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Technology Alibaba Jack Ma

Hollywood, data and ‘not being like Amazon': Alibaba’s Jack Ma on his vision for the future

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By Seb Joseph, News editor

January 18, 2017 | 6 min read

Alibaba’s data rather than its sprawling e-commerce business is where founder Jack Ma believes its future lies, a future it hopes will see it become just as famous for making movies as it is making sales.

Jack Ma, Alibaba's chief executive, was speaking at The World Economic Forum

Jack Ma, Alibaba's chief executive, was speaking at The World Economic Forum

“We are a data company,” declared the entrepreneur at the World Economic Forum today (17 January). While many make the claim, few have the breadth of data Alibaba owns to make it a reality. “Eight years ago we said Alibaba should not be an e-commerce company because we have data from people, manufacturers, logistics and transactions,” he explained.

Ma said the data was allowing his business to "bank the unbanked", pulling from transaction records on Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao systems to figure out whether a person or company deserves credit in a country where many people don’t have a credit history. While this so-called Sesame Credit has come under fire for what critics believe is an attempt to gamify credit, Ma said it was “powerful” example of how its reach in China goes far beyond online shopping.

“We’ve given five million businesses loans in three years,” he revealed. “In three minutes we can decide whether to give you a loan and within one second you can have the money in the account where zero people can access it apart from you,” he said of a process he has dubbed “3,1,0”.

The same system is being used to aid the online behemoth’s attempt to crackdown on piracy, with Ma warning “if you sell or buy products them the Sesame Rating will know”. He has taken the brunt on the criticism, with many observers rounding on his long-held view that it is becoming harder to tackle piracy when the quality of the fake goods are sometimes better than the actual brands they’re aping.

Ma sees its progress to date as part of “war against human greed”. He added: "You can ‘t finish it, but you have to continue to fight .... Last year we put 400 people in jail, deleted 370 million fake products from our site … I’m happy the whole world is starting to realise the issue. Today, [it’s harder] for these fake product manufacturers and sellers to come to Tmall because our data can track them.”

Data might sit at the heart of Alibaba’s future but it’s move onto the big screen is arguably another key pillar in how the business flexes in time with the cultural shifts in its heartland. Ma has convinced Hollywood’s highest-grossing director Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners to produce, finance and distribute movies. As odd a union as it sounds, Ma outlined the rationale behind the move, claiming he wants Alibaba to tackle some of society’s biggest problems, which in China is happiness and health.

“Five years ago we had a big debate about the next 10 years and what things that China’s society will want – happiness and health,” he said. "We believe the movie industry makes people happy because people aren’t always happy these days."

He made light of the differences between how the two cultures make movies, joking that in Chinese movies the hero “always dies” whereas in America the “heroes never die”, before concluding that: “if all the heroes died then no one would want to be a hero”.

To Ma, movies represent what Alibaba could amount to over the next 30 years, with the entrepreneur vociferous in his view that it should have a stronger purpose than just retail. If Amazon wants to control the entire infrastructure around it then Alibaba is a business forged on empowering those in its own ecosystem to become the next retail behemoth.

“I want to make our company something that gives people inspiration rather than just being commercial,” he said. So much so that he told one attendee that he’d rather sacrifice Alibaba then play a role in a trade war between China and an America led by Trump.

As lofty as it is, Ma’s aspirations could be heavily swayed by relations between the US and China, which have grown tense since Donald Trump’s shock presidential victory last November. Given the property tycoon’s threats on blanket tariffs on Chinese goods in order to kick-start his own country’s manufacturing business, talk of an impending trade war between the world’s biggest economies has been rife.

On the controversial president-elect, Ma said: “we agreed on small business and mid-west America,” during their meeting earlier this month in reference to Trump’s edict on economic nationalism. He explained how he thinks the former reality TV star wants to improve globalisation but warned it needs to be “inclusive” rather than in the interests of a few as it has done for the last 30 years.

“America’s international companies made millions of dollars from globalisation; companies like IBM, Cisco, the profit they’ve made is much more than the four largest banks in China," said Ma.

“These are companies that have seen their market cap grow more than 100 times in 30 years. And yet where did the money go? For the past 13 years America had 13 wars, spanning $14.2trn. What if they spent that money on infrastructure and helping the blue and white collar workers? You’re supposed to spend money on your own people. Not everyone can pass Harvard.”

Technology Alibaba Jack Ma

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