Jack Ma Says He Doesn’t Give a Crap About Rival Jingdong or its CEO

The many faces of Jack Ma.

Apparently retirement isn’t doing much to keep former Alibaba CEO Jack Ma out of the limelight, or out of the center of controversy. In a recent interview with China Entrepreneur, Ma was asked why banks are afraid of Alibaba, and this is how he responded:

Why are banks afraid? Because we’re doing it right. If [we] weren’t doing it right, what would they have to worry about? If you’re doing things wrong, you can do whatever you want, the bigger the better; either way it’s no threat to me. Am I worried about about what [Jingdong CEO] Liu Qiangdong is doing today? I’ve never even met that guy, he can do whatever he wants for all I care. If the banks start to target you, it’s because you’re doing something right. Ma Yuhua’s thinking on web finance is very true; it’s better to embrace than to resist, because you can’t resist the future. [Resisting e-payment] is like the cart drivers of old Shanghai smashing the taxi cabs when they began to appear. Did that work?

In other words, Ma is saying that Liu Qiangdong’s Jingdong (the artist formerly known as 360Buy) isn’t a threat to Alibaba at all. And while he didn’t put things very nicely, it’s hard to deny that what Jack Ma is saying is true. Alibaba services like Taobao and Tmall dominate the ecommerce market on the web, on mobile, and Jingdong is even further behind many of Alibaba’s other offerings, like payment service Alipay or music service Xiami.

(China Entrepreneur via TechWeb)