Ma argued that China’s financial sector was overly regulated. China’s best known tech entrepreneur and richest man told the gathering that the country had “inertia” in its thinking. “Innovators must make mistakes,” Ma said. There are just too many “documents” that regulate what people can and cannot do in China with their money. “We cannot use the method for managing a railway station to manage an airport,” he said. “We cannot regulate the future with yesterday’s methods.”
Not since the listing of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding six years ago had an IPO generated as much buzz as the listing of Ant Group. Alibaba’s IPO, which raised US$25 billion, was the biggest-ever at the time. So huge was the demand for Ant shares that the listing shattered all records. The retail portion soaked up US$3 trillion ($4.1 trillion), with Shanghai offering a whopping 870 times oversubscribed while the Hong Kong part was 389 times oversubscribed. Ant was set to raise US$34.4 billion in the IPO, at a valuation of US$313 billion. But just 36 hours before the ceremonial gong at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange was set to be struck for the record-setting listing, Beijing abruptly pulled the rug underneath it.
The suspension of the mega listing came just 10 days after Jack Ma gave a bluntly-worded speech at the Bund Summit in Shanghai lashing out at old-fashioned financial regulations that he claimed hampered financial innovations. The Basel Accord — a set of internationally agreed banking supervision regulations — the Alibaba founder said, was a “club for the elderly” which should not apply to China because it does not have a mature financial ecosystem yet.
