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Alibaba, for real

Bloomberg
Jack Ma went from English teacher to billionaire with Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company he co-founded.
The online world opened to the founder of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., on his first trip to the LIS in 1995. While visiting a friend in Seattle who showed him the Internet, Ma typed the word "beer" and couldn't find any Chinese information. He decided to fix it.
Almost 20 years later, Alibaba is China's largest online retailer, and Ma's HS-inspired brainchild is readying for an initial public offering in New York that could raise as much as $20 billion, potentially making it the largest IPO there ever. The valuation may make the 49-year-old entrepreneur the third-wealthiest in China, with $12.5 billion, and one of the 100 richest worldwide in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Alibaba has helped transform life in China, offering opportunities to entrepreneurs and revolutionising retailing for consumers who just a few decades ago used ration coupons to buy items such as clothing, rice and bicycles. Like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook Inc. (FB), Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Ma has become an iconic figure whose impact stretches far.
"If Steve Jobs created the operating system for the smartphone, Jack Ma and his team created the operating system for commerce in China and the future," said Porter Erisman, who directed the documentary, "Crocodile in the Yangtze: A Westerner Inside China's Alibaba.com," that chronicled his eight-year employment at the company starting in 2000. "He's someone who loves a challenge. He's motivated by doing things that push China forward."
Already, Alibaba is the source of
more than 70 percent of package deliveries in China and has broken what may be a worldwide sales record of $5.6 billion in a single day. It has also pioneered a service that lets users deposit money into accounts via smartphone, drawing about $87 billion in its first nine months, more than double Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)'s 2013 revenue. Alibaba has helped create 15 million jobs, Ma said in a
February letter to employees on the company's official microblog.
"I searched the word beer, b-e-e-r, very simple word," Ma recalled in a television appearance shown in the documentary. "I found American beer, Germany beer, and no Chinese beer. So I was curious. I searched 'China,' and all search engines said no China, no data."
Ma said he asked his friend to help him create a home page in Chinese,
and within five hours of posting it, he received five emails from the US, Japan and Germany seeking more information.
"I was so excited," he recalled. "I said, 'This is something interesting.'"
To start China Pages, Ma took 7,000 yuan from his savings and borrowed money from his sister, according to a book in Chinese by Ma's personal assistant Chen Wei and verified by an Alibaba spokes-
men.
The company's first two employees were Ma's wife Zhang Ying, who was his university classmate and colleague when he taught English. Zhang played an important role in Alibaba's early days until she turned to more-domestic responsibilities and raising their son, according to Chen's book and company spokesmen, who declined to give the son's age.