 It is my privilege to be here this evening with Jack Ma, one of the great entrepreneurs of our time, of course, the founder of Alibaba. And we have so many things to talk about over the next half an hour, and of course we also want to try to get to your questions as well. We're going to talk about Alibaba, of course, but also China, the Trump world that we all live in, globalization, trade, and so many other issues. But first of all, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. Let me start with this, which is to say that you just spent some time inside Trump Tower and went to go visit with Donald, our president-elect in the United States. Tell us about that meeting. Well, it's a very productive meeting, much better than I thought, than I expected. What did you expect? Well, I heard a lot, and I watched, like anybody, I watched all the news and heard a lot about him. So when I go inside, I thought, hmm, anything that, but he's very sort of open minded, listen what I talk. So I think I'm very happy about the results. And finally, when he said, he offered, he said, Jack, let me walk you down. I think he's very happy about the results we had. Can I ask, how does a meeting like that happen? Do you call him? Does he call you? Well, how does this take place? Well, that's the question I'm asking myself. Because someday, I got some request from people, say, Jack, do you want a meeting in the president-elect? I say, is that true or not? Because I'm not ready for that. Because I don't know what to talk about. And then a few days later, I got another request. I got several requests, and then I saw one email, which was a friend. It's very sort of specific. I thought about it. I think, yes, maybe I should go and have a talk. And at least, I think president-elect Donald Trump would be happy to hear what I want to talk about. So I went. And what did you tell him? Talk about the small business. Talk about agriculture products. Talk about the trade between China and the USA. We especially focus on telling about how can we bring this small business in America, sell them to China, to Asia, through our network, which can create a lot of jobs for them. And you committed to create what you say is going to be one million jobs in the United States over the next five years. Now that's not a million jobs that Alibaba itself, but you're not hiring a million people. No, no. Alibaba probably put together like 45,000 people. We cannot hire one million. I cannot imagine I can manage one million people. Explain to us how you think about the U.S.-China relationship. Given some of the comments that Donald Trump has made about China being a currency manipulator, did that come up during your meeting? Well, I think first, in America, there's a freedom of speech, right? So he can say whatever he wants. And I respect, I understand. But of course, I have my views. We did not debate about the China-US trade or manipulation, we did not debate. We actually agreed on something, small business, developing the Midwest America, helping the farmers there, small business there, exporting to China. So we all agreed. But something that we did not discuss about the American, the job losing to China, Mexico and this, can I share with you my ideas? Please. Yeah. First, I think 30 years ago, when I just graduated from universities, I heard America had a wonderful strategy that outsourced the manufacturer's job, service jobs. They outsourced the manufacturer to Mexico and China, outsourced the service job to India. There's a book called The World is a Flat. Tom Friedman, your colleague at the New York Times. And I think it's a perfect strategy, you know, that the Americans said, we just want to control the IP, we just want to have technology, we just want to brand and leave the lower-ended jobs for the world, great strategy. And second is that the American international companies made millions and millions of dollars from globalization, the top 100 companies in America, amazing. I remember when I graduated from university, I tried to buy a beeper, the Motorola beeper, cost me $250. My pay at that time is $10 a month as a teacher. And the cost of making that beeper is only $80 for a chip. So past 30 years, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, they made tons of money. The money, the profit they made are much more than the four largest banks in China put together. The China mobile phone, China Unicom, and whatever you name it, put together. Still, these multinational companies made more money than that. So their market cap grew more than 100 times in the past 30 years. But where did the money go? This is what I'm curious, because as a business people, I always care about the balance of shit. Where did the money come in? Where did the money go? Past 30 years, the Americans had 13 wars, spending $14.2 trillion. The money going there, what if they spent part of that money on building up the infrastructure, developing the white colors and blue colors? No matter how strategic good it is, you're supposed to spend money on your own people, on the not everybody can pass Harvard. Like me, they're not good at education. We should spend money on those people who are not good at schooling. And the other money which I'm curious about is that when I was young, I heard America is about the Ford and Boeing, those big manufacturing companies. The last 10, 20 years