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Christina Hall Addresses Rumor She “Stole” the Kids She Shares With Ant Anstead, Tarek El Moussa – E! NEWS
- Christina Hall Addresses Rumor She “Stole” the Kids She Shares With Ant Anstead, Tarek El Moussa E! NEWS
- Christina Hall Clarifies She Never ‘Stole’ Her Kids as They Celebrate Easter in Tennessee PEOPLE
- Christina Hall clears up ‘false info’ about her home life Daily Mail
- Christina Hall Shuts Down Claims She ‘Left’ Or ‘Stole’ Kids During Trip To Tennessee: ‘False Info’ Yahoo Entertainment
- Christina Hall Slams Trolls Who Assume She ‘Stole’ Kids From Exes While Celebrating Easter in Tennessee Us Weekly
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Jack Ma to relinquish control of Ant group
CNN
—
Chinese billionaire Jack Ma will no longer control Ant Group after the fintech giant’s shareholders agreed to reshape its shareholding structure, according to a statement released by the company on Saturday.
After the adjustment, Ma’s voting rights will fall to 6.2%, according to the statement and CNN calculations.
Before the restructure, Ma held 50.52% of voting rights at Ant via Hangzhou Yunbo and two other entities, according to its IPO prospectus filed with stock exchanges in 2020.
Ant added in the statement that the voting rights adjustment, a move to make the company’s shareholder structure “more transparent and diversified,” will not result in any change to the economic interests of any shareholders.
Ant said its 10 major shareholders, including Ma, had agreed to no longer act in concert when exercising their voting rights, and would only vote independently, and thus no shareholder would have “sole or joint control over Ant Group.”
The voting rights overhaul came after Chinese regulators pulled the plug on Ant’s $37 billion IPO in November 2020, and ordered the company to restructure its business.
As part of the company’s restructuring, Ant’s consumer finance unit applied for an expansion of its registered capital from $1.2 billion to $2.7 billion. The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission recently approved the application, according to a government notice issued late last week.
After the fund-raising drive, Ant will control half of its key consumer finance unit, while an entity controlled by the Hangzhou city government will own a 10% stake. Hangzhou is where Alibaba and Ant have been headquartered since their inceptions.
Ant Group is a fintech affiliate of Alibaba, both of which were founded by Ma.
Jack Ma Cedes Control of Fintech Giant Ant Group
Billionaire
Jack Ma
is ceding control of Ant Group Co., capping a tumultuous period for the Chinese fintech giant.
Mr. Ma will no longer be the controlling person of Ant, the company said in a statement on Saturday, confirming a previous report by The Wall Street Journal.
The changes are being made to reduce Ant’s reliance on the flamboyant Chinese billionaire, who co-founded
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
BABA 2.70%
and helped create Ant, the Journal reported previously.
Mr. Ma will continue to hold voting rights in an entity that controls Ant, alongside nine Ant executives and employees who will be also given voting rights.
Mr. Ma doesn’t hold an executive role at Ant or sit on its board, but is a larger-than-life figure at the company. He has controlled Ant via an entity in which he holds the dominant position. The agreements that allowed Mr. Ma’s dominance will be terminated. The nine other Ant executives and employees to be given the voting rights at the company can exercise their power independently of each other and of Mr. Ma, according to Ant’s statement.
Ant, which owns the popular digital-payment platform Alipay, has been forced to overhaul its operations amid a government crackdown that began with Beijing calling off the company’s multibillion-dollar initial public offering in November 2020. The IPO, which had been slated to happen in Shanghai and Hong Kong concurrently, would have raised more than $34 billion and valued Ant at more than $300 billion.
Ant has been revamping its various business lines, from consumer lending to insurance, and will eventually become a financial holding company subject to regulations in line with traditional financial firms.
The change of control moves Ant a step closer to finishing its overhaul. Yet it also could put back a potential revival of Ant’s IPO for a year or more. Chinese securities regulations require a timeout on public listings for companies that have gone through a recent change in control.
