Alibaba’s Jack Ma: “The relationship between investors and entrepreneurs is like a couple’s, nobody can say who is taking advantage of the other”

May 23, 2014 Leave a comment

Alibaba’s Jack Ma: investors and entrepreneurs like husbands and wives

3:17am EDT

BEIJING (Reuters) – Jack Ma, the founder and executive chair of Alibaba Group Holding, said investors and entrepreneurs can fall out like domestic couples squabbling over their children in a blog post published late on Monday as the Chinese e-commerce juggernaut prepares for its blockbuster initial public offering.

“The relationship between investors and entrepreneurs is like a couple’s, nobody can say who is taking advantage of the other,” Ma said in an emoticon-filled post, written on Alibaba’s mobile social networking app Laiwang.

“Also, it is common for them to quarrel and break up because they have different opinions over how to raise and educate their child,” he said.

Alibaba, the world’s biggest e-commerce company, is preparing for its U.S. IPO after filing its prospectus last week. This has the potential to be the biggest tech company listing yet, according to analysts, surpassing Facebook Inc’s $16 billion filing in 2012.

“Investors know they aren’t your guardian angel,” Ma continued. “The reason they invest in you isn’t because they’re kind-hearted.”

In a letter Ma sent to employees before the IPO filing, Ma emphasized that shareholders were not his priority. “After the IPO we’ll still uphold the policy of ‘customers first, employees second, and shareholders third,'” he wrote.

Ma’s checkered past with investors has raised concerns among some ahead of the IPO.

In 2011 a decision to spin off Alipay, the online payment arm of then-listed Alibaba.com, caused a row between the company and major stakeholders Yahoo Inc and Softbank Corp.

Alibaba, Yahoo and SoftBank settled the matter in 2011, but not before David Einhorn, the Greenlight Capital hedge fund manager, sold all of his Yahoo shares in frustration at what he deemed mutual “finger-pointing” between the companies.

“Finding money is difficult, finding intelligent money is even harder, and finding a way to harmoniously coexist and develop with your investors after the investment is the hardest,” said Ma in Monday’s post.

 

Filed under Macro Trends, TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment