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Exclusive | Jack Ma’s office says he remains ‘very positive’ about Alibaba and clarifies that he will continue to hold the tech giant’s shares
- Shares in Alibaba, the second-heaviest member on the Hang Seng Index with a 7.6 per cent weighting, fell by almost 10 per cent in Hong Kong
- Jack Ma, who retired as Alibaba chairman in 2019, remains a major shareholder through his family trust
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Jack Ma’s office said the founder of Alibaba Group Holding remains “very positive” about one of China’s biggest technology companies, giving the market the assurance after a sell-off of the company’s shares weighed on Hong Kong’s key stock index.
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The statement by the office of Ma, who retired as Alibaba chairman in 2019 but remains a major shareholder through his family trust, came after his JSP Investment and JC Properties trust units said in an overnight filing that they plan to sell US$870 million of Alibaba shares in instalments starting on November 21.
The phased sale is part of a long-standing and long term “preset conditional plan to do a partial sell-down for the future that was adopted in August and it won’t lead to any reduction of [Ma’s] holding of shares for now” and “not a single share has been sold”, according to Ma’s office. “We believe the current stock price is far below its fair value.”
Ma has full confidence in Alibaba and will continue to hold its shares, his office added.
The shares of Alibaba, the second-heaviest member on the Hang Seng Index with a 7.6 per cent weighting, fell by almost 10 per cent in Hong Kong today. The company announced overnight that it would not proceed with the full spin-off of its cloud computing unit after posting 9 per cent revenue growth in its September quarter. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Ma, who co-founded one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms in 1999, has not been involved in Alibaba’s daily operations since his retirement on his 55th birthday.
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