Regulators didn’t demand the change but have given their blessing, the Journal reported previously. Ant is required to map out its ownership structure when it applies to become a financial holding company.
The nine others who will hold voting rights include Chairman
Eric Jing,
Executive Vice President Xiaofeng Shao and Chief Technology Officer Xingjun Ni, in line with the details in the previous Journal report. Mr. Shao is also the general secretary of Ant’s Communist Party committee, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Ni was instrumental in founding Alipay in 2004.
Mr. Ma has all but vanished from the public spotlight since he laid into Chinese regulators in a controversial speech days before Ant’s planned IPO in 2020. He retired from Alibaba in 2019 but continued to control Ant. The two companies that Mr. Ma co-founded have been charting separate courses in light of Beijing’s crackdown on big internet platforms.
Mr. Ma’s control over Ant goes back more than a decade to the period when he was CEO of Alibaba. Throughout the years, he had contemplated giving up control of Ant out of corporate-governance concerns that risks may arise from Ant being too reliant on a single dominant figure atop the company, the Journal reported previously.
Write to Jing Yang at jing.yang@wsj.com
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Alibaba Leads Rally in US-Listed China Stocks on Ant Capital Nod
(Bloomberg) — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. led an advance in US-listed Chinese stocks on Wednesday, with Ant Group Co.’s approved fundraising plan boosting optimism that China’s regulatory clampdown on its internet sector is easing.
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Alibaba, which owns a stake in Ant, rallied as much as 7.5%, the most since November. Its e-commerce peers JD.com Inc. and Pinduoduo Inc. both traded up more than 6%. The Nasdaq Golden Dragon Index gained over 5%, rising on a second day to its highest level in about four months.
Chinese stocks have rallied at the start of the year on bets that the nation’s reopening will eventually boost the economy and corporate profits despite initial disruptions.
Regulators approved a plan by Jack Ma’s Ant to raise 10.5 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) for its consumer unit, removing a hurdle before the fintech giant restarts its initial public offering shelved in 2020. The news pointed to warmer ties between Chinese authorities and the country’s biggest tech firms, as officials placed economic growth as a top priority.
Adding to the optimism is further potential policy support to the housing sector, a key weak spot in China’s Covid-hit economy. Beijing is planning to help shore up balance sheets of some developers it deemed as “systemically important,” according to a Bloomberg report. Authorities also resumed approvals for private equity funds to raise money for residential property developments.
With Wednesday’s advance, the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index, a gauge tracking major Hong Kong-listed Chinese stocks, closed at its highest level since July. A pickup in mobility in some major cities has given hope that Covid caseload may have peaked, after the highly infectious virus pushed the country’s economic activity to the slowest pace since February 2020.
–With assistance from Yiqin Shen.
(Updates chart, prices and adds Nasdaq Golden Dragon Index movement in second paragraph)
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Ant gets approval to expand its consumer finance business
Regulatory scrutiny forced Hangzhou-based Ant Group to abruptly suspend its massive IPO plans in 2020.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
BEIJING — Ant Group’s consumer finance unit has received approval to more than double its registered capital, a sign of progress in resolving regulators’ concerns.
Since the abrupt suspension of its massive IPO in late 2020, Ant has been working with Chinese regulators to restructure its business. Alibaba owns 33% of Ant, which operates one of China’s two dominant mobile pay apps.
Alibaba’s Hong Kong-traded shares traded 8% higher Wednesday. Shares listed in New York closed 4.4% higher overnight.
Ant launched its consumer finance company in 2021 as part of the restructuring.
On Friday, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission said it approved Ant’s request to increase the amount of registered capital for the consumer unit, to 18.5 billion yuan from 8 billion yuan.
Ant will still hold a 50% stake in the consumer finance company, according to the announcement. New investors in the other half of the company include an entity backed by the Hangzhou government and Sunny Optical Technology.