I heard about is Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The money go to the Wall Street. And what happened? Year 2008. The financial crisis wiped out $19.2 trillion USD alone. They wiped out all the white colors and destroyed 34 million jobs globally. So what if the money, it's not the Wall Street, what if the money spent on the Middle East, Middle West of the United States, developing the industry there, that could be changed a lot. So it's not the other countries still jobs from you guys. It is your strategy. You do not distribute the money and things in a proper way. This is what I... And now we are having a backlash. And that backlash is a rebuke of globalization. And so much of the conversation, frankly, that we have here. And that backlash is happening in the United States. But I will say President Xi was here yesterday. You had lunch with him. And he was quoting Abraham Lincoln. What did you make of that? Well, I would say that globalization is a great stuff. Because the U.S. is a developed country to teach us how to do globalization. I remember 2002 or 2001, before China joined the WTO, everybody in China was worried. I was worried because what if all the international products come to China, destroy our industry and we have a loser job? So convinced China after 20 years, then you guys are telling us, this is a terrible thing. I believe globalization is good, but globalization need to be improved. This is Donald Trump, President-elect, want to solve it, the problems. That globalization, I think, should be inclusive globalization. In the past 30 years, the globalization was controlled by 60,000 big companies. 100 years ago, globalization was controlled by several kings and empires. What if next 30 years we can support 6 million business doing business across the board? What if in next 30 years we can help support 20 million small business can do business across the board? So this is something which I believe globalization should be inclusive. And do you think that the words of President Xi will happen in reality, which is to say that China has largely acted on its own behalf for many, many years. And now is effectively saying that the US needs to continue acting on everybody else's behalf. Yeah, I think the world needs some, it's such a, Mr. Xi, it's a wonderful time, it's a bad time, or the worst time. The world need a new leadership, but the new leadership is about working together. This is what I understand. We do not necessarily need one specific leader to teach us what to do, what not to do. But the world have to partner together. This is what I think. And I think I like, as a Chinese, as a business people, I like, I feel proud for what President Xi said yesterday. As a business person, I want the world to share the prosperity together, to join the force together. As a Chinese, I'm happy about what he committed yesterday. He said, you know, he speaks like us, takes the responsibility of the second largest economy. As the China's second largest economy, he has to take some responsibility. This is the first time I heard a Chinese leader make number commitment. He said, next 10 years, we are going to import 8 trillion U.S. dollars. This few, this few make me feel excited because China is transforming from exporting to importing. If there's a concrete number, if we can fulfill it, there's going to be huge change to the China and to the world. But don't you think that it's easier today for China to be interested in globalization because of the benefits that can accrue to China because you're continuing to develop than it is for countries that are, quote, unquote, developed? Well, first, the WTO rule is not designed by China. It's not made by China. I would say there's something that I want to change. The WTO is designed, a lot of rules designed for big companies in the past 30 years. And only big companies can do it. And China definitely benefit a lot from opening. I think China should learn one thing, that we grow in the past 30 years is because we open to the world. If we continue to open to the world. Not fully. The American business that wants to effectively go into business in China has a very difficult time, has to partner effectively with a company that's there already. This is why I said China has problems too. The world has problems. And China definitely has a lot of problems. China should open, it should be more confidence. This is what I feel yesterday, I feel the confidence of Mr. Xi that he is ready to open more to the world. This is what I suggest that we should solve the problem by business community, by negotiation. WTO, China joined WTO for like 20 years or 70 years, I don't know the number. But the past two years that I think we as a business, we as a country, we as the world, we have to review something. But not because unbalance the things, we stop it. You've been calling for something called EWTP. What is that? This is what I would talk about is that the WTO was great, but they mainly designed for developed countries, big companies. There's no opportunity for small business. We want to build up an EWTP, electronic world trade platform to support young people, small business thanks through mobile phones, internet they can sell and buy across the board. And the other thing is that WTO is a very interesting organization. When you put the door around, when you put 200 government