Duncan Clark

Take a look at the title of the book: "Alibaba : The House That Jack Ma Built". Now ask yourself: what will this book be about?
A. Alibaba, the company founded by Jack Ma
B. Jack Ma, the Chinese entrepreneurial tycoon
C. The situation in China wrt entrepreneurship, online businesses and the Internet.
D. The various e-commerce businesses in China, whether those in direct competition with Alibaba's sites or those providing supporting services such as online payment, logistics, etc.

The answer shall show more be revealed later in this review. Hold your horses until then. :P

There's no doubting the Alibaba magic, or Jack Ma's role in revolutionising e-commerce in China. Jack Ma is almost entirely self-made. An average student coming from a regular middle-class family, Ma describes himself as “100% made in China” as he hasn't studied abroad. He learnt English from his parents and by reading books and then practising his conversational skills with tourists. Ma left his teaching job behind when the entrepreneurial bug bit him. After two failed attempts, he hit the jackpot with Alibaba. Today, the company hosts the largest B2B (Alibaba.com), C2C (Taobao), and B2C (Tmall) marketplaces in the world with an annual revenue of $72 billion. As a person, Jack Ma is simple, humorous and technology-averse. (The last point is quite ironic, considering his entire wealth is based on technological development.) He is known to be a great orator, but he never prepares for his speeches, preferring to speak without notes. He firmly believes in “Customers first, employees second, shareholders last”, and emphasises on the importance of supporting small businesses on his websites. Every single aspect of him points at a person who has gone far beyond what should have been possible for him in a communist country. This should have been such an interesting and inspiring journey to read about.

Unfortunately, it isn’t. Reason: Duncan Clark.

Ideally, the book should have focused on all four of the points I wrote at the start, but with a greater focus on A and B, especially as it has Jack Ma on the cover. The Goodreads blurb suggests that the main focus will be on Jack Ma with a secondary focus on Alibaba. What we actually get is a potful of A, a spoonful of B and a barrelful of C and D, each.

Other than Jack Ma and Alibaba, the book talks of competitor strategies of ecommerce companies in China and other Asian countries such as those of eBay, Yahoo and PayPal (who competed with AliPay), the dot-com boom and bust and resurgence, the subsidiary industries that developed in China because of the internet, the Chinese attitude towards online shopping then and now, the counterfeit goods problem and the action being taken with respect to the same, the financial struggles of the companies after the American financial crisis of 2008,… Basically, it goes all over the place and covers whatever topics Clark deemed fit to include. Furthermore, there is not much structure to the content. Rather, Clark goes where his mind takes him, leaving us to remember what the original point of that section was.

I would have still let this aberration go, if the book were written in an engrossing way. Sadly, Duncan Clark might be an expert on the Internet and entrepreneurship in China, but a writer he is not. The book is written in a bland manner even though the content is so interesting. When I saw sentences such as “Let us take a brief tour’ or “Let us look more into this”, I was reminded of all those dreary textbooks I’ve left behind eons ago.

That said, there are many precious gems to be found in the content. You get a crash course on how to run a successful business with the various anecdotes scattered in the story, both related to Jack Ma as well as the other ecommerce magnates. In a world where businesses are increasingly concentrating on the bottom line, Jack Ma teaches you that focussing on the entire value chain, right from suppliers to customers, ensures greater long-term rewards. We also see how the one-size-fits-all approach of international companies doesn’t work; the local culture and ideology has to be taken into consideration if you want to be a success. So if you can keep all quibbles regarding the haphazard composition of the book, you will definitely stand to benefit from its content.

