Beijing
\nJack Ma, the pioneer of China\u2019s internet industry, has termed the speculation swirling around his retirement as a \u201csea gossip\u201d, saying that he would rather die on the beach than in his executive office at Alibaba.<\/p>\n
On September 10, Chinese billionaire Ma, on his 54th birthday, announced that he would step down as Alibaba\u2019s executive chairman in one year to make way for the next generation of leaders at the USD 420 billion e-commerce giant.<\/p>\n
He named the company\u2019s Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang as his successor who would take charge in September next year, while he would continue to be company\u2019s director.<\/p>\n
Speaking about his retirement at the concluding session of the the Summer Davos Forum in China\u2019s Tianjin city on Thursday, Ma said \u201cgossip has been around us every day for the past 19 years. For someone who has a dream for the future, gossips, rumours, hardships and frustrations will always be part of your life\u201d.<\/p>\n
Reporting on Ma\u2019s speech at the forum China\u2019s state-run Xinhua news agency reported that sceptics said he was forced to step down, while others claimed he had already shifted a large number of assets to other countries, planning to leave China.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the next 15 to 16 years, there\u2019s still a lot of things I can do. I know it would be difficult for people at the age of 55 or 56, say 60, to leave. By then you would no longer be sure about your future, and you would hang on,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The retirement decision announced was anything but a retreat. It is actually \u201ca step forward\u201d for himself and the company, he said.<\/p>\n
Ma, who grew from an English teacher to China\u2019s top billionaires making Alibaba into USD 420 billion company, always took care to not ruffle feathers of the ruling Communist Party of China .<\/p>\n
Ma started Alibaba.com in 1999 as a business-to-business marketplace with 17 co-founders in his Hangzhou apartment turning the company into a global e-commerce giant with burgeoning cloud computing and package delivery businesses.<\/p>\n
Alibaba\u2019s sprawling businesses also include brick-and-mortar stores, online video, movies and other enterprises, and it has sought to expand in promising new markets like India and Southeast Asia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beijing Jack Ma, the pioneer of China\u2019s internet industry, has termed the speculation swirling around his retirement as a \u201csea gossip\u201d, saying that he would rather die on the beach than in his executive office at Alibaba. On September 10, Chinese billionaire Ma, on his 54th birthday, announced that he would step down as Alibaba\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42710,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42709"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42711,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42709\/revisions\/42711"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}