E-commerce key to China Web growth: Interview w/Alibaba's Jack Ma

[mandy]

China's best-known Internet guru is Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba.com, an e-commerce auction site that pitches made-in-China goods to a global market.

Earlier this year, Yahoo paid $1 billion and handed over its China unit to Jack for a 40 percent stake in his company, turning Jack into a dotcom millionaire a few times over -- and Alibaba into the biggest Internet operation in China.

Ma: You have to create value for local customers. The U.S. multinational companies, they come to China, they want to buy the China market,...

full article and interview: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/10/19/spark...index.html

related topic from today on Alibaba's Taobao auction site: http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...802.0.html

[amy]

Interviewer on the question of Internet censorship and whether Ma would inform the government/censor as Yahoo China did recently when it gave info to the Chinese government that led to the jailing of a journalist who had criticized government policy.

An action like that -- it's basically saying sacrificing press freedom and the freedom to exchange information in China is the price to pay to be in business in China, I guess.

Ma's answer was basically yes, profits come before freedom