Jack Ma retires from Alibaba

Alibaba, China’s most valuable public tech company, will mark its 20th birthday on Tuesday with a rite of succession: its founder Jack Ma will retire as executive chairman and hand the reins to chief executive Daniel Zhang. It is the first transition at the top of a big Chinese tech company — peers Tencent and Baidu are still run by their founders Pony Ma and Robin Li — and in many ways the toughest to pull off. The 55-year-old Mr Ma, China’s richest man, is a charismatic leader who built Alibaba from a shared apartment into a company worth $462bn.

His successor is a low-key former accountant. But Alibaba’s investors are unfazed. The company’s share price has risen 9.4 per cent in the year since he announced he would retire and Alibaba is woven into the fabric of daily life for hundreds of millions of Chinese as means of buying and selling goods, making payments and as a source of entertainment.