offices in a one room, ask them to agree on something, it's impossible. I can never imagine that they can agree on something together. Business should be designed by business people. So we believe EWTP should be something that the business people sit down together, agree on something, negotiate on something, and get endorsement from the government. I want to talk a little bit about Alibaba and the model itself, because I think for many in the West, if you will, they don't necessarily understand it. And to the extent that I could try to compare it to Amazon, which I know you think is an unfair comparison, one of the things that's so fascinating to me is that Amazon and Jeff Bezos have pursued what might be described as a very asset heavy business model. They're buying airplanes. They want to own the entire supply chain from beginning to end. And Alibaba has effectively an asset like business. It is very much in terms of the retail piece of this. The opposite. You don't want to own the warehouses. You don't want to own the logistics companies. How do you think about that? Is Jeff Bezos right or are you right? And is there going to be a meeting in the middle? I hope both are right. And because the world can never have one model. If the world has only one corrective model, the world is too boring. We need to have all kinds of models. And the people who do the model should believe in the model. And I believe what I do. The difference between Amazon and us. Amazon is more like an empire. Everything they should control themselves by and sell. And our philosophy is that we want to be an ecosystem. Our philosophy is to empower others to sell, empower others to service, empower making sure the other people are more powerful than us. Making sure with our technology, our innovation, our partners, our 10 million small business sellers, they can compete with Microsoft, IBM. Our philosophy is that we think using internet technology, we can make every company become Amazon. Remember one thing. Today for ourselves, our GME last year is more than $550 billion. To hire people delivered for us, we need 5 million people. So how can we hire 5 million people deliver things for us to deliver the things we sold? The only way we do is empower the service companies, logistic companies. Making sure they are efficient. Making sure that they make the money. And making sure that they can hire more people. But without owning the whole chain, can you do it as effectively? The idea that you're watching Amazon, being able to deliver things now within hours, literally. We made 125 cities delivered within one day last year. Imagine 10 years ago, deliver one thing from Beijing to Hanzo takes about 8 days. Now you can deliver things from Hanzo from Beijing to Inner Mongolia, some city within 12 hours. It's improving. You can never expect these things happen within 24 hours. We have patience. So I think, can you imagine that we did 11 single days, we sold $17 billion. And by delivering more than 600 million packages within 3 days. This is happening. And this is what we feel proud of. It's not how much money we make. It's not how powerful we are. We think because of the technology, we can make the technology very inclusive. That every small company can use it. This is my dream. Because I set my first business in 1992 in China as a small business. In order to borrow money, 5,000 US dollars from bank took me 3 months to acquire, still failed. So difficult to be a small business. Today, with the technology, we can empower them. This is something I want to do. One of the critiques, as you know, and it continues to linger around Alibaba is the piracy issue. There's an IP issue and it's an issue all over China, but you take the brunt of a lot of it. How much progress have you made in your mind? And how do you think about some of the regulatory bodies in other countries, including the US, that continue to criticize Alibaba for these issues? First, when we start to do this business, as a business like this size, you have to take all the criticism. You have to listen, what is right, what is wrong. And second, as an e-commerce, when you put 10 million small business, empower them to sell, we do not like Amazon buy. We cannot check. Even you buy, when you buy 55 trillion dollars, or 55 million dollars, you cannot check every product. So the model itself and the e-commerce of the self may have a lot of these flaws. And third, I would say in the past 17 years, we are the leader of this anti-privacy issues, the IP, protect the IP. But the second, we are internet companies. We do not have the law enforcement. We find this guy is selling products, fake products. We delete them. We cannot arrest them. But we have a huge progress. Last year alone, we put 400 people into jails. We deleted 370 million fake products listing on our site. I would say we are the leaders, and we are using the big data to check who's buying, who's manufacturing, who's selling, what is that address. So now, I'm happy about the whole world, especially China, all the government organizations, start to realize the issues. So I would tell you a good thing is that today, when you go to those criminal groups, which I call them criminals, those fake products, manufacturers, sellers. You've praised the quality, though, of some of these. I will talk about it later. Those criminals, they can go anywhere, but