If Mr Ma feels most comfortable next to his sales force, it is because their work comes closest to what the 44-year-old has been doing over the past 15 years: preaching the importance of the internet and convincing companies to pay for offering their products on Alibaba's website.

Today, Alibaba has 36m registered users worldwide and generated revenues of Rmb2.2bn () in the first nine months of 2008 – 43 per cent up from the previous year. The group employs 12,000 people and intends to hire another 4,500 this year. It also controls Yahoo China and Taobao, China's leading consumer e-commerce platform, which Mr Ma founded in 2003.

Jack Ma has been called China's internet godfather. But when the slight, gaunt man – birdlike in appearance – tried to sell online advertising space on China's nascent internet in 1994, people viewed him with scepticism and suspicion. “They would think I was crazy,” he says, gesturing with his bony hands.