The world was an entirely different place for Jack Ma nine months ago. Ant Group, a fintech company owned by his retail giant, Alibaba, was all set for a $34.4 billion initial public offering, the world’s biggest. It had got $3 trillion worth of bids from individual investors across its dual listing in Hong Kong and Shanghai. The bidding for the IPO was so aggressive that the servers of some brokerage platforms in Hong Kong reportedly crashed owing to the overwhelming number of orders.
Ant Group’s shares were expected to trade in Hong Kong and Shanghai on November 5, 2020. But it never happened. On November 3, Chinese regulators summoned Ma and told him that Ant’s days of relaxed government oversight were over; they later shut down the IPO saying there were shortcomings in the process. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping had personally halted the IPO because an outspoken Ma had irked the government. Though he was the poster boy of Chinese entrepreneurship, Ma always had an uneasy relationship with the government, as he seldom hesitated to criticise its policies. He was rarely seen in public after the botched IPO.
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