Saturday, September 20, 2014

Alibaba – The Forrest Gump of China – Süddeutsche.de

Alibaba – The Forrest Gump of China – Süddeutsche.de

From Marcel Grzanna, Nikolaus Piper, John Kuhn, Christoph Giesen and Christopher wedge

His story is full of craziness. Now brings founder Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group Online in New York on the stock market – and saved $ 25 billion. Astray? Yes, completely.

It is the day of Jack Ma. The 50-year-old founder of online retailer Alibaba Hangzhou standing with black suit over a dark blue shirt without a tie in the lot on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and looks like all the monitors. DC is 9.30 clock in New York. The famous bell of the NYSE will be clanging over the hall and opened the stock trading. On this day, Jack Mas day, opened trade with the largest IPO in history. More than 25 billion dollars will be recorded here

If a company is new to the stock market, the boss may press the button, of the bell, the “Opening Bell” triggers. Ma has ceded the honor to eight customers of Alibaba: five women and three men in white T-shirts, including a cherry picker from the State of Washington and a former Chinese Olympian, who now sells bracelets. When the act is over, they are in the arms.

In the trading room it goes this morning to how to times when the trade was not yet controlled by computers. The people are crowded together, because something really happened: The “market maker”, as they are called, so the people of Goldman Sachs and Barclays begin to process the order books. The Trust is working, and it takes some time until the opening price is fixed

Meanwhile, is Ma the economy transmitter CNBC still on the floor of an interview., It’ll go in the IPO to not only money, “what we get is people’s trust,” he says. A little later, he repeated: “Without faith it is not.” The fixation on the trust has reasons: Among analysts on Wall Street, there are some who hold Alibaba’s management structure for transparent and have criticized. But when the opening price is available, it is now past: $ 92.70, at an issue price of 68 dollars. And that’s why New York is celebrating once the winners from China. Prior to this offering Ma must be accompanied by the Chinese actor Jet Li and business partners, working through a throng of people, as if he were a rock star. At the front pillars of Wall Street blow the American and the Chinese flag, to an advertising pennant business. For lunch Ma meets sizes of the American economy. Jeff Immelt, the boss of General Electric, is, as Henry Kravis, founder of the financial investor KKR. Then waits Bill Clinton, the Ma-profit organization “Clinton Global Initiative” imagines.



online trade in China, which was once just a figment of Jack Ma

The fact that one company from China so would come up quickly, it was not to think 17 years ago. On the balcony, where on Friday urging the eight Alibaba’s customers, was the Chinese leader Jiang Zemin in autumn 1997. It was Jiang’s first trip to the USA, he had long endeavored. What exactly is a stock exchange, had his advisors told him before that. “Good morning,” Jiang called to the dealers in English and waved a little stiff. “I wish you a good trading day.”

At the time, Alibaba did not exist, the idea of ​​the online trade in China was only a figment of Jack Ma. Today it’s a billion dollar business. Last year the total value of transactions amounted to the website of Alibaba $ 296 billion, for 60 percent of all parcels in China, the company is responsible – and so much more dominant than Amazon in Germany or in the United States. Almost eight billion dollars annually by Alibaba sets, and makes up about $ 3.5 billion profit. The Margins of which the competitors are far away.



A TV crew is in Mas apartment when China gets Internet

That much money would make money on the internet, this Vision had the former English teacher Jack Ma already before President Jiang waved from the balcony of the Exchange. Ma had the Internet in 1995 met during a trip through the USA. With friends in Seattle he typed the words “beer” and “China” in a search engine. There were no results. Back in China, he began to build his business model. He visited companies, collected information and created “yellow pages” for China. The data he sent to the United States, there have been programmed directory and on the Internet.

A few months later, Ma invited friends to his apartment in Hangzhou one, also came a television crew. It was August 8, 1995, the day on which China’s telecom joined the People’s Republic to the worldwide network. The small group staring at a screen. Only after hours Mas homepage was loaded, China’s first commercial website. It was a flop. Hardly anyone was interested in the offer, Ma soon lost all control, the local government took his side.

But Ma could not be beaten. He borrowed $ 60,000 and asked his friends again in 1999, to his home to introduce his latest project: a website where buyers and sellers meet. Chinese producers should seek their overseas customers themselves. His idea was to eliminate the middleman. Whether clothing, fruit, toys – everything should be traded, always in large quantities, the common unit was the shipping container. As a corporate name is Ma wondered: Alibaba. Why? Because “everyone knows the story of Alibaba. He is a young man who is willing to help others,” he said. His home was the headquarters. Today it is a place of pilgrimage for the staff. They come by to be inspired. 150 square feet, four bedrooms, in a four-storey residential building. The square now costs 25,000 yuan, Ma had paid 3000 yuan. The apartment is on the second floor. On the dark brown door is the number: 202 No one opens

A Man of the House Administration says that a cleaning woman passing came regularly and in the apartment so look like earlier – before Alibaba moved to a larger office.. At the time, took Ma and his people the apartment to sleep and work, mostly they ate noodles from the bag. A few months after Ma Alibaba was founded, the Japanese investment firm Softbank got in with a few million, and the trading platform was a success. Ma developed his company constantly not only wholesalers should be customers, but all Chinese consumers. Thus was created in 2003 Taobao, China’s eBay, which can be so much more than the original and is from the USA and within a few years became market leader. This was achieved primarily because Ma its own online payment system introduced: Alipay. Who is on Ebay, must be able to trust that the seller sends the auctioned goods and the buyer pays. This trust have many Chinese do not, too often they were disappointed. With Alipay the money will only be passed if the goods are actually arrived at the customer; as long as the money remains in Alibaba. Currently, billions rest on the accounts. Also from the Group proposes profit, private investment arm puts the money to the customer.



