Welcome back Jack Ma. Don't forget the little guys

Alibaba’s “rehabilitated” founder has much to gain from improving the lot of food delivery riders.

- Juliana Liu

It would be smart of Mr Jack Ma, now firmly back at the company he co-founded, to do more to improve the livelihoods of delivery riders powering Alibaba Group Holding’s biggest business unit. Doing so would be a shrewd move in more ways than one.

Just months after publicly shaking hands with President Xi Jinping, heralding the revival of animal spirits among China’s technology firms that has boosted the stock market, Mr Ma has returned to the office and is more directly involved than he’s been in years, Bloomberg News reported. Though without an official title, the iconic businessman’s reappearance has nevertheless fired up morale.

Once one of the country’s most outspoken founders, Mr Ma vanished from public view shortly after making sharply critical remarks in October 2020 about China's financial regulators and its state-owned banks. That 20-minute speech was surely the most expensive in corporate history, eventually costing Alibaba and its affiliate Ant Group - which was on the cusp of going public in Shanghai — about US$877 billion (S$L1.13 trillion) in lost market value. It also resulted in a nearly US$1 billion fine for Ant and an unprecedented crackdown on other tech companies and the broader private sector.

Mr Ma’s rehabilitation symbolically closes that dark chapter. But he is returning to a company that is facing a very different set of challenges than in September 2019, when he resigned as executive chairman in a planned leadership transition.