“Today isn’t about Jack Ma retiring but the beginning of a succession system,” he said. “Today isn’t about one person’s choice, but the success of a system.”

“Alibaba is just one of my many dreams. I still feel I’m young, there are many places I want to go visit, to challenge,” he said. “After tonight, I will start a new chapter of my life.”

Ma, who turned 55 on Tuesday, is considered young to be stepping away from the company he helped to build from the ground up in a country where founders are inclined to wield a tight grip over their companies well into their eighties in some cases.

Ma’s departure from the executive chairman role, which coincides with Alibaba’s 20th anniversary, is perhaps the biggest indication that Alibaba has fully transitioned to a new era, with control handed over to a younger generation of leaders that have been tasked with keeping the firm going for at least 102 years – by which time its history (from inception in 1999) will have spanned three different centuries.

New York-listed Alibaba is also the parent company of the South China Morning Post.

In his speech, Ma also urged the 60,000 gathered at the stadium to devote their cause to solving China’s problems, pointing out that creating enough jobs will be a major challenge for the nation.

On Tuesday, Alibaba also announced a refresh of its six core values to strengthen the company’s culture, as it navigates through the fast-evolving digital era and moves to remain relevant to its global workforce. It follows Alibaba’s recent reaffirmation of its mission statement: “To make it easy to do business anywhere.”

Its core values include: focusing on “customers first, employees second, shareholders third”; knowing that “trust makes everything simple”; remembering that “change is the only constant”; and that “today’s best performance is tomorrow’s baseline”.

One value asks: “If not now, when? If not me, who?”

The final core value is to “live seriously, work happily”.

Will the house that Jack Ma built be safe into the next century as Alibaba chief bids adieu?

Those represent the second refresh of company values in the past 20 years. The core values have helped propel Alibaba’s growth from an 18-person start-up founded in a Hangzhou flat to one of the world’s most innovative technology companies with more than 100,000 employees and over 30 business units.

With businesses across the e-commerce, financial technology, logistics, cloud computing and entertainment sectors, Alibaba aims to serve two billion consumers, help create 100 million jobs and enable 10 million small- and medium-sized enterprises to be profitable by 2036.