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Jack Ma shows up at Alibaba maths competition in Hangzhou after Tokyo seminar to chat with finalists

  • The billionaire founder of Alibaba talked about the ‘understanding of mathematics’ with participants in the competition he started five years ago
  • Ma’s public appearances have become more frequent since he returned to China this year and took up multiple professorships at global universities

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Jack Ma showed up at Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition in Hangzhou days after his first class as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo. Photo: Weibo
Che Panin Beijing
Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Alibaba Group Holding, made a rare public appearance on Saturday in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou to chat with the finalists of an annual global mathematics competition organised by the company’s in-house research unit.
According to a statement from the e-commerce giant’s Damo Academy, Ma discussed the “understanding of mathematics” with finalists of the 2023 Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition.

This marks the second time that the 58-year-old entrepreneur appeared in Hangzhou this year, following a March visit to a local school that is jointly funded by partners of Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post.

The whereabouts of Ma, who has resigned from all his corporate roles, remain closely watched since he started keeping a low profile in 2021, after the government quashed the initial public offering of Ant Group, Alibaba’s fintech affiliate. In October 2020, Ma gave a controversial speech in Shanghai, where he said Chinese banks, the largest of which are state-owned, have a “pawnshop mentality”.

The move against Ant, which has still not publicly listed, later snowballed into an industry-wide crackdown on Big Tech, and Ma started spending much of his time overseas.

At the VivaTech conference in Paris last week, Alibaba president Michael Evans said Ma was “alive” and “happy”, in response to a question from Maurice Levy, chairman of French advertising group Publicis, according to a CNBC report.

Ma started the Global Mathematics Competition in 2018, which he said was to inspire “public enthusiasm” for the field. The entrepreneur has previously said he was terrible at math, scoring just one point out of 100 on a college-entrance exam in 1982.

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