Jack Ma goes toe-to-toe with other billionaires over Alibaba’s future

Photo credit: Asia Society.

You may recall that late last month, LeEco (formerly Letv) founder and billionaire Jia Yueting publicly slammed Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (the so-called BAT companies) for oppressing startups, calling them “three giant mountains that have left countless startups shadowed in darkness.”

Baidu CEO Robin Li and Tencent CEO Pony Ma were at that event, but Alibaba’s Jack Ma was not. But Ma and Jia crossed paths at a recent China Entrepreneur Club event, and Jack got a chance to respond in person. Here’s how it went down.

Jia Yueting gave a speech at the event, and then took questions from the audience. He called on Jack Ma, who said this:

Recently someone told me that at the Shenzhen IT Summit you said BAT were monopolizing internet innovation resources and making it impossible for others to survive. So I want to ask, if we switched places and you represented one of the BAT companies, what would you do differently?

Jia responded, albeit in a way that mostly dodged Jack Ma’s question:

Now I’m under a lot of pressure, as Jack Ma has asked a very difficult question! Because it is true that in any age, there will be some representative companies that monopolize a lot of society’s resources. But that’s not important because society constantly changes, and the changes of each age will bring newer, stronger companies to the fore. So to break through the lock, or the mountains, of the great companies of an age, what you need is just to judge what the next age will be, and not go trying to work in the BAT companies’ areas. You also shouldn’t count on the BAT’s resources. Like Mr. Guo said earlier today, many companies count on BAT as an entrance point, but thinking about it from a different perspective, aiming higher, letting the dimensions of the next age guide your strategy, and using your own resources to walk a different path, you might just lead the coming of the next age. Thank you!

But Jack Ma wasn’t done, and explained his own position further during his own remarks:

Just now Jia Yueting answered very well. I see it like this: overthrowing the three mountains and killing the landlords does not necessarily mean the peasants will get rich. Internally, we worried about that: Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle would use all the resources, and we wouldn’t get where we are today. But actually big companies like that face huge challenges, and the same is true of Alibaba.

Later, he offered even more in defense of the BAT companies’ vulnerability in response to some criticism from New Oriental founder Yu Minhong:

Just now Yu Minhong said that companies like ours will be around in 10 years, but they definitely won’t be around in 100 years, whereas education and New Oriental will be. I think there are two logical errors there. First, there’s no guarantee we’ll be around in 10 years, or even three years. What internet company today can be sure of being strong for three years? It’s difficult. Second, while education will be around, New Oriental won’t necessarily be. Education does not equal New Oriental, but education will definitely be around. Two industries that have always existed in human society? Education and religion.

[…]Everybody thinks the BAT companies are so strong, but your imagination isn’t good enough. I think that in two or three years the outlook will have changed, and whether we’re still there in four or five years is a big question.

It would be easy to write Jack Ma’s assertion that Alibaba could be gone in three years as modesty. And that’s certainly part of it; few industry analysts or investors would be willing to bet on Alibaba disappearing. But at the same time, the investment record of Alibaba over the past few years is evidence enough that Jack Ma knows just as well as Jia Yueting that the current era of ecommerce won’t last forever, and that any company that wants to be on top ten years from now has to be hunting for the trends that will define the next internet age. That’s why we’ve seen Alibaba invest in everything from smart cars to VR.