not top on T-more, because using our data will trace where they are, who they are, what's the address, what they mount. I will deliver this to the PlayStation and working with them to arrest them. The quality issues is something I want to share with the people. It's not about praising the fake products. I want to say that for so many years, those branded companies, you have to be very careful, because the fake products, their quality improving is scary. That is the difference between us, because when you find the guys, the thing that people said, this is fake, and you have to find people, you have found a third party institution to check if it's fake or not. We find sometimes the quality is better. And I tell you, another thing is even scary. A lot of, there's one branded company, he said, we are selling fake products. We check everything. It's nothing wrong. So we say, hmm, what is wrong? So we buy the products from his flagship and deliver to them. They say, it's a fake. You know what I'm saying? We buy things from the flagship of this brand and deliver back. It's the fake products, they say. So it's a bit confusing. This is fighting against the fake products. It's the war against the greed, human greediness. It's not easy. You cannot finish it, but you have to continue to fight. And I want to say we put 2,000 people, 1 billion IMB every year fighting against that. It can never finish the war within two years. But I'm happy whether people criticize me, criticize us. The most important is that we are happy about the progress we've made. But if people praise me, so when people say, Jack, you're wonderful, I know I'm not wonderful. Oh, I think I was great. We are not great. We are just a 17-year-old company. But when people say, you're doing nothing. No, we're doing a lot of things. But you don't have to argue. You don't have to debate. You do what you believe. One of the things you mentioned was using big data on the piracy side. But the other thing that you're using a lot of that big data to do is provide credit and effectively banking the unbanked. And what's so fascinating to me, and I hope you'll share it, is we've talked about the sesame credit, how you are able to use big data effectively to figure out who deserves credit and who doesn't in a marketplace where some of these people had no credit history before. Well, before we do that, we had a system called Teach Computers to learn how to anti-fake products, teach the computers to learn how to, because we have AliPay. A lot of people try to use all the ways to cheating. So we teach the computer how to do that, the cheating things. So we've been doing that for 10 years. Until now, there is artificial intelligence because we've been doing that. We are a data company. Eight years ago, we said to ourself, AliPay should not be an e-commerce company. We should be a data company because we have the data from consumers, we have data from the manufacturer, we have data from the logistic company and transactions. But we think how we can make a data really beneficiary to the society. What China need is we have a lot of great people, all the small business, they are very credible, but we don't have a credit system for that. So how can we use a credit rating system based on the data we have to giving everybody a sesame rating system? That is so powerful in the past four years. Because every individual, every small business, if they have been using our services, we give them a rating system. So we're giving loans in the past five years, we're giving five million business loans. They only borrow $5,000. Three minutes we can decide whether we should give you money, how much I'm gonna give. Within one second, the money will be in your account and zero people touch. So we call it three, one, zero. And even today the sesame rating system become people dating. The mother-in-law want to say, hey, you wanna date with my daughter? Show me your rating system of the sesame car. So it's so funny we go to the, people want to rent a car, people want to rent a bicycle, they will say, show me your sesame car. Good, because if they do not pay back, if they do not fulfill, the ratings is going to go down and they can never rent a house. This is what we want to build up, the system. That if you sell or buy fake products, the sesame cars will show. I'm gonna open up to questions, but a final one for me. There's been a lot of speculation that you're gonna get into the business of Hollywood. Your name has appeared at Alibaba Group at the beginning of a couple of big films recently. What is the ambition for Alibaba in the entertainment world? The beginning were like this, several years, every five years we have a review for our strategy. Now our strategy is always to look at the 30 years and 10 years. Every strategic decisions we make, we have to ask one question. If this decision we make, solve society problem, because we believe the bigger social problem you solve, the more successful you are. So if we do this, cannot solve any social problems, we don't do it. Second, is this project is gonna be successful in 10 years? If it's gonna be successful in 10 years, let's do it. If it's gonna be successful in one year or one month, now I'm gonna say, forget about it, because why you can be successful in one year or one month? So we all have to put the parent. And five years ago, we had a big