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Jack Ma at AsiaD: Money is Not the Problem, Yahoo Just Needs to Say Yes

Jack Ma’s onstage interview at the AsiaD conference in Hong Kong has just come to an end, which gave the Alibaba Group founder and CEO a chance to air some of his views on recent issues, such as the prospective purchase of Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), and the virtual protest by some small businesses on his Tmall.com B2C platform.

In effect, Mr Ma didn’t say too much that was new, but it was good to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

Here’s what Ma had to say this morning on a number of key issues (to use the actual quotes from AllThingsD): On Yahoo…

"If the board is willing to sell [Yahoo], I’m interested. They’ve just got to let us know.

We’ve been working with Yahoo for years to buy a portion of them or buy them out. Money is not the problem. The problem is what Yahoo wants to do."

But Jack Ma conceded that they’re just waiting for the board to say something, and that his own mind is set on this issue. He went on to say that he doesn’t know what the Yahoo board is pondering. On why Yahoo is so important to the industry…

"Without Yahoo, I wouldn’t have started my Internet business."

Ma said that he’d bring in new management if he were in charge of Yahoo, but declined to name a sort of dream team for the job. As a final word on the speculation, Ma initially joked, “I didn’t know we were so important;” before then saying, “Definitely, we are the main driving force.”
On China and business…

" I think censorship is an issue, but it’s not that big of an issue. … I think the Chinese government is getting more and more open.

When I started the company, I wasn’t looking out a year or two, I was looking ahead 10 to 15 years.

Everywhere I go, people are talking about IPOs, no one is talking about creating value. That’s a problem."

No mention was made of a potential IPO for Alibaba Group or its two consumer-oriented e-commerce sites. So far, only its B2B platform Alibaba.com (HKG:1688) has listed. On the subject of copyright and copycats, Mr Ma said he didn’t agree with the view that Chinese sites tended to copy others, and said the point is to make your customers happy in whatever way you can – even if that entails following in someone else’s footsteps. That sounds a bit like our editorial, “Screw the Idea, It’s the Execution That Really Matters.”

But he maintained a harder stance on copyright, saying:

"We will never step back from our stance on intellectual property problems … This problem can’t be solved by Alibaba alone, it has to be solved by Alibaba working with its merchants."

On the Tmall.com virtual protests… "Sometimes the people that love you most are the people that hurt you most."

That was Ma’s phlegmatic comment on the week-long virtual protests by smaller businesses over greatly increased user deposits for a store on Tmall. The issue was resolved this Monday when Alibaba promised to invest 1.8 billion RMB to help smaller vendors use the platform.

For a somewhat divergent perspective, none other than Yahoo’s Jerry Yang – co-founder and former CEO – spoke earlier at AsiaD and said:

"The intent going in is not to put ourselves for sale. The intent is to look at all the options."