Alibaba Stock Slips as CEO Jack Ma Feared Lacking
2 min readStories have emerged in the latest days that Jack Ma, the billionaire entrepreneur and enigmatic co-founder and CEO of Alibaba Group (NYSE:BABA), has not been found in general public and has not posted in social media because late October. Ma also failed to make an expected visual appeal as a choose on a expertise show he made, Africa’s Business enterprise Heroes, a fact system that includes African entrepreneurs competing for $1.5 million in prize cash.
Potentially not coincidentally, the timing of his reported absence coincides with the planned original general public giving (IPO) of Ant Group, Alibaba’s financial technology (fintech) arm. The digital finance firm was established to increase a history $37 billion ahead of it was unceremoniously pulled immediately after Ma manufactured a speech vital of the China’s regulation of the banking business.

Co-founder and CEO Jack Ma at Alibaba’s 20th anniversary event. Impression source: Alibaba.
The Shanghai Inventory Exchange issued a statement relating to the suspended IPO, declaring, “Not too long ago, your firm’s true controller, chairman, and typical manager have been jointly summoned and interviewed by the appropriate regulatory authorities.”
China’s banking watchdog group also referred to as Ant executives to seem ahead of a hearing to emphasize the country’s more and more rigorous money rules.
Soon thereafter, China’s Point out Administration for Market place Regulation, the agency that sets organization standards and polices, launched an antitrust investigation into Alibaba and Ant for “suspected monopolistic conduct.”
Some perspective these developments as a rebuke from the Chinese authorities for a speech given by Ma in late October. At the Bund Fiscal Summit, he criticized the regulation of the country’s banking procedure, comparing the policies to an “outdated people’s club,” expressing the region must abandon “the pawnshop mentality of banking companies.”
This is just not the initial this kind of executive disappearance. Ren Zhiqiang, a previous major executive of condition-managed assets developer Huayuan True Estate Team, was noted lacking past March after crafting an essay that referred China’s President, Xi Jinping, as a “clown.” In actuality, Zhiqiang experienced been arrested and later on convicted and sentenced to 18 several years in prison on corruption rates.