“This is a positive start of the steps that Ant Financial needs to go through [with] its restructuring process under the supervision of the CBIRC and PBOC,” said Winston Ma, adjunct professor of law at New York University.
It remains unclear what the timeline is, if any, for a revival of IPO plans. Ant has yet to receive a financial holding company license from the People’s Bank of China. The company did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.
The consumer unit houses Ant’s credit businesses Huabei and Jiebei. So-called credit tech had contributed 28.59 billion yuan, or 39.4%, to Ant’s revenue in the first six months of 2020, according to a prospectus.
China’s banking regulator said the company had six months to complete the changes before the capital expansion approval became invalid.
Chinese media previously reported news of the approval, whose terms were previously released publicly.
— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.
‘Zombie ant’ fungi infected with parasites of their own
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CNN
—
Around the world, a parasitic fungus transforms ants into “zombies.”
The fungus is like something out of a horror movie: The organism hijacks the body and brain of its ant host, mind-controlling it into abandoning its nest and climbing a nearby tree.
There, the infected ant clamps its jaws around a leaf, dangling above the forest floor, and dies in a matter of days as the fungus digests it. Bursting through its host’s body, the fungus then sends down a shower of spores to infect the next generation of ant prey.
Scientifically categorized in the genus Ophiocordyceps, the more than two dozen species of zombie ant fungus populate the globe, including Florida, Brazil and Japan; scientists suspect that each of the dozens of ant species affected has its own specialized Ophiocordyceps strain.
So far, scientists have figured out the molecular mechanism of the parasitic interaction between fungus and ant that forms the basis of the behavioral manipulation, according to a 2020 study. How exactly these parasites systematically operate, however, is poorly understood.
Now, scientists have revealed that the ant-attacking fungus is infected with fungal parasites of its own, which could be helping to keep ant zombification in check, according to a new study.
Dr. João Araújo, an assistant curator of mycology at the New York Botanical Garden, has been trekking through tropical forests in search of zombie ants for more than a decade. Over the years, he kept noticing something strange: a fuzzy white fungus growing on top of the zombie ant fungus.
Other scientists have noted the mystery fungus for decades, but Araújo and his colleagues decided to become the first scientists to systematically dig into the matter, zeroing in on a strain of zombie ants from Florida. The researchers described the physical structure of the fungi growing on top of the zombie ant fungus and sequenced their DNA in a study published November 9 in the journal Persoonia.
In doing so, the team discovered two new genera of fungus previously unknown to science.
“We realized that there were two different lineages of fungi, novel lineages of fungi, infecting one species of zombie ant fungus in Florida,” said Araújo, the study’s lead author.
Each of the two newly discovered fungi belongs to its own genus. One of the new fungi, Niveomyces coronatus, is responsible for the fuzzy white coating on the zombie ant fungus — a component of its name (“niveo”) comes from the Latin for “snowy.” The second new fungus, Torrubiellomyces zombiae, is harder to spot: The little black blobs “look like fleas,” according to Araújo.
The fungi attacking the zombie ant fungus don’t, in turn, zombify their host, but they do feed on its tissues and appear to cause it harm. “Every time we see these new genera we described growing on the fungus, the fungus looks pretty beaten up, really consumed by this other fungus,” Araújo said.
“In some cases, it castrates Ophiocordyceps (the zombie-making fungus) first, so it cannot shoot the spores anymore, and then it grows and then consumes the whole fungus.” Since Niveomyces and Torrubiellomyces are so new to science, it’s not yet clear how much of an effect they have on zombie ant fungi populations overall.
These new genera are the first parasites officially described as infecting the zombie ant fungus, but the researchers suspect there could be others out there. “I think it’s more common than we think. Parasitism is a super lucrative sort of lifestyle,” said senior study author Dr. Charissa de Bekker, an assistant professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “It might be the most dominant lifestyle on the planet.”
