JACK MA ESCAPES BEIJING’S CROSSHAIRS BY GIVING UP HIS POWER

Jack Ma is on a week-long tour of Europe after largely disappearing from public view for nearly two years, adding to signs the Chinese government is easing pressure on the businessman as he bids farewell to a business empire that left him one of the country’s leaders. most powerful people. The 57-year-old co-founder of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. visited restaurants in Austria, toured a university in the Netherlands to learn about sustainable agriculture, and docked his yacht off the Spanish island of Mallorca, according to reports from Bloomberg and the media. Ma had to make significant concessions to get out of the government doghouse. After regulators torpedoed Ant’s much-anticipated IPO in 2020, the company reviewed operations to comply with tighter controls and has regularly spoken to the country’s central bank about how to “fix” operations.

In its early years, Ant’s success in services like digital payments and money market deposits threatened the dominance of the big state-backed banks. According to people familiar with the matter, Ant has also verbally signaled to regulators that Ma intends to relinquish control of the company, adding that they have relayed those plans to officials and the central bank for years. A proposal under consideration is to transfer Ma’s stock to other executives so the company can be overseen by a committee, one of the people said. In a filing this week, Alibaba reiterated that Ma “intends to reduce and thereafter cap its direct and indirect economic interest in Ant Group overtime” to no more than 8.8%.

Ma currently holds 50.52% of the voting rights in decisions about Ant. Ma could now be a way to align with President Xi Jinping’s vision of achieving “common prosperity.” Its companies are trying to meet demands from China’s watchdogs, who have vowed to curb the “reckless” expansion of tech companies. The evolution of the Communist Party’s attitude towards the private sector has become one of the most closely watched developments in global markets in recent years.

With some observers going so far as to say that China’s expanding internet sector cannot be reversed. “While there will be a wait for Ant on this change, it will make little difference as weak markets will mean Ant is in no rush to go public,” Tang said. Ant is currently waiting for the central bank to announce and agrees to review its application for a financial holding license, an important step for the company to move forward with an IPO opportunity. Ant’s forecast value, once estimated at $300 billion, has fallen after regulators restricted operations in the company’s most profitable units, including consumer credit. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Francis Chan estimated in June that Ant is worth about $64 billion.