economy and volatile stock markets, which dragged down Alibaba’s shares in their wake.

  Despite the ups and downs of the stock market, with a dominant share of the e-commerce market, Alibaba is uniquely well positioned to benefit from the rise of China’s consuming classes. Over 400 million people, more than the population of the United States, make purchases on Alibaba’s websites each year. The tens of millions of packages generated each day account for almost two-thirds of all parcel deliveries in China.

  Alibaba has transformed the way Chinese shop, giving them access to a range and quality of items that previous generations could only dream of. Like Amazon in the West, Alibaba brings the convenience of home delivery to millions of consumers. Yet this comparison understates Alibaba’s impact. Taobao, its online shopping website, has given many Chinese people their first sense of being truly valued as a customer. Alibaba is playing a pivotal role in China’s economic restructuring, helping move the country away from a “Made in China” past to a “Bought in China” present.

  The Old China growth model lasted three decades. Based on manufacturing, construction, and exports, it delivered hundreds of millions out of poverty but left China with a bitter legacy of overcapacity, overbuilding, and pollution. Now a new model is emerging, one centered on catering to the needs of a middle class expected to grow from 300 million to half a billion people within ten years.

  Jack, more than any other, is the face of the new China. Already something of a folk hero at home, he stands at the intersection of China’s newfound cults of consumerism and entrepreneurship.

  His fame extends well beyond China’s borders. A meeting (and a selfie) with Jack is coveted by presidents, prime ministers and princes, CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors, and movie stars. Jack regularly shares the stage with the world’s political and corporate elite. A masterful public speaker, more often than not he outshines them. To go onstage after Jack is a losing proposition. In a remarkable reversal of protocol, President Obama even volunteered to act as moderator for Jack at a Q&A session during the November 2015 APEC meeting in Manila. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2016, Jack dined with Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Spacey, and Bono, along with the CEOs of the Coca-Cola Company, DHL, and JPMorgan Chase. The founder of another China Internet company remarked to me: “It was almost as though Alibaba’s PR department was writing Obama’s script!”

  Tom Cruise and Jack Ma in Shanghai, September 6, 2015, at the Chinese premiere of Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, which was financed in part by Alibaba Pictures. Alibaba

  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been demonstrating his commitment to learning Mandarin Chinese in speeches he has made since 2014, starting at Tsinghua University in Beijing. But Jack, English teacher turned tycoon, has been wowing crowds in both English and Chinese at conferences around the world for over seventeen years.

  I first met Jack in the summer of 1999, a few months after he founded Alibaba in a small apartment in Hangzhou, some hundred miles southwest of Shanghai. On my first visit, I could count the number of cofounders by the toothbrushes jammed into mugs on a shelf in the bathroom. In addition to Jack, there included his wife, Cathy, and sixteen others. Jack and Cathy had wagered everything they owned on the company, including their home. Jack’s ambition then, as it remains today, was breathtaking. He talked of building an Internet company that would last eighty years—the typical span of a human life. A few years later, he extended Alibaba’s life expectancy to “a hundred and two” years, so that the company would span three centuries from 1999. From the very beginning, he vowed to take on and topple the giants of Silicon Valley. Within the confines of that modest apartment this should have seemed delusional. Yet there was something about his passion for the venture that made it sound entirely credible.

  I became an adviser to Alibaba in its early years, helping Jack and his right-hand man, Joe Tsai, with the company’s international expansion strategy and recommending to them some of its first foreign employees. Alibaba has assisted me in my research for this book by arranging interviews with senior management and providing access to the company in various locations. But this is an entirely independent account. I have never been an employee of the company and have no professional relationship with them today. My insights come in part from my brief role during the dot-com boom as an adviser to Alibaba and from the proximity that this early contact has afforded since. Yet in writing this book, I have been guided also by my personal experience living in China since 1994, when the Internet first came to the country’s shores, and by my professional career. With support from my previous employer Morgan Stanley,1 in the summer of 1994, I founded BDA China, a Beijing-based investment advisory firm, which today numbers more than one hundred professionals, consulting to investors and participants in China’s technology and retail sectors.

  As part of the remuneration for my advisory service, in early 2000, Jack and Joe granted me the right to buy a few hundred thousand shares in Alibaba at just thirty cents each. When the deadline was up to buy the shares, in early 2003, things weren’t looking so good for the company. The dot-com bubble had burst and Alibaba’s (original) business was struggling. In an error of colossal proportions, I decided not to buy the shares. In the weeks after the company’s September 2014 IPO, this mushroomed into a $30 million mistake.2 I would like to thank you very much for purchasing this book. Writing it has proved (somewhat) cathartic as I explore the stories of others, like Goldman Sachs, who underestimated Jack’s tenacity and sold their early stake too soon, and eBay, who dismissed his firm as a rival, only to be forced out of the China market within a few years.

