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Rumor: Jack Ma to Step Back from Alibaba Daily Management

China Business News, 6/14/12

A source close to Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group says founder and CEO Jack Ma has quietly withdrawn from day-to-day operations at the company and is busy training a new generation of management. Ma has been making frequent visits to Beijing recently, the source said, and has not been paying close attention to specifics of Alibaba's operation, to such an extent that he has turned responsibility for bringing on new institutional investors to raise financing to cover repurchase costs over to CFO Joe Tsai.

By Ma's own account, he has not set foot in his office for more than two months, and responds to perhaps one out of every hundred e-mail messages.

Last weekend, Ma expressed a willingness to allow sovereign wealth funds to purchase shares of Alibaba, on the condition that all new investors waive their voting rights in order to preserve Alibaba management's control of the company. Ma said he would prefer not to see a major company like Yahoo controlling an excessive share of the company, in order to ensure that the next generation of Alibaba management not come under heavy shareholder pressure five to ten years down the line.

Responding to reports of Alibaba's "anti-corruption" efforts, Chief Risk Officer Polo Shao said that participation in popular Taobao promotional tools like the purchase-points product Taojinbi, Tiantian Tejia (literally "daily sales"), and group-buy site Juhuasuan was being restricted in order to reduce the possibility of human interference, and that the company is now testing data-driven automatic selection for listings.

Keywords: HR Jack Ma Polo Shao e-commerce Internet Alibaba Group Joe Tsai

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The information contained in this newsletter is based upon sources that Marbridge Consulting believes to be reliable, and we have made every effort to translate the original articles or article excerpts as faithfully as possible. However, Marbridge Consulting makes no warranty of and assumes no legal responsibility for the accuracy of either the original source material or the English language translations.

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