Alibaba is the company that likes to think it’s a country. Jack Ma, the former English teacher who founded the group, works the stage like a seasoned diplomat. At the G20 meeting of global leaders in Hangzhou last year, Mr Ma hosted Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull, Canada’s Justin Trudeau and Italy’s then premier Matteo Renzi.
In January he became the first Chinese businessman to sit down publicly with Donald Trump after the US election — a full month before the US president spoke to Chinese president Xi Jinping. Since then he has met the leaders of Argentina, Australia, Israel, Malaysia and Pakistan.
Mr Ma’s ambitions for Alibaba, the ecommerce company worth $309bn that began life in his Hangzhou apartment, are equally global. Come 2036, he wants sales across its platform to be bigger than the gross domestic product of the world’s fifth-biggest economy, outranked only by the US, China, Japan and the EU. It is aiming for 2bn customers, which on current numbers would be one in every four people on the planet.