[Harper] to meet Alibaba CEO [Jack Ma] at start of China trip

 BY MATTHEW FISHER, THE LEADER-POST NOVEMBER 6, 2014

 

 

Founder and Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group Jack Ma rings the bell at the New York Stock Exchange in September. Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be looking for ideas from the multibillionaire on ways Canadian businesses can reach China's swelling middle class through e-commerce.

 

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is to begin his fourday trip to China by meeting the richest man in the country.

Harper is to have a chat in Hangzhou on Friday with a figure sometimes affectionately known as Crazy Jack. Internet entrepreneur and Alibaba Group CEO and founder Jack Ma took the eBay idea and applied it in China.

In 1999, Hangzhou's most famous son was earning $20 a month teaching English at a local high school. Since then, Ma's net worth has zoomed from zero to more than $20 billion. A chunk of that money has come from a staggering $25-billion stock flotation two months ago in New York.

The prime minister's angle is that he wants Ma Yun - to use his Chinese name - to educate him and Canadian businessmen about how e-commerce could drum up new sales by reaching China's swelling middle class. Ma's angle in meeting leaders such as Harper is to open doors for Alibaba, which Bloomberg says has a market cap of $231 billion and wants to expand quickly in the West.

The Ma formula could work especially well for small-and medium-sized Canadian companies that have not done a great job so far selling products in what will inevitably become the world's largest market.

If nothing else, Harper's visit with a business icon who has achieved rock star status in China will raise Canada's modest profile here.

Even before Harper's aircraft lands in Hangzhou he will probably notice the air pollution. Even at noon on Wednesday, a cloudless day, a blanket of smog enveloped Hangzhou. That is the steep environmental price China's rulers have been willing to pay for more than a decade of white-hot economic growth that Crazy Jack and many other entrepreneurs have done so much to push along. The expansion of the Chinese economy has slowed a lot over the past few months, but it is still expected to hum along next year at an annual growth rate of about seven per cent.

Although Hangzhou has long been regarded as one of the most prosperous places in China, it is a second-tier city compared with mega-cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. But Hangzhou dwarfs New York City in size. About 21 million people live in Hangzhou's greater metropolitan area and 8.7 million in the city itself, where the downtown core is full of shops selling luxury goods with European brand names such as Cartier and Hermès.

After meeting Ma and others in Hangzhou, Harper will meet political and business leaders in Beijing this weekend and at the start of the APEC summit. His main theme is that in a world in chaos, Canada remains a stable, reliable trading partner. With the prime minister is a Canadian business delegation that includes representatives of the aerospace, energy, education, forestry and computer technologies industries.

A particular emphasis of Harper's third visit to China will be on the financial and agri-food sectors and tourism. Canada receives nearly $500 million a year from Chinese tourists now. That sounds impressive until you factor in that Canada actually hosts less than one-half of one per cent of the Chinese travelling abroad.

The highlight of the trip is expected to come on Saturday in Beijing when Harper meets with President Xi Jinping. After their talks, Toronto is to be named North America's first Chinese currency trading hub. The move will probably save Canadian companies billions of dollars because they will no longer have to put every transaction in both directions through U.S. dollars.

Perhaps the bonhomie created by Harper's visit with Jack Ma and the official currency announcement will spill over into "open and frank" discussions Harper is expected to have with Xi about human rights, transparency, the rule of law and the fate of a Canadian couple, Kevin and Julia Garratt, who were placed in detention three months ago amid allegations they were engaged in the theft of state secrets.

[wasnt Harper told by his handlers, not to go to China, or to be seen in China during this time?!]