Jack Ma makes rare public appearance at Alibaba Hangzhou campus to discuss philanthropy, agriculture tech
Alibaba Group Holding founder Jack Ma made a rare public appearance at the company's Hangzhou campus on Tuesday, discussing philanthropy and agricultural technology with employees, according to a social media post by China Philanthropy Times.
A photo published by the newspaper on its official Weibo account on Wednesday evening showed Ma seated with around 20 other employees in a meeting room. It was only the second public appearance by the Alibaba founder since he returned to China last November from a European study trip.
Ma has kept a low profile since a controversial speech in Shanghai in October 2020, just days before Ant Group's mega-initial public offering was called off. Ant is the fintech affiliate of Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post.
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Ma's whereabouts are of keen interest to the general public and investors alike. Earlier this month, a mistaken-identity incident triggered a sell-off in Alibaba shares after investors feared that an arrested person in Hangzhou surnamed Ma was the billionaire. Chinese state media later clarified that the person arrested was not the entrepreneur.
Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent via email.
In an interview given in June last year, Joe Tsai, a co-founder of Alibaba, said Ma was "lying low right now" while taking up new hobbies such as painting. "I talk to him every day ... he's actually doing very, very well," Tsai said. "I think you have to separate what's happening to Jack and what's happening to our business."
Ma has been focusing on philanthropy and agriculture since he resigned as Alibaba chairman in 2019, although he is still widely viewed as the face of Chinese private entrepreneurship.
Jack Ma (middle, far right side) is seen in a meeting room at Alibaba's Hangzhou campus on Tuesday, in a photo posted on Weibo by China Philanthropy Times. Photo: Weibo alt=Jack Ma (middle, far right side) is seen in a meeting room at Alibaba's Hangzhou campus on Tuesday, in a photo posted on Weibo by China Philanthropy Times. Photo: Weibo>
During Ma's trip to Europe last year, he visited companies and research institutions involved in agricultural infrastructure. Ma believed that the technology he saw in Europe, combined with Alibaba's cloud computing, big data analysis and artificial intelligence, could help modernise agriculture in China, the Post reported at that time, citing people familiar with the matter.
Ma's appearance in Hangzhou on Tuesday coincided with AliDay, an annual gathering of Alibaba staff and their families, which commemorates China's struggle to overcome the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, when the entire company staff had to work from home because one employee had contracted the disease.
Ma was also seen at last year's event, when unattributed pictures posted online showed him clad in a blue T-shirt surrounded by staff. This year he kept an even lower profile as his whereabouts were unknown until the China Philanthropy Times report.
Ma is not the only Chinese tech billionaire to maintain a low profile. Tencent Holdings CEO Pony Ma Huateng made a public appearance in March 2021 at the National People's Congress, the country's annual parliamentary gathering, in his capacity as a delegate member, but has been rarely seen in public ever since.
Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance who stepped down as chief executive and chairman of the board last year, has rarely been seen in public since, while Wang Xing, the 43-year-old billionaire founder and chief executive of Meituan, recently took action to hide nearly 18,000 of his social media posts from public view.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2022 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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