Alright! Ma time to meet that shag quota! Alibaba chairman steps down at 55 with $38.6bn fortune At 55 years old, Jack Ma, boss of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, is stepping down from day-to-day management of the company he founded – with a $38.6bn fortune in his pocket. The move was announced a year ago in a letter to customers and shareholders. Ma has been "consciously edging himself out" ever since, according to the Beeb …
Good on him for building such a career and such a company. Working 9 to 9 ? Less good for the workers but hey, he's a billionaire, not a philanthropist.
I wonder how long it will take him to launch himself into another project. He does not seem to be the type to just up and retire to taking care of his garden.
I'm not sure how he correlates his statement about having sex 6 times in 6 days, with one of his previous comment
"I personally think that being able to work 996 is a huge blessing" (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/microsoft_github_china/)
I doubt I'd be able to get up the energy to have sex even once a week if I was working a 72 hour week...
China hasn't been properly communist for decades now. They have retained some aspects of the central planning, but outsourced most of it to a combination of capitalism and local control. Which really isn't all that different than how things work in the US and UK (just look at all the tax breaks offered to businesses to "encourage" them to do what the government wants)
While communism has always required a strong degree of authoritarianism to function on the scale of a nation (I think pure communism without coercion would probably not work on a scale larger than a town, everyone has to know everyone else) China basically dropped most of the communism and has been ramping up the authoritarianism. They keep their fingers in the businesses (i.e. required investments by the government, control over business decisions in some cases) too so it is much more fascist than communist at this point.
In 1994, Ma heard about the Internet and also started his first company [19]Hangzhou Haibo Translation Agency. In early 1995, he went to the US with his friends, who helped introduce him to the Internet. Although he found information related to beer from many countries, he was surprised to find none from China. He also tried to search for general information about China and again was surprised to find none. So he and his friend created an "ugly" website related to China.[20] He launched the website at 9:40 AM, and by 12:30 PM he had received emails from some Chinese investors wishing to know about him. This was when Ma realized that the Internet had something great to offer. In April 1995, Ma and He Yibing (a computer teacher) opened the first office for China Pages and Ma started their second company. On May 10, 1995, they registered the domain chinapages.com in the United States. Within three years, the company had made 5,000,000 Chinese Yuan which at the time was equivalent to US$800,000.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma#Business_career
So he's built the company to a value of $460 billion in twenty years. That's around $63 million a day. That's got to have taken luck, judgement, skill and hard work. Those who think to scoff should perhaps explain why they weren't achieving this.
Let's just hope Ma now follows Bill Gates' lead and applies himself equally hard to the intelligent spending of the cash.
Alibaba's cloud business and financial services affiliate Ant Group has expanded further out of China this week, by opening a pair of datacenters in Saudia Arabia and a digital wholesale bank in Singapore.
Alibaba Cloud and Saudi Telecom Company (STC) have opened two cloud services in Riyadh which will serve as a regional hub as part of a joint venture called the Saudi Cloud Computing Company (SCCC). STC confirmed the launch on Tuesday and the joint venture, SCCC, shared scenes from the launch.
Other businesses playing a part in SCCC are eWTP Arabia Capital, the Saudi Company for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), and the Saudi Information Technology Company (SITE).
Alibaba is being sued in the US by the parents of a man, who bought a 3D printer from the Chinese e-commerce giant, and died in an accident after the device allegedly malfunctioned and caught fire.
Hoi Kwong Yu and Janice Yu, parents of Calvin Yu, claim their son purchased "a defective Tronxy X5SA 24V 3D printer" from Alibaba's website AliExpress.com around 9 November 2019. Disaster struck six months later, on 11 June 2020.
The device was plugged into an electric power strip, and overheated causing a fire to erupt in Calvin's home, it was alleged in court documents filed to San Francisco's Superior Court [PDF]. He died a day later.
Ever since Lenovo acquired IBM’s x86 server business in 2014, one thing has proven elusive: profit.
Now the company can point to a pair of consecutive quarters, and a full year, in the black.
