Jack Ma is the most unlikely of Chinese internet multimillionaires. He is a former English teacher who has developed a bold idea into a business that inspires an almost religious zeal among its supporters.

Aged 43 and barely more than five feet tall, Mr Ma founded the Alibaba group in his flat in 1999 to help small manufacturers to sell their goods in China and worldwide.

A self-confessed workaholic, Mr Ma likes to say that his journey from the classroom to the boardroom has been “like a blind man riding the back of a blind tiger”.

His first brush with the internet came when a Chinese company employed his English skills and sent him to the United States to collect money owed by an American company.

He returned to China filled with enthusiasm for internet technology and founded China’s first e-commerce business, China Pages, which carried websites of small businesses in his home region.

Mr Ma employs a staff of about 6,000 and insists that the wellbeing of his employees remains his priority. “I respect and listen to shareholders, but I will do things my own way,” he said recently. “So customers are number one, employees are number two and shareholders are number three. This philosophy will not change after Alibaba is listed on the market.”

His aim is to make Alibaba one of three largest internet companies in the world, a Fortune 500 company – and the world’s best employer.

He wants the company to last for at least 102 years. Why that number? So that the business he founded in 1999 can span three centuries.

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