Mother of Jack Ma’s Fund Partner Becomes Billionaire With Alipay

by Zijing Wu

Employees work at Alibaba.com Ltd.'s headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. Alibaba and Shanghai YTO Express Logistics Co. said they have notified Chinese aviation authorities about the flights as required by regulation and believed that the deliveries complied with all existing rules. Photographer: Nelson Ching/Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- The mother of Jack Ma’s private-equity fund partner became a billionaire following a higher valuation of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s finance affiliate last week.
Wang Yulian owns 4.6 percent of Zhejiang Ant Small & Micro Financial Services Group Co., according to company filings obtained by Bloomberg News, making her the biggest shareholder in the parent of Alipay after Ma and Alibaba co-founder Simon Xie. She has a net worth of $2.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Wang is the 15th billionaire shareholder of Ant Financial. Twelve others emerged on Jan. 30 after the company’s valuation doubled to about $50 billion amid plans for a private placement ahead of an initial public offering, people familiar with the matter said. The billionaire may
be holding the shares for her son, according to James Hu, a Shanghai-based analyst at Capital Securities Corp.

“It’s common for family members to hold shares for each other,” Hu said. “It could be for various reasons such as a single shareholder’s stake-size limit.”
Wang is the mother of David Yu, who co-founded Yunfeng Capital with Ma, according to earlier filings by Huayi Brothers Media Corp. Yu and Ma, who became Asia’s richest person after Ant Financial’s new valuation, are on the board of the Beijing-based film distributor. Yu also holds shares of Ant Financial, the filings showed.

Flourishing Products

Jenny Kong, a spokeswoman for Yunfeng Capital in Shanghai, didn’t respond to phone calls and an e-mail seeking comment from Yu and Wang. Yu also didn’t respond to a message sent to his microblog account.
Wang’s stake in Ant Financial is held through a company established in December, according to the filings. That entity became a shareholder of Ant Financial about two weeks ago, obtaining its stake from the partnership that’s owned by Ma and Xie, the filings showed.
“E-finance products are flourishing,” Elinor Leung, a Hong Kong-based analyst with CLSA Ltd., said in a report last week. Products such as online payment, consumer financing and Internet banks “gained full support from the government after a clean-up last year as it provides much needed funding alternatives to fuel private sector growth.”
Yunfeng Capital is a combination of co-founders Ma and Yu’s first names in Chinese, Yun and Feng respectively, according to its website. Set up in 2010, the Shanghai-based company counts more than 10 Chinese entrepreneurs among its co-founders, including New Hope Group’s billionaire chairman Liu Yonghao and Giant Interactive Group Inc.’s Shi Yuzhu.

Alipay Spinoff

Alipay was spun off by Ma in 2011 because a transfer into Chinese ownership was necessary to facilitate applying for an online payment license in China, Alibaba had said. Alipay processes payments for e-commerce companies and has more than 800 million registered users. It handles 45 million transactions a day, the company said in October.
Under a revised agreement, Alibaba is entitled to a payment of at least $9.4 billion if Alipay or its parent stages a public offering. Alibaba also gets the perpetual right to 37.5 percent of the finance arm’s pretax earnings and can buy a stake of about one-third if regulators approve the listing.
New billionaires from the latest valuation of Alipay’s parent include Alibaba’s Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Lu and Chief People Officer Lucy Peng. The higher valuation came after Alibaba’s shares jumped as much as 75 percent since its record IPO in September.