Jack Ma, founder and president of the Alibaba Group, is the richest man in China, according to Forbes. This businessman, who at first seemed destined to fail, managed to turn his luck and move from being an English teacher to an IT geek, a pioneer of the Chinese network.
Jack Ma comes from a humble family, raised in the Hangzhou region under the strict Marxist rules of the Chinese communist regime. He was never a very good student, in fact he failed the university entrance examination twice.
Mathematics was the worst subject, he has acknowledged in several interviews that numbers are not his thing. On the other hand, he was always good in English, so he decided to study teaching.
He was rejected in more than 30 jobs before becoming one of the richest men in the world. He tried to enter the police but was rejected with a cold: "you do not serve for this".
Another of his great setbacks happened when he tried to enter to work in the KFC fast food chain and of the 24 aspiring employees he was the only one who did not succeed. He was also fired from a McDonalds. This far from intimidating him gave him the impulse to continue surpassing himself. Complaining and giving up did not fall within his philosophy, and so he left patent with this phrase:
"An entrepreneur must have skills that allow him to withstand the blows of fate and overcome the inevitable failures."
Jack Ma continued to struggle to outdo himself, and in 1999, when he was 35 years old, he founded the online e-commerce company Alibaba, with an initial capital of $ 50,000. The idea was to contact Chinese manufacturers with foreign companies, incorporating a secure purchasing method that worked with a rating system for sellers.
The starup was financed with the help of the few friends who trusted their business idea and placed the facilities in their apartment. In the first three years the company did not generate just income but this situation did not stop Jack Ma from moving forward.
Currently Alibaba and Aliexpress move 80% of electronic commerce in China and has 24,000 employees in 70 cities in China, Japan, Korea, Great Britain and the United States. In 2015, it generated a sales number of 463,000 million dollars, surpassing other giants such as Ebay and Amazon. The company is valued at 228,000 million dollars, according to Factset, ranking 13th among the most valuable companies in the world.
At the "At World AI" Conference Jack Ma co-founder of the largest e-commerce company Alibaba cited that artificial intelligence, Blockchain and the Internet of Things will not make sense if they do not focus on attacking the manufacturing industry .
Ma, has said that Blockchain and other advanced technologies must still demonstrate that they can help to evolve society in a "greener and more inclusive" direction. His comments came as part of a keynote speech delivered at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in China on September 17.
While Ma's main discourse focused on the common challenges and perceptions surrounding the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, it reserved a place for Blockchain technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) as technological basins in the new " it was the data ", arguing that:
"The era of data is a great opportunity for manufacturers to reform the industry. But Blockchain and IoT will lack technological sense unless they can promote the transformation of the manufacturing industry and the evolution of society towards a more ecological and inclusive direction ".
"These technologies will not make sense but can provide the transformation of the manufacturing industry and the evolution of society around an ecological and inclusive world in all directions," says Jack
The talk that gave the co-founder at the event did not revolve around Blockchain, this talk touched on the three technologies that both governments and conglomerates consider will build the 4.0 world.
The manufacturing industry itself is valued at $ 3.1 trillion dollars, in the past decades specifically speaking of the last 3 years the industry of intelligent manufacturing has had an exponential growth; conglomerates have begun to explore innovative options that reduce costs and improve manufacturing efficiency with emerging technologies.
Manufacturing processes have changed dramatically in recent years, companies have moved to automation, using robots to eliminate human errors and increasing speed in operations.
Since the possible conception of the idea about decentralizing systems for industry began in 2016, many Blockchain consortiums and developers have focused their attention on using this technology to rebuild supply chains.