What’s more, she said, parasites in general and parasitic fungi in particular are poorly studied. “The fact that we had to invoke two new genera tells you how little we know about this part of the fungal tree of life,” de Bekker said.
By deepening our understanding of the zombie ant fungus, the new research could have applications that go beyond the study of fungi, said Dr. Carolyn Elya, a postdoctoral fellow in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University. She was not involved with the study.
“Ophiocordyceps has basically over evolutionary time become an expert neuroscientist. It knows exactly what buttons to push and how to get the ant to do what it wants,” she said. “By studying how it’s figured out how to solve this problem, we can have insight into our more general goal of trying to understand how brains work or produce behavior.”
Fire ant rafts form because of the Cheerios effect, study concludes
Enlarge / Georgia Tech scientists found that the so-called “Cheerios effect” is the mechanism by which fire ants cluster together to form rafts.
Hungtang Ko
Fire ants might be the scourge of southern states like Georgia and Texas, but scientifically, they are endlessly fascinating as an example of collective behavior. A few fire ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them closely together, and they act more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. They can form rafts to survive flash floods, arrange themselves into towers, and you can even pour them from a teapot like a fluid.
“Aggregated, they can almost be thought of as a material, known as ‘active matter,'” said Hungtang Ko, now a postdoc at Princeton University, who began studying these fascinating creatures as a Georgia Tech graduate student in 2018. (And yes, he has been stung many, many times.) He’s a co-author of two recent papers investigating the physics of fire ant rafts. The first, published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics (B&B), investigated how fire ant rafts behave in flowing water compared to static water conditions.
The second, accepted for publication in Physical Review Fluids, explored the mechanism by which fire ants come together to form the rafts in the first place. Ko et al. were somewhat surprised to find that the primary mechanism appears to be the so-called “Cheerios effect”—named in honor of the tendency for those last remaining Cheerios floating in milk to clump together in the bowl, either drifting to the center, or to the outer edges.
A single ant has a certain amount of hydrophobia, i.e., the ability to repel water. This property is intensified when they link together, weaving their bodies much like a waterproof fabric. The ants gather up any eggs, make their way to the surface via their tunnels in the nest, and as the flood waters rise, they chomp down on each other’s bodies with their mandibles and claws until a flat raft-like structure forms. Each ant behaves like an individual molecule in a material—say, grains of sand in a sand pile. The ants can accomplish this in less than 100 seconds. Plus, the ant raft is “self-healing”: it’s robust enough that if it loses an ant here and there, the overall structure can stay stable and intact, even for months at a time.
In 2019, Ko and colleagues reported that fire ants could actively sense changes in forces acting upon their floating raft. The ants recognized different fluid flow conditions and can adapted their behavior accordingly to preserve the raft’s stability. A paddle moving through river water will create a series of swirling vortices (known as vortex shedding), causing the ant rafts to spin. These vortices can also exert extra forces on the raft, sufficient to break it apart. The changes in both centrifugal and shearing forces acting on the raft are quite small—maybe 2 percent to 3 percent the force of normal gravity. Yet somehow, the ants can sense these small shifts with their bodies.
Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, identified a few simple rules that seem to govern how floating rafts of fire ants contract and expand their shape over time. As we reported at the time, sometimes the structures would compress into dense circles of ants. Other times, the ants would start to fan out to form bridge-like extensions (pseudopods), sometimes using the extensions to escape the containers.
How did the ants achieve those changes? The rafts essentially comprise two distinct layers. Ants on the bottom layer serve a structural purpose, making up the stable base of the raft. But the ants on the upper layer move freely on top of the linked bodies of their bottom-layer brethren. Sometimes ants move from the bottom to the upper layer or from the upper to the bottom layer in a cycle resembling a doughnut-shaped treadmill.
