Review: Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built by Duncan Clark

4 stars for Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built by Duncan Clark.

This book is a joy to read.

It is easy to read about the success of people, the founders of so-and-so companies, but it is not often that we get to learn about the difficulties faced or the sheer amount of hard work put in or even the many failed attempts undergone before these people come to be where they are today.

In the book, the author tells the remarkable story of how Alibaba Group Holding Limited - a company registered in the Cayman Islands but based in China, controlled by a partnership which does not actually own the business assets in China, and subsequently listed in the United States New York Stock Exchange - come to be and its goals for the future.

Another reason this book provides enjoyment reading is that the author has a good grasp of the Chinese language. By using the Hanyu Pinyin, a Mandarin phonetic transcription system, together with corresponding English explanations, he succeeds in relating the story content in his own way while retaining the Chinese flavour of what the book is like.

Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, a former English teacher turned businessman, philosopher, philanthropist, environmentalist, has big vision for the company. It does seem as if Alibaba wants a share in everything, from business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce to business-to-consumer (B2C) to health care to environment to sports and entertainment to even the newspaper industry which some consider to be a sunset industry.

Can Alibaba survive long enough in today's cutthroat industry to span three centuries from its incorporation in 1999 to see its vision come to fruition? Only time will tell.


Publisher: Ecco; Reprint edition
Publication date: 20 Mar 2018

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In just a decade and half Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an English teacher, founded and built Alibaba into one of the world’s largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and Presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China’s booming private sector and the gatekeeper to hundreds of millions of middle class consumers.

Duncan Clark first met Jack in 1999 in the small apartment where Jack founded Alibaba. Granted unprecedented access to a wealth of new material including exclusive interviews, Clark draws on his own experience as an early advisor to Alibaba and two decades in China chronicling the Internet’s impact on the country to create an authoritative, compelling narrative account of Alibaba’s rise.

How did Jack overcome his humble origins and early failures to achieve massive success with Alibaba? How did he outsmart rival entrepreneurs from China and Silicon Valley? Can Alibaba maintain its 80% market share? As it forges ahead into finance and entertainment, are there limits to Alibaba’s ambitions?  How does the Chinese government view its rise?  Will Alibaba expand further overseas, including in the U.S.?

*Blurb from Goodreads*

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