Alibaba continues with good news for its shareholders. The shares of the e-commerce giant Soar above 8% and hit six-month highs, after its founder, Jack Ma, has finally ceded control of the Ant Group fintech subsidiary. This is the Chinese fintech whose IPO was stopped in 2020 by the Beijing authorities. In this way, the agreements that had allowed Ma to maintain a dominant position within Ant Group’s corporate governance structure would be terminated.
Internal company reorganization
The group announced last Saturday in a statement a readjustment in the voting rights structure, diluting Ma’s power, with the aim of making the company more transparent and diversified. This decision is an important step in the company’s internal reorganization process. Thus, Ant Group grants 10 people, including the founder, management and employees, independent voting rights. After the restructuring, the main shareholders They will independently exercise their voting rights. Therefore, no shareholder will have, alone or jointly with another shareholder, the power to control directly or indirectly.
Despite this, Alibaba it still has a third of the shares of Ant Group, according to the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post, owned precisely by the conglomerate. Although the fintech reported this weekend that several of its managers left the parent company’s governing body in order to reinforce the independence of the subsidiary.
Ant Group, a global technology provider that was created as a subsidiary of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is the operator of Alipay, the world’s largest digital payments platform, with hundreds of millions of monthly users in China and beyond. Its long-awaited debut in the financial market was suddenly interrupted by a decision by the Chinese authorities, in a campaign of scrutiny that has resulted in several sanctions against large companies.