  Jack is different from most of his Internet billionaire peers. He struggled in math as a student and wears his ignorance of technology as a badge of honor. His outsize ambitions and unconventional
strategies won him the nickname “Crazy Jack.” In this book, we will explore his past and quirky personality to learn the method to his madness.

  China’s e-commerce market differs in important ways from the United States and other Western economies, the legacy of decades of state planning and the important role still played by state-owned enterprises. Alibaba has sought out and exploited the inefficiencies these have created, first in e-commerce, now in media and finance. His vision for the company—or his own philanthropic endeavors—now extends to grappling with China’s greatest challenges, in reforming health care, education, and its approach to the environment.

  Yet Alibaba’s main business today remains e-commerce, a market it helped create and which it currently dominates. Is there more room for it to grow? Competitors are waiting in the wings. Also watching closely is the Chinese government. As Alibaba consolidates more market power than any other private company ever has, can Jack keep the government on his side?

  Although most of its operations are in China, Alibaba is pursuing an ambitious international expansion. Newly appointed president Michael Evans: “We like to say that Alibaba was born in China, but we were created for the world.”

  Before we look at the remarkable story of how Alibaba came to be, and its goals for the future, let’s start by taking a tour of what Jack calls the “iron triangle,” the key underpinning of the company’s dominance today: its strengths in e-commerce, logistics, and finance.

  Chapter One

  The Iron Triangle

  China changed because of us in the past fifteen years.

  We hope in the next fifteen years, the world changes because of us.

  —Jack Ma

  On November 11, 2015, in Beijing, in the iconic bubble-like structure bathed in blue light known popularly as the “Water Cube,” the venue for the aquatics events in the Beijing Olympics held seven years earlier, it wasn’t water that flowed but streams of data. For twenty-four hours, without interruption, a huge digital screen flickered with maps, charts, and news crawls, reporting in real time the purchases of millions of consumers across China on Alibaba’s websites. In front of hundreds of journalists broadcasting the event across China and around the world, the Water Cube had been repurposed as mission control for the Chinese middle class and the merchants marketing to them. A four-hour live TV special, the 11/11 Global Festival Shopping Gala, was broadcast to help keep shoppers up until midnight, featuring actors such as Kevin Spacey, who appeared in a filmed montage as his character from House of Cards, President Frank Underwood, endorsing Alibaba as the place to buy disposable “burner” cell phones. The gala show culminated in a skit featuring Jack’s face as the new Bond girl before he appeared in a tuxedo walking alongside Bond actor Daniel Craig for some onstage antics in the final countdown to midnight.

  In the first eight minutes of 11/11/15, shoppers made more than $1 billion in purchases on Alibaba’s sites. And they kept on shopping. As the world’s largest cash register tallied the takings, Jack—seated next to his friend, the actor and martial artist Jet Li—couldn’t resist taking a photo of the huge screen with his cell phone. Twenty-four hours later, 30 million buyers had racked up over $14 billion1 in purchases, four times greater than 11/11’s U.S. equivalent, Cyber Monday, which occurred a few weeks later, after Thanksgiving’s Black Friday discount day.

  Shortly after midnight, Chinese media reporting the sales figures recorded by Alibaba’s Singles’ Day promotion on November 11, 2015. Duncan Clark

  In China, November 11 is Singles’ Day,2 a special annual promotion.3 In the West, the date commemorates veterans of past wars. But in China, November 11 is the most important day of the year for the merchants fighting for the wallets of the country’s newly minted consumer class.

  On this day, also known as Double Eleven (shuang shiyi),4 people in China indulge in a frenzy of pure, unadulterated hedonism. Jack summed up the event: “This is a unique day. We want all the manufacturers, shop owners to be thankful for the consumers. We want the consumers to have a wonderful day.”5

  From just twenty-seven merchants in 2009, over forty thousand merchants and thirty thousand brands now participate in Singles’ Day. Total sales in 2015 were up 60 percent from the $9 billion of the previous year. On that occasion, celebrated at Alibaba’s Wetlands campus in Hangzhou, the company’s chief strategy officer Dr. Zeng Ming described the scene in terms reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein watching his creation stirring from the dead: “The ecosystem has its own will to grow.” Alibaba’s executive vice chairman Joe Tsai echoed the sentiment: “You’re seeing the unleashing of the consumption power of the Chinese consumer.”

  This power has long been suppressed. Household spending in the United States drives two-thirds of the economy, but in China it barely accounts for one-third. Compared to developed countries, Chinese people don’t consume enough. The reason? They save too much and spend too little. To fund their future education, medical expenses, or retirement, many families accumulate substantial amounts of mattress money or “precautionary savings.” Also, lacking the range or quality of products on offer in the West, consumers in China until relatively recently had little enticement to spend more on themselves.