“I admire Jack Ma”

One day before the stock market swing it rains in Hangzhou. Still the headquarters of the company is located in Mas hometown, with the express train takes less than an hour in Shanghai. A man in his early 40 hurries to his car. He could actually say anything. He says nevertheless: “Yes, of course we are all very proud of the IPO.” Then he drives away. A little later comes a young woman. She had a job interview. She says: “I admire Jack Ma He’s a legend, and he inspired me why I am applying Alibaba I love his way of running the company, he brings smart people together…..” The headquarters of Alibaba is a hand applied as a modern campus on the other hand guarded as a secret headquarters. In size and social architecture of the complex is on a level with the working environments of Apple, Google or Yahoo in the hinterland of San Francisco. Because the buildings are located on a river delta, Jack Ma had a park with a pond and wooden bridge for hiking between the hours of work to create. The cultured leisure area and the predominantly clear, sometimes curved lines of glass and steel facades dominate the external appearance.

A guided two years ago impressed especially a statue and Big Data Room. Ma personally, a spokeswoman stressed, have larger than life sculpture worried of dark stone and arranged to set it up on a plot planted with grass courtyard. The statue depicts a naked, muscular warrior. In Big Data Room almost ten meters wide and two meters high digital button shows the entire flow of goods Alibaba. Often the number of columns to flow in real-time in diagrams, geographic heat maps illuminate consumer behavior in China.



Eight percent holding Ma still in the company, he leads in the background

On campus there is a gym, different cafes and canteens, a gift shop and a florist Alibaba, pool tables and table tennis tables. There are artfully designed gravel paths, plants in orange pots, airy spaces. On the marble floor lobby, which is an hour of polished cleaners, stood a replica of a Lamborghini. Also, the car was sold on Taobao. It glowed orange. This is the Alibaba color. There are orange roofs, walls are painted orange, desks have orange trim, the framework of specific images from the company’s history are orange.

Walking across the executive suite to one of the many conference rooms said the spokeswoman, Ma was not quite so often in his office. About eight percent, he still holds in the company, the post of chief executive he did in 2013, but he still leads in the background. The IPO will probably make him China’s richest man.

The two major shareholders, the Japanese investor Softbank and the Internet company Yahoo are among the market winners. Yahoo had purchased in 2005 for a billion dollars. With the first day of trading of the shares value increased to over $ 40 billion. The partnership between Yahoo and Alibaba is based mainly on a male friendship. 1997 traveled born in Taiwan Yahoo founder Jerry Yang to China. His company had just been listed on the stock exchange. Who does not want to lose the orientation of the still young world wide web, could not pass on Yang’s web directory. Fact that it was the first failed IT entrepreneur Ma picked him up at the airport, took a job in the meantime for the Chinese Technology Ministry, is likely to be one of the great coincidences in the history of the Internet industry.

Details of the meeting are hardly survived, however, to Ma have taken long walks with the four years younger than Yang personal city guide. There is a photo that Ma and Yang smiling together shows on the Great Wall of China. Yang had followed the rise of his new acquaintance after visiting china and Yahoo very friendly positions. Trouble came when Yahoo in 2004 the Chinese authorities surrendered the data of journalist Shi Tao, the Yahoo e-mail service had used to communicate with human rights organizations in the United States.

Shi is still sitting in prison. Almost eight years after their first meeting, Yang suggested finally: While a golf tournament in the picturesque Pebble Beach on the California coast, he persuaded Ma to leave Yahoo 40 percent of Alibaba. For the Chinese company that was also a life insurance policy against the competitors Ebay and Amazon. “Yahoo Alibaba swallows”, interpreted Western media on the day of delivery the Buyer. “Alibaba swallows Yahoo,” wrote the Chinese. None of the two was correct: Both companies acted independently of each other, over time against each other. 2010, for example, as Yahoo as well as Google Beijing criticized Internet censorship, Alibaba dismissed this as “ruthless” back

The business of the two companies have developed in the opposite direction. During the Chinese group’s goal for marketplace idea lost Californians with its advertising-based business model more and more ground, especially on the competition from Google and Facebook later.

Today Yahoo employees rarely talk about Yang. He enlisted as a chief executive and by 2012 the Supervisory Board significantly to the decline. Unlike Ma lacked the talent to identify trends early, they say. Yang is dedicated to become the game of golf and as a partner of an investment company in the discovery of new start-ups

In the fall he will but take another part-time job. He returns to the extended board of Alibaba – back to his pal Jack Ma.

Why Alibaba is so extraordinarily successful? During his CNBC interview on the first trading day Ma says: His hero is always “Forrest Gump” was. In the hit movie of 1994 Tom Hanks plays an inexperienced young man from Alabama who stumbles through the American disasters and follies of the sixties, seventies and eighties. He’s lucky Always, always he sets trends without having quite understand why. Is this the secret behind Alibaba? The founder in any case seem to believe that everything always turns out well.

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