Ko et al.‘s B&B study is somewhat related in focus, except the Boulder study looked at the broad collective dynamics rather than interactions between individual ants. “There are thousands and thousands of ants in the wild, but nobody really knows how a pair of ants would interact with each other, and how that affects the stability of the raft,” Ko told Ars.
With such large rafts, repeatability can be an issue. Ko wanted to gain a little more control over his experiments and also study how the ants adapted to different flow scenarios in water. He found that the ants employ an active streamlining strategy, changing the shape of the raft to reduce drag. “So maybe it takes less force, or less metabolic cost, to hold onto the vegetation than if they stuck with the original larger pancake shape,” said Ko.
These ant queens live 500% longer than workers. Now we know why.
How far would you go to increase your life span by 500%? One ant species engages in brutal colony-wide brawls to replace recently deceased queens — and the victor not only gains the throne, but also gets a dramatic boost to their longevity.
Upon the death of a queen, Indian jumping ants (Harpegnathos saltator) battle to see which worker will take the queen’s place. Winning the crown means more than pumping out eggs — it also means living 500% longer than the average worker. Now, scientists may have pinpointed how substitute queens slow their aging.
The secret lies in a protein called Imp-L2, which counteracts some of the effects of insulin in the substitute queen ant’s body, according to a new study, published Thursday (Sept. 1) in the journal Science (opens in new tab).
In general, the hormone insulin helps direct sugar from the circulatory system into cells, where it can be used for fuel. The substitute queens — officially known as pseudoqueens or gamergates, in reference to the Greek words for “married worker” not the misogynist online harassment campaign GamerGate — must boost their production of insulin to contend with the incredible amount of food they must consume. “If you want to make eggs, you need to have a lot of insulin because you eat constantly,” co-senior author Claude Desplan, a professor of biology and neural science at New York University, told Live Science.
Related: These vegetarian ants have steak knives for teeth, new study finds
Although necessary, this influx of insulin should theoretically come with a catch: In addition to helping shuttle sugar into cells, insulin sets off several molecular chain reactions, some of which contribute to the aging process. Specifically, the “Akt signaling pathway” — which is involved in many cellular functions, ranging from metabolism to cell survival — can be activated by insulin and has long been tied to aging and age-related disease.
So, if a pseudoqueen starts pumping out huge quantities of insulin, in theory she should age more quickly than the average worker ant, who doesn’t make as much of the hormone. “However, in the case of these ants, it’s the exact opposite,” Desplan said. The median life span of a typical worker ant is nearly eight months, while pseudoqueens can live for about three years and three months. “It’s a huge extension of the life span,” he said.
And interestingly, if a pseudoqueen is placed in a different colony with an already-established ruler, she’ll revert to being a normal worker, Desplan said. These former pseudoqueens are called “revertants” and have life spans similar to those of workers. Somehow, only queens and pseudoqueens, despite all their insulin, manage to survive for years on end.
To solve this apparent paradox, Desplan teamed up with his longtime collaborator Danny Reinberg, a professor of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
Their team sampled tissues from H. saltator workers, revertants and pseudoqueens, focusing on tissues involved in metabolism and reproduction. These included the brain, ovaries, fat body, an organ similar to the human liver and adipose (fat). Using a technique called bulk RNA sequencing, the team analyzed which proteins were being built in the sampled tissues. A molecular cousin of DNA, RNA carries genetic instructions on how to build proteins, ferrying these blueprints from the cell’s command center to one of the cell’s protein construction sites.
By peeking at these RNA instructions, the team discovered that, compared with workers and revertants, pseudoqueens produced much more insulin in the brain and began producing more fat and vitellogenin — a precursor to egg yolk — in the fat body. Some of these resources from the fat body was transported to the ovaries, to support egg production, and some of the fat went into making a unique pheromone that only queens and pseudoqueens exude. (It’s the disappearance of this pheromone in a nest that prompts worker ants to duel after their queen dies.)
Related: Trap-jaw ants’ lightning-fast bite should rip their heads apart. Here’s why it doesn’t.
