Billionaire Alibaba founder Jack Ma has been chilling in Bangkok this week amid reports that he is taking more steps to scale back his personal involvement with his online empire.
Mr Ma is giving up controlling rights of Ant Group, the Alibaba fintech subsidiary, according to an announcement on Saturday. The company said it would give 10 individuals, including the founder, management and staff, voting rights independently, effectively removing Mr Ma’s voting control.
Mr Ma has mostly disappeared from public view since giving a speech that criticised Chinese regulators for holding back innovation in November 2020. Not long afterward, Beijing ordered a halt to a planned initial public offering (IPO) by Ant Group, which would have been one of the largest in history.
Following the crackdown on Ant, Beijing moved to clip the wings of several other Chinese tech giants, which leaders believed had become too powerful and were not putting the public interest first.
For the past six months Mr Ma reportedly has been living in Japan, making trips to the countryside and some visits to the US and Israel, the Financial Times reported in November.
This past week he was spotted in Bangkok, hanging out with the Michelin-starred street food celebrity Supinya “Jay Fai” Junsuta, who shared a photo on her Instagram account on Friday.
Local media reported that Mr Ma was at the restaurant with Supakit Chearavanont, chairman of Charoen Pokphand Group.
CP Group did not comment on the meeting when asked by Reuters.
Mr Ma was also photographed at a Muay Thai boxing match at Rajadamnern Stadium together with the champion Buakaw Banchamek.
Many of Mr Ma’s peers have also relinquished their formal corporate roles and increased donations to charity in the past two years to align with President Xi Jinping’s vision of achieving “common prosperity".
Ant has since focused on overhauling its business operations to appease regulators. It has strengthened the capital base of its consumer loan affiliate and moved to build firewalls in an ecosystem that once allowed it to direct traffic from the payment platfor3m Alipay, with a billion users, to services like wealth management and consumer lending.
The change of control could mean that Ant will have to wait longer for a much anticipated resumption of its IPO. Companies can’t list domestically on the country’s A-share market if they have had a change in control in the past three years. For the Hong Kong stock market, this waiting period is one year.