Oh, but how I wish someone like Ashlee Vance would have written this book! :/

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In some ways this is an unfair review. First. The Jack Ma story is now dated and this is really a story about Jack Ma...more so than Alibab. But second, this review is based on a reading of the Blinkist summary only. I’ve not yet read the full book...and probably wont. Where I’ve had the chance to cross check, I’ve been very impressed with the ability of the Blinkiist rteam to draw the essential points out of quite complex books. Though I admit, they can never catch the full impact show more froma reading of the whole book. Nevertheless I’ve taken a few samples below to give the gist of the book.
Today, household spending only accounts for a third of China’s economy. Meanwhile, in the United States, consumer spending makes up two-thirds of the economy. In China in 2009, only 27 shops were offering Singles’ Day-related sales; but only six years later, in 2015, 40,000 retailers and 30,000 brands had joined in on the festivities......During the first ten minutes of Singles’ Day in 2015, $1 billion in purchases had been made through Alibaba.
Chinese customers like to say you can buy anything on Taobao.com, one of Alibaba’s many popular subsidiary sites.
But the impact Alibaba has had on China’s economy far surpasses Amazon’s status in the United States......When it became a publicly traded company in 2014, it generated the greatest global initial public offering, or IPO, ever.
At the end of the day, merchants will end up paying a price that corresponds to the number of clicks their advertisement received and how many times their product page was visited.
The site is monitored by a group called the “xiaoer,”.......What these people do is act as mediators for any conflicts that may arise between customers and vendors. They also perform routine monitoring and can delete the profile of any vendor who doesn’t follow the website’s code of conduct. It allows customers and vendors to use their webcams and haggle in real time over the cost of a product.
Jack Ma made sure that every Alibaba employee knew the company mantra by heart: “customers first, employees second and shareholders third.”
The love for his customers contrasts somewhat with the relationship Jack has toward his shareholders, who often pressure him to generate short-term profits for their benefit.
Jack Ma has a strong commitment to his employees as well, and his leadership style is focused on generating motivation and maintaining loyalty. If a worker needs money for a new car or home, they can get an interest-free loan for up to $50,000.....What Jack Ma expects in return are committed and loyal employees who are willing to put in long hours to make Alibaba a continued success.
Jack Ma began his career as an English teacher......Jack’s [initial] company created home pages and simple websites that listed contact information for other Chinese businesses that were looking to establish a web presence. After he created a website for a hotel in Hangzhou called Lakeview, American travellers began to show up in droves–it was the only Chinese hotel they were able to find online!.......Connections were so faulty that Jack sometimes had to show his clients printouts of their websites, and some people took this as a sign that they were being ripped off. Since the cost for web service was $2,400 back then, this was an understandable suspicion that Jack had to work hard to overcome.
[He decided on the name Alibaba] but there was a catch. Alibaba.com was already owned by a man in Canada, who was asking $4,000 for it....but Jack bought it. .....With everything in place, Jack Ma launched Alibaba in February of 1999 and proved he had a clear vision, right from the start.
Alibaba was a service designed for small businesses.....In 1999, Shirley’s contact information [with Goldman Sachts] was like gold. As luck would have it, when Joe called her up, Shirley was seeking investment opportunities just like Alibaba. In no time at all, she was in Hangzhou being introduced to the Alibaba team. In the end, Goldman was a bit hesitant, but Shirley convinced the firm, along with some smaller investors, to give Alibaba $5 million in start-up funds.
[The] the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.....In March of that year, the Nasdaq stock market collapsed after years worth of investments in internet start-ups. Jack predicted that 60 percent of Alibaba’s competitors would shut down as a result. Suddenly, things were looking pretty good for Alibaba. They’d only spent a fraction of what they had raised in funding, and they now faced far less competition in the marketplace. But still, one problem remained: profits.....By the end of 2000, Alibaba still wasn’t making any money. They had half a million users and a lot of money in the bank, but their revenue fell short of $1 million.
Making matters worse, Jack Ma had spent a small fortune hiring more people in an effort to expand Alibaba’s presence in the United States and Europe..... [A new hire] Kwan, was given a mission: turn Alibaba into a profitable and healthy business. And Kwan did just that by cutting costs and narrowing the company’s scope within the Chinese market.
In 2003, eBay made an attempt to take the Chinese market by storm–but they hadn’t counted on Alibaba’s presence.....eBay’s strategy was to buy an existing Chinese company that offered a service similar to its own. In fact, the company in question controlled 90 percent of China’s online consumer-to-consumer business, and after the buyout, the company was rebranded eBay EachNet........But Jack Ma was ready for a fight, and he used every local and cultural advantage he had at his disposal.....The first step was to create the subsidiary site, Taobao,....With its focus on online haggling for consumer-sold products,
Crucially, Taobao had something Ebay didn’t: an understanding of what appealed to the Chinese market. With lively graphics and clustered displays, it captured the feel of a hectic bazaar......There’s no doubt that Taobao was one of the best things that happened to Alibaba. It gave them control of China’s e-commerce business and Jack Ma finally had a business that was making serious money.
The key message in this book: Despite a lack of experience and little start-up funding, Jack Ma built an e-commerce empire from the ground up, at a time when few people in China even had an e-mail account. But Jack had something far more important: he was filled with entrepreneurial spirit and the desire to put in the hard work necessary to make his vision a reality.
What’s my overall take on the book. Well, first, it’s now a bit dated and makes no mention of jack Ma’s fall from grace with the ruling party and his strange disappearance and reappearance ...suitably chastened. Secon, I didn’t get enough of the range of products being traded on Alibaba. When I looked at it in 2013, I was not confident enough to recommend it as a potential source of buyer contacts for overseas companies wishing to sell to China. But it clearly has been mightily successful. It’s really a history of Jack Ma’s rise to stardom ...and a rather uncritical one at that....almost as though it hasd been ghost written for Jack Ma. ....Nor was there much about the man himself but maybe this is in the full book. Overall, two stars from me. show less

More like 3.5 stars. I’m a big fan of Jack Ma and Alibaba, but this biography just didn’t do a great job of introducing the reader to him. It was adequate, but focused on a lot of pointless details in some places, and short on facts and analysis on other places. It is especially hard to see how replicable what he did really is. The book felt sometimes fawning to a degree which really calls into question overall objectivity, too.

This is an interesting book, more because of the stance it really doesn't take, it debates some of the points about ethical shopping and how people have to do something about the ways in which we're disrupting the planet but at no stage does it really suggest "one true way". It offers choices and ideas and further reading.

Interesting food for thought.