Jack Ma loves to talk big. In some ways, that's understandable: how many former English teachers have borrowed US$2,000 from family and friends to set up an internet company and been rewarded, six years later, with
US$1 billion for selling 40 per cent of that same firm? Even so, the braggadocio from the skeletally thin internet entrepreneur and Alibaba.com chief executive, whose online auction site, Taobao.com, has outstripped global giant and arch-rival eBay on the mainland, has raised eyebrows.
'We win [against] eBay, buy Yahoo and stop Google,' Ma boasted to reporters on the sidelines of a Pacific Rim leadership conference in South Korea in November. In May, he told analysts at the US offices of Yahoo, in Sunnyvale, California, that 'the game is over', with Taobao cocking a snook at its powerful American rival, buyer of the 40 per cent stake in Alibaba.
Ma has said that, despite a US$100 million injection last year, eBay is finished on the mainland. Depending on who is counting, Taobao has either 70 per cent share of the market (Ma) or 57 per cent (internet analysis firm iResearch). Either way, Taobao leads the pack, with eBay second and Paipai.com, owned by instant-messenger giant Tencent Holdings, trailing in third. The prize is glittering: valued at 900 million yuan in 2001, the mainland online auction market reached 5.2 billion yuan last year and is still trending sharply upwards.
So, expecting more bombast, it comes as a surprise when Ma takes a different tack during a recent interview in the ninth-floor headquarters of Yahoo China, just off Guanghua Road, in Beijing's central business district.
EBay, I point out, has not exactly rolled over and died.
'Yeah, let them [live],' says Ma, casually dressed in a light-grey polo shirt, dark-grey trousers and black leather shoes. As he speaks, he fidgets in his black office chair, one moment swinging his feet up onto another chair, the next bringing them down with a crash as he leans forward to make a point. From time to time he reclines, hands behind his head, lean frame almost disappearing under the table. 'It's impossible to completely vanish eBay. They are rich, they are powerful. They are rich enough that they can be here in 10 years, 20 years, they can be here all the time. [We can't] do something impossible.'