debate about 10 years later, 20 years. What are the things that China society and the world leave want? So we say happiness and health. Two H strategy, the happiness and health. We believe Hollywood, the movie industry, bring people happy. Because today, nobody's happy. Rich people not happy, poor people not happy, you know? At least when I watch movie, I feel happy about, right? So I think we should partner with the Hollywood, especially like a lot of, we have a different way of living in China. The movie, we have a lot of heroes, but China movies, heroes always dead. The American movie movie hero never die. If all the heroes die, who want to be the hero? So my movie, I wanna make the hero live. Right, so this is, I think we should learn a lot. And it's only about two years. So we have another eight years to go. I want to make our company that it's not e-commerce. It's something that given people inspirations. Given people, because I learned a lot. For example, I will say that my favorite movie, Forrest Gump, you know, Life's Tough. This is I learned, and that inspired me. That is why when people call me crazy, stupid, past the 17 years, you're crazy, doing something that will work. You're stupid, how can you do that model? Amazon this model, EB this model, why Al Baba this model? I told myself, Forrest Gump said, go ahead. Never cared about what the other people. And the other thing, Forrest Gump said, nobody make money out of the catching whales. People make money by catching shrimps. So we serve small business. Fair enough. Jack Ma, we should probably end it there, because we're going to run out of time, but I thank you, I thank you so much for the conversation. I promise we'd sneak in a question or two when we literally have two minutes and they're going to get upset with me. If you have a question and we're going to, I got to beg you to do it within literally, you know, a second to go for it right there. Well, I don't think so. I think China and the US should never have a trade war. We'll never have a trade war. And I think we should give him President-elect Donald Trump some time. And he's open-minded. He's listening. And I think the war is so easy to launch a war, but it's so difficult, almost impossible sometimes to terminate a war, Iraq war, Afghanistan war. Is that a finish? No, trade war. I believe one thing, when trade stops, the war starts. Trade is something that people start to communicate. Trade is something people exchange culture and value. And I will be happy if China, USA agree on something and Alibaba business model destroyed. I will destroy Alibaba model by stopping the war between. Because how can you imagine the first largest economy of the world, second largest economy of the world, have a trade war? It's going to be a disaster for two countries and for the world. If anybody can do something to stop it, do anything to stop it. Did you have a reaction to Trump and the situation with Taiwan and how he's thinking about that? Well, Taiwan, I think this is not something about government. This is not something about business. This is something about people. If the Taiwan issue is the population, if you do Taiwan issue, it's against 1.4 billion people. So this is another issue. So we're talking about trade. We're not talking about Taiwan. Very politic. Let's take one final question if we can. I think we can steal one more in. Yes, sir, right there. I'm not a politician. I try to speak like this. This is asking me a credit story. How do you assure you are not messing up with people's life and you are not dictating the whole credit kingdom or the system? Because now you are the decision makers. You are the rule makers. OK. First, I'm not sure. People say, oh, this is uncertain to the world. Every day is uncertain. The only certain day was yesterday. I'm not sure about that in the future. I would dictate. I would be stupid. That's why I should retire early when I'm young. That is why I have a lot of things that I dream I want to do. I want to be a philanthropy. I want to be a teacher. I want to go back to school. I want to do the environment. And the world is so wonderful. Why should it be the sea of Alibaba all the time? I'm coming to this world not to work. I want to come to this world to enjoy my life. I don't want to die in my office. I want to die on the beaches. It's a wonderful message. Jack Ma, thank you for the conversation. Can I say one last thing? Yes, please, please. I just want to give my last advice to any people here that every government should pay attention to in the next 30 years are critical for the world. Every revolution, technology revolution takes about 50 years. The first 20 years, technology company. Next 30 years, the implication of the technology. Focus on next 30 years. The first 20 years, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Google, good. The most important is that make the technology inclusive. Make the world change. This is 30 years. Next, pay attention to those people who are 30 years old because those are international generation, internet generation. They will change the world. They are the builder of the world. Third, let's pay attention to the company who have fewer than 30 employees. 30 years and 30 years old and 30 employees, that will can make the world much better. Jack Ma, thank you very, very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.