The Chinese kit-maker yesterday reported Q4 and FY 2022 results, with quarterly revenue of $16.7 billion representing seven percent year on year growth. Annual revenue reached $71.6 billion, an increase of 18 percent. Annual net income topped $2 billion.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has open-sourced a federated learning platform it claims protects privacy by enabling the development of machine learning algorithms without having to share training data.
FederatedScope was developed by Alibaba's DAMO Academy, the global science and technology research outfit it founded in 2017, and the source code for this is now published under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub.
The platform is described as a comprehensive federated learning platform that provides flexible customization for a variety of machine learning tasks in both academia and industry.
Alibaba's DingTalk collaboration suite has entered "extended reality" with a new offering powered by smart glasses.
DingTalk offers messaging, video conferencing, and other collaboration tools.
Released yesterday, "DingTalk XR" extends the DingTalk experience into what the company has called "extended reality" by running on smart glasses from an outfit called Rokid.
Chinese tech giant Alibaba is joining a coalition pledging to freely distribute energy efficient and green technologies, and has made nine patents available as part of the deal.
The patents Alibaba is giving to the Low Carbon Patent Pledge (LCPP) mostly involve parts of its own in-house "soaking server" liquid immersion cooling system developed in 2015 that Alibaba claims reduced its datacenter energy expenditure by 70 percent.
Two of the nine patents were unrelated: one limits hard drive power consumption, and another was designed to improve hardware utilization rates.
Alibaba Cloud has opened its first datacenter in South Korea.
As is nearly always the case when hyperscalers expand their physical footprints, the company has said nothing about where the facility is located, or its capacity. Sadly, the company is also silent on whether it has brought its flagship immersion cooling to South Korea. It is also unclear if all Alibaba Cloud products, or a mere subset, are offered in South Korea. We've asked the company to clarify matters.
One product that Alibaba has definitely deployed in South Korea is its "China Gateway" – a service that allows users to operate resources on Alibaba Cloud inside China with Alibaba assisting with local compliance chores, while maintaining secure and dedicated links to cloudy resources outside the Middle Kingdom. The service even offers the chance to rent office space from WeWork inside China, and to arrange local logistics. Alibaba Cloud suggests the service is a fine way for web-based businesses to enter China.
China's Cyberspace Administration has published statistics to assert that the nation's big technology companies are growing and not laying off thousands of workers.
A Friday post by the Administration (CAC) revealed that from July 2021 to mid-March 2021, a dozen of China's top tech companies increased their collective payrolls by 79,100 people. The post names Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Meituan, Pinduoduo, Kuaishou, Baidu, JD.com, NetEase, Weibo, Bilibili and Ant Group, and says all but one increased overall headcount.
The announcement then offers short summaries of interviews the CAC has conducted with some of the companies mentioned above. All tell tales of re-alignments to catch shifting markets and consumer behaviour.
Alibaba Cloud has brought its palm-sized Wuying cloud client device to Singapore – its first foray outside China.
Wuying was revealed in September 2020. The tiny device was suggested as a way for consumers and businesses to break free of PC upgrade cycles. Instead, it allows them to run a virtual desktop streamed from the Alibaba Cloud and endure a cabled connection to a local monitor and input devices.
In 2021 Alibaba offered a sequel: an all-in-one Wuying that offered the cloudy client plus a large touch screen. Accompanying the device was a Cloud Workplace that offers cloud storage and offers admins the chance to manage Wuying devices remotely.
Alibaba Cloud has decided to make its DingTalk collaborative workplace platform more attractive to enterprise customers, in China and beyond.
DingTalk combines messaging, conferencing, task management and integrates with online personal productivity suites. Livestreamed video and real time translation are also features. In form, function and intention – providing a single app for most collaboration needs – DingTalk is not vastly different to Microsoft Teams.
The app is already popular among Chinese SMEs, who can use it at no cost. Now Alibaba plans to court third-party developers to make the app extensible, and has added three upgraded and paid versions of software for enterprise users. The company also said it will "foster relationships with hardware manufacturers."
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