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Of all years in the Chinese zodiac, the most auspicious is the Year of the Dragon. The dragon is the most powerful of the animals, and its year is the emperor of the zodiac. When the dragon returns, every 12 years, the maternity wards in Chinese hospitals become busier than ever, since so many couples want to have dragon children.
Jack Ma is a dragon -- and he's confident that this is his year. The founder of one of China's hottest Internet companies, Alibaba.com, Ma was born in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou in 1964, and he believes in the power of the Chinese calendar. He's the kind of man who's willing to put off a major announcement to ensure that it falls on his birthday. Now, he explains to me in his new Hong Kong office, 2000 is his benming nian, the year of destiny. Not all dragon children do well in their year, since there's no guarantee that their destiny is always good. Ma clenches his fist and explains. "You have to run," he says. "You've got to take the challenge to do big things."
Determined to make his benming nian a success, Ma has laid out an ambitious plan to expand his company, which focuses on business-to-business e-commerce, mostly in China. He started 2000 with a blast by winning a $20 million investment from a group led by Softbank last month. Next up, he wants to expand into Japan and South Korea. By yearend, he aims to take Alibaba public. "This year would be a good time for that because of Dragon Year," he says.
VIRTUAL BAZAAR.
From time to time, I'll be tracking the progress of Alibaba to see how Ma's Dragon Year is developing. After all, Alibaba is one of China's Internet pioneers, and a look at how Ma and his team are progressing will provide a valuable example of the dot-coms emerging from China. What's more, Ma and I have something in common: I'm a dragon, too.
Ma is not aiming to make Alibaba into Asia's answer to Yahoo! or eBay. Asia is the world's manufacturing center, and Ma figures an Asian company that provides a way for suppliers to hook up with buyers plays naturally to the region's strength. With more than 100,000 registered users, and about 1,500 new customers signing up each day, Alibaba provides companies a chance to trade in 33 different categories ranging from textiles to industrial supplies to electronics. More than half of the company's users are from China, although Alibaba, which has both a Chinese and an English-language version, also features sellers like a Hungarian merchant hawking Hewlett-Packard printer cartridges and a Greek salesman offering second-hand textile machines.
Ma is an unlikely Internet trailblazer. Standing 5-foot, 4-inches and weighing just 97 pounds, he still looks like the struggling student he was a couple of decades ago who didn't have time to eat. But he's older than many of the entrepreneurial Chinese who are now setting up Internet companies in Beijing and Shanghai. And he has no technology background.
NO HOLIDAY.
Ma grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and he literally bears the scars of the fanaticism that gripped so many Chinese during the time. His grandfather had been a landlord before the Communist takeover, and in the Maoist scheme of things, landlords were lower than dirt. He frequently suffered injuries from fights with kids who harassed him because of his family background. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Ma was able to go to college only after working as a delivery boy for a few years and studying at night. He worked for years as an English teacher before starting the company that turned into Alibaba a few years ago.
That kind of perseverance will be important during the rest of 2000 and beyond. Ma canceled the Christmas and Chinese New Year holidays for Alibaba's 60 employees. "This is going to be a hard year for us," he says. "We have to work damn hard." That's the only way, if the Year of the Dragon is going to be Alibaba's year.
Einhorn is Asia technology correspondent for Business Week. His column appears on Mondays on BW Online EDITED BY PAUL JUDGE
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