As pseudoqueens make more insulin, their ovaries grow and develop so that they can carry eggs. The insulin directs this ovary maturation process through the “MAPK signaling pathway,” another chain of chemical reactions that can be set off by insulin. At the same time, the ovaries make Imp-L2, the team discovered, which essentially blocks the Akt signaling pathway that could otherwise cause rapid aging in the pseudoqueen.
Imp-L2 secreted from the ovaries also makes its way to the fat body and provides an anti-aging shield to that organ, too, the team determined.
“The two main branches of the insulin signaling pathway” — MAPK and Akt — “appear to differentially regulate fertility and lifespan, with increased signaling in one aiding reproduction in pseudoqueens and decreased signaling in the other consistent with their extended longevity,” Reinberg said in a statement (opens in new tab).
The team’s next step will be to understand how Imp-L2 blocks only the aging-related pathway and not the reproduction-related one, Desplan told Live Science. They plan to study the effects of the insulin-blocking protein in additional insects, including fruit flies, and then eventually in mammals.
“We don’t know exactly what’s going to happen,” Desplan said. “Flies and ants aren’t exactly similar to one another.” And it’s even more difficult to predict whether the anti-aging benefits Imp-L2 grants to Indian jumping ants would carry over to noninsects, such as mammals, he said.
Originally published on Live Science.
Jack Ma Plans to Cede Control of Ant Group
HONG KONG—Billionaire Jack Ma plans to relinquish control of Ant Group Co., people familiar with the matter said, part of the fintech giant’s effort to move away from affiliate Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. after more than a year of extraordinary pressure from Chinese regulators.
The authorities halted Ant’s $34 billion-plus IPO in 2020 at the 11th hour and are forcing the technology firm to reorganize as a financial holding company regulated by China’s central bank. As the overhaul progresses, Ant is taking the opportunity to reduce the company’s reliance on Mr. Ma, who founded Alibaba.
Mr. Ma, a 57-year-old former English teacher and one of China’s most prominent entrepreneurs, has been the target of government action that appears designed to reduce his influence and the power of his companies. He has controlled Ant since he carved its precursor assets out of Alibaba more than a decade ago. Over time he built it into a company that owns the Alipay payments network with more than one billion users, an investing platform that houses what was once the world’s largest money-market fund, and a large microlending business. Ant was expected to be valued at more than $300 billion had it gone public.
Diminishing his ownership could put back a potential revival of Ant’s IPO for a year or more. Chinese securities regulations require a timeout on public listings for companies that have gone through a recent change in control.
Mr. Ma doesn’t hold an executive role at Ant or sit on its board, but is a larger-than-life figure at the company and currently controls 50.52% of its shares via an entity in which he holds the dominant position. He could relinquish his control by transferring some of his voting power to other Ant officials including Chief Executive
Eric Jing,
after which they would collectively control the company, some of the people said.
Ant told regulators of Mr. Ma’s intention to cede control as the company prepared to convert into a financial holding company, the people familiar with the matter said. Regulators didn’t demand the change but have given their blessing, the people said. Ant is required to map out its ownership structure when it applies to become a financial holding company.
The People’s Bank of China has yet to officially accept Ant’s application to become a financial holding company. Any change of control isn’t likely to materialize until Ant’s restructuring is complete.
Ant owns the Alipay payments network that has more than one billion users.
Photo:
Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News
Mr. Ma has personally contemplated ceding control of Ant for years, some of the people said. He has been concerned about the corporate-governance risks arising from being too reliant on a single dominant figure atop the company, those people said.
The charismatic founder addressed those risks at Alibaba years ago by setting up a partnership structure to ensure a sustainable succession as its first generation of leaders moved on. He gave up the CEO job at Alibaba in 2013 and stepped down as chairman in 2019 when he retired from the company. He currently holds less than 5% of Alibaba’s shares.
