FUNDAMENTALS OF BUSINESS

Business Venture Project – Part A (10%) on Jack Ma and Alibaba.com

Directions: Please use this Word document (and no other document of yours) and present your answers immediately below each of the questions asked and send the document back to me as an attachment to your e-mail by the time indicated to you in class today
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In 1995, I travelled to America and saw the Internet for the first time. When I searched for “China beer” on the Internet, I found nothing. Seeing the lack of results, I decided to go back and start a company to bring the Internet to China, and to bring China to the rest of the world. Back then, there was no online business in China. Now, the Internet is everywhere. I cannot believe how far the world has come. Jack Ma

Questions related to the videotaped interview

  1. What is your general impression of Jack Ma as an entrepreneur, a manager, and a person?
    Please provide a full and clear answer. (3 marks)
  2. Go to https://www.finance.yahoo.com and do a search for Alibaba Group Holding
    Limited, ticker symbol BABA. (a) What is the current market value of the company?
    (b) What is the 52 Week Range of the stock price of the company? (c) Go to the
    functionality of “Financials” and state the Total Revenue ($B) and Net Income ($B) for the
    2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 fiscal years, in that order. Please present your answers in
    three separate paragraphs. (5 marks)
  3. What was Jack Ma’s response when Bill Gates and Warren Buffett approached him to
    make a pledge of a contribution to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which was
    engaged in important charitable work across the world? Please provide a full and clear
    answer. And do you agree with the position taken by Jack Ma? (3 marks)
  4. One wonders where did Jack Ma get his ideas about the purpose of business and about
    how to proceed into a business venture. Now, go to https://www.amazon.ca and do a
    search for the book, C. K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid and state
    fully and accurately the first fifteen lines of the Preface of the book. Prahalad had been
    championing the ideas put forward in the book since the early 1990’s. And do you think
    that it would it be reasonable to conclude that Jack Ma was influenced by the work of C.
    K. Prahalad? (4 marks)
  5. When Alibaba.com IPO’ed (became a publicly-traded company and was listed on the New
    York Stock Exchange), Jack Ma used the occasion to outline his approach to the
    management of the company, embodied in what he called Value No. 1, to the actual and
    prospective shareholders of the company. (a) What exactly was this approach? (b) And
    what was Jack Ma’s response to the shareholder who questioned the soundness of the
    approach? (4 marks)
  6. What was Jack Ma’s answer to the interviewer’s question about whether he had any ideas
    of how to change the old industrial paradigm (approach) to education? (3 marks)
  7. As a follow up to question 6: In business schools here, we study companies that have
    been successful, we study companies that have declined, and we study companies that
    have failed. Do you think Jack Ma would agree with our approach? Do explain your
    answer clearly and fully. (3 marks)
  8. AI (artificial intelligence) stands for what at Alibaba.com, according to Jack Ma? (1 mark)
  9. What is the difference between Fin Tech and Tech Fin, according to Jack Ma? (2 marks)
  10. What does Jack Ma think about the differences between men and women as employees
    and managers at Alibaba.com? And do you agree with Jack Ma? (4 marks)
  11. Is true that Alibaba.com (Alipay) processes about 50% of the number of electronic
    payments processed by Visa and Mastercard combined per day? Do explain your answer.
    (2 marks)
  12. What exactly is this “three-one-zero” system of lending, as explained by Jack Ma?
    (2 marks)

Questions related to the HBR article, Alibaba and the Future of Business

  1. What exactly is a smart business? (2 marks)
  2. Ant Financial Services is part of the Alibaba Group of companies. Why did they choose the
    name “Ant” for this particular company in the group? (2 marks)
  3. To become a smart business, your firm must enable as many operating decisions as
    possible to be made by machines fueled by live data rather than by humans supported by
    their own data analysis. Transforming decision making in this way is a four step process.
    What are the four steps in the process? And what sentence in the author’s presentation
    on each of the four steps best captures the author’s meaning of what is involved in the
    step in question? (4 marks) A + the sentence B + the sentence C + the sentence D + the sentence

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