In just a year, Alibaba Group Holding Limited has lost around $344 billion in market capitalization, the largest-ever decline in shareholder value globally, reports Bloomberg. Last year, Alibaba founder Jack Ma faced summons from the Chinese authorities when they suspended the listing of Alibaba’s fintech arm Ant Group. With that, Alibaba’s shares started sinking and…

The reported reappearance of Jack Ma overseas, for the first time in over a year, has resulted in shares of the tech giant Alibaba Group surging in Hong Kong. Ma is the founder and former chairman of Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post (SCMP) which reported on Oct. 19 that he…

Commentary On Sept. 26, 2021, the current affairs program “60 Minutes” aired a fascinating documentary, which told the harrowing story of Chinese whistleblower Desmond Shum, whose ex-wife, billionaire Whitney Duan, disappeared on the streets of Beijing four years ago. Until recently, nobody had heard from her, and her fate was unknown. However, when her ex-husband,…

Analysis Xi Jinping may be fighting hard to pave his way to the upcoming 20th Party congress meeting in 2022. He may be directing his actions at the Jiang Zemin faction that Xi has implied are careerists in the Party. From the recent push for common prosperity, to the purging of the entertainment industry and the…

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is seeking to sell its entire stake in Mango Excellent Media, less than a year after buying stock shares from the company. The move comes as Beijing has tightened its grip over various industries, including e-commerce. Television-based service provider Mango Excellent Media, headquartered in Hunan Province, announced on Sept. 24 that an…

Commentary China’s political leaders fear the power of their ultra-wealthy Big Tech CEOs and react to the threat with political persecution. But in the United States? Not so much. The old adage, “Money is power,” is proving to be much less reliable these days than it used to be, particularly in communist China. Just ask…

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is clamping down on the entertainment industry. More than 700 talent agencies in China have been shut down so far this year. According to commentators in Taiwan and China, the entertainment industry has close ties to CCP officials, and the showbiz storm reflects an unusually fierce factional struggle within the Chinese…

Commentary The investing term “ex-China” has a lovely ring to it. It means everything but China. So for emerging market (EM) investors, many of whom have traditionally invested in China, an EM ex-China fund provides the opportunity to invest in emerging markets, except China. The biggest emerging market economies, ex-dictatorships, are Brazil, India, and Mexico,…

According to Alibaba Group’s 2021 annual report, Jack Ma, founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant,  appears to no longer be a shareholder. Ma held more than 1 billion Alibaba shares in 2020. On July 27, the company announced it filed its annual report, on Form 20-F, for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2021, to…

Commentary Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai apparently can’t afford their own private jets. They had to borrow money from Credit Suisse to get them, despite each having cashed out over $5 billion in stock since 2017. Where’s all that cash gone? Is it even real? Do they keep it in banks for which they…