With a population of over 1.3 billion people, you’d expect China to birth some fat cats… According to Forbes, China has 157 individual US dollar Billionaires and Mr. Jack Ma is the phattest of ’em all!
Ma topped the Chinese billionaire’s list last week when the group he founded went public. The primary company of Alibaba Group, AliBaba.com is the world’s largest online business-to-business trading platform. It is a transaction-based retail website that handles sales between importers and exporters from more than 240 countries and regions.
On Friday, September 17th the Chinese E-commerce giant set the record for the largest Initial Public Offering (IPO) ever. The total deal size offered to the public was initially supposed to be 320.1 million shares, but Alibaba’s lead underwriters — Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup — decided to increase the offering size by 15 percent to 368.1 million shares via a ‘green-shoe option’ (a provision that gives right to sell investors more shares than originally planned). Shares were offered at $68 a-piece raking in a staggering 25 billion dollars, and breaking the previous global IPO record of $22.1bn set by The Agricultural Bank of China back in July 2010.
So what does all of this mean for Mr. Ma?
When the company went public, his 7.3 percent economic interest in AliBaba Group Holding Ltd. fetched him a cool $16 billion, skyrocketing his total net worth to a blistering $21.8 billion. The bike-riding English teacher started Alibaba from his one-bedroom ‘Hupan Garden’ apartment in Hangzhou, with a meager budget of just $60,000 that he and his friends pooled together.
After Alibaba’s online transaction volume exceeded one trillion Yuan ($162bn) in November 2012, Ma was labeled ‘Trillion Hou’ which translates to ‘Trillion Yuan Marquis’.
Today, the one-time KFC reject can comfortably afford to buy out the entire Kentucky-based chicken-frying brand!