American depositary shares of Alibaba traded in the U.S. fell 2.2% on Thursday. They have lost nearly half their value over the past 12 months.
The need to end Mr. Ma’s control at Ant gained new urgency as the souring regulatory environment spurred Ant and Alibaba to cut their ties. On Tuesday, Alibaba revealed seven top Ant executives had stepped down from the Alibaba partnership, the top echelon of management at Alibaba and its subsidiaries. The two companies also terminated long-running commercial and data-sharing agreements that had given Alibaba an edge.
Mr. Ma previously held back from giving up control of Ant because he didn’t want to delay the company’s plans for an initial public offering, some of the people familiar with the matter said. The scuttling of those plans—after Mr. Ma laid into financial regulators in a speech—removed that obstacle and created a fresh opportunity for Mr. Ma to resolve the matter, those people said.
A change in control could mean that Ant will have to wait a while longer before it tries going public again. Chinese securities regulations state that companies can’t list domestically on the country’s A-share market if they have had a change of controlling shareholder in the past three years—or in the past two years if listing on Shanghai’s Nasdaq-like STAR Market.
Hong Kong also imposes a waiting period but only for one year. Ant’s scuttled IPO plan included simultaneous listings in the former British colony as well as Shanghai.
Ant is in no rush to attempt an IPO again and intends to keep its options open, some of the people said. The company could consider other moves including spinning off units that could in turn be listed themselves, those people said.
Mr. Ma controls Ant through an entity called Hangzhou Yunbo Investment Consultancy Co., which in turn controls two vehicles that together own a little more than half of Ant’s shares.
Mr. Ma has a 34% stake in Hangzhou Yunbo. The other 66% is split evenly among Ant’s CEO, Mr. Jing, former CEO
Simon Hu
and veteran Alibaba executive and former Ant nonexecutive director Fang Jiang.
The billionaire originally owned all of the entity. He transferred two-thirds of the shares to the three executives in August 2020 before Ant filed its IPO prospectus. At the same time, Mr. Ma was given veto power over Hangzhou Yunbo’s decisions, according to the prospectus. The arrangement was designed to give the other executives more say in Ant’s affairs without triggering an effective change in control that could delay the IPO, a person familiar with the matter said.
Jack Ma doesn’t hold an executive role at Ant or sit on its board but controls 50.52% of its shares via an entity in which he holds the dominant position.
Photo:
bobby yip/Reuters
Mr. Ma could cede control of Ant by diluting his voting power in Hangzhou Yunbo via giving up his veto and transferring some of his stake to other executives, the person said.
Mr. Hu, who resigned as Ant’s CEO last year and recently retired, and Ms. Jiang, who left Ant’s board last year, will likely exit Hangzhou Yunbo and be replaced by other Ant executives. In addition to Mr. Jing, Ant’s most senior executives are now Executive Vice President Xiaofeng Shao and Chief Technology Officer Xingjun Ni. Mr. Shao is also the general secretary of Ant’s Communist Party committee, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Ni was instrumental in founding Alipay in 2004.
Mr. Ma’s control over Ant goes back more than a decade to the period when he was CEO of Alibaba. In 2011, it emerged that he had carved the payments business Alipay out of Alibaba without the knowledge of key shareholders including Yahoo Inc. and
SoftBank Group Corp.
9984 0.37%
Alibaba argued the transfer was needed for Alipay to secure a Chinese license that might not have been granted if the company had foreign shareholders. Following the move, China’s central bank in May 2011 gave Alipay a license to operate as a payment-services company. Yahoo and SoftBank were later compensated by an agreement that allowed them to share economic interests in Ant through their ownership in Alibaba.
In 2014, Ant Financial Services Group was created to hold Alipay and other financial businesses including consumer lending. The company in 2020 changed its name to Ant Group.
Write to Jing Yang at Jing.Yang@wsj.com and Raffaele Huang at raffaele.huang@wsj.com
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