  Addressing an audience at Stanford University in September 2015, Jack observed that “in the U.S. when the economy is slowing down it means people don’t have money to spend.” But, he joked, “You guys know how to spend tomorrow’s money or future money or other people’s money. China’s been poor for so many years, we put our money in the bank.”

  Old habits die hard, but a new habit—buying online—is changing the way consumers in China behave. Alibaba is at the forefront of this shift. Its most popular website is Taobao.com, China’s third most visited website and the world’s twelfth. A common saying today in China is wanneng de taobao,6 meaning “you can find everything on Taobao.” Amazon has been called “the Everything Store.” Taobao too sells (almost) everything, everywhere. Just as Google is synonymous with searching online, in China to “tao”7 something is shorthand for searching for a product online.

  Alibaba has a much greater impact on China’s retail sector than Amazon does in the United States. Thanks to Taobao and its sister site, Tmall, Alibaba is effectively China’s largest retailer. Amazon, by contrast, only became one of the top ten retailers in America in 2013.

  Although Alibaba launched Taobao in 2003, it was only five years later that it really came into its own. Until then China’s countless factories churned out products mostly for buyers overseas, shipped to stock the shelves of retailers like Walmart and Target. But the global financial crisis in 2008 changed everything. China’s traditional export markets were thrown into a tailspin. Taobao pried open the factory gates to consumers in China instead. The Chinese government’s response to the 2008 crisis was to double down on the Old China model—pumping money into the economy that fueled a massive real estate bubble, excess capacity, and yet more pollution. As the bills came in, it became clear that the much-needed rebalancing of the Chinese economy toward consumption could no longer be postponed. And Alibaba is one of the biggest beneficiaries.

  Jack likes to say that his company’s success was an accident: “Alibaba might as well be known as ‘one thousand and one mistakes.’” In its early years, he gave three explanations as to why the company survived: “We didn’t have any money, we didn’t have any technology, and we didn’t have a plan.”

  But let’s look at the three real factors that underpin Alibaba’s success today: the company’s competitive edge in e-commerce, logistics, and finance, what Jack describes as Alibaba’s “iron triangle.”

  Alibaba’s e-commerce sites offer an unparalleled variety of goods to consumers. Its logistics offering ensures those goods are delivered quickly and reliably. And the company’s finance subsidiary ensures that buying on Alibaba is easy and worry free.

  The E-commerce Edge

  Unlike Amazon, Alibaba’s consumer websites Taobao and Tmall carry no inventory.8 They serve a
s platforms for other merchants to sell their wares. Taobao consists of nine million storefronts run by small traders or individuals. Attracted by the site’s huge user base, these “micro merchants” choose to set up their stalls on Taobao in part because it costs them nothing to do so. Alibaba charges them no fees. But Taobao makes money—a lot of it—from selling advertising space, helping promote those merchants who want to stand out from the crowd.

  Merchants can advertise through paid listings or display ads. Under the paid listing model, similar to Google’s AdWords, advertisers bid for keywords to give their products a more prominent placement on Taobao. They pay Alibaba based on the number of times consumers click on their ads. Merchants can also use a more traditional advertising model, paying based on the number of times their ads are displayed on Taobao.

  The old joke about advertising is “I know at least half of my advertising budget works . . . I just don’t know which half.” But with “pay-for-performance” advertising—and a ready market of hundreds of millions of consumers—Taobao commands an enormous appeal to small merchants.

  Keeping order amid Taobao’s virtual alleyways are Alibaba’s client service managers, the xiaoer.9 Thousands of xiaoer mediate any disputes that arise between customers and merchants. These referees, young employees averaging twenty-seven years old, work long hours, often sending messages to vendors late at night.

  The xiaoer have great powers of enforcement, including the ability to shut down a merchant entirely. They can also offer merchants a carrot: the ability to participate in marketing campaigns. Inevitably, some merchants have sought to corrupt the xiaoer by offering bribes. Alibaba periodically shuts down merchants caught in the act, and an internal disciplinary unit is constantly on the lookout to root out graft among its employees.

  But Taobao’s success is not explained by the xiaoer alone. The site works because it succeeds in putting the customer first, bringing the vibrancy of China’s street markets to the experience of shopping online. Buying online is as interactive as in real life. Customers can use Alibaba’s chat application10 to haggle over prices; a vendor might hold up a product to his webcam. Shoppers can also expect to score discounts and free shipping. Most packages arrive with some extra samples or cuddly toys thrown in, something I have personally grown so used to that when receiving Amazon packages in the United States I shake empty boxes in vain. The merchants on Taobao guard their reputation with customers fiercely; such is the Darwinian nature of the competition on the platform. When customers post a negative comment about a merchant or a product, they can expect to receive a message and offers of refunds or free replacements within minutes.