Alibaba's Jack Ma speaks before U.S. small businesses. (Photo : Getty Images)
Alibaba founder and executive chairman Jack Ma expressed his desire to help small businesses using technology, during a recent interview on CNBC's "Halftime Report" on Wednesday, Jan. 18.
"How can we hire 5 million people to deliver things, for us to deliver the things we sold?" Ma asked and he said that the answer lies in empowering service companies and logistic companies and making sure that they are "efficient."
Ma pointed out what technology can do as Alibaba was able to make a one-day delivery to 125 cities last year, a feat that he said was not possible a decade ago.
"It's improving. You can never expect these things to happen within 24 hours," he said.
The Chinese tycoon said that Alibaba takes pride in how it leverages technology to help small businesses. "It's not how much money we make. It's not how powerful we are."
He said he knew the struggles of small businesses, recalling his frustration in waiting for three months for a $5,000-loan, when he started his first business in 1992. "So difficult to be a small business," he added.
Ma said that technology can now be used to help those businesses.
"This is something I want to do," he added.
Earlier this month, Jack Ma had met with President-elect Donald Trump at the Trump Tower, where he promised to create one million jobs in the U.S., among others.
Although the promise may be plausible, some people raised questions about how the monumental task may be accomplished in a rapidly changing global environment.
Some experts believed that this can be done by following Alibaba's model where ordinary Chinese people were able to sell products and services through their platform. This would entail creating Taobao villages in the U.S. to enable small business enterprises in remote, rural regions of America to connect directly to the global market place.
Hundreds of thousands of "e-tailers" have been empowere by the Taobao Village network across China using the Alibaba platform ecosystem, which created micro-markets, even in some of the most unlikely places in the country.
