Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Amid reports that Covid-battered China is talking to the US multinational Pfizer to import its vaccines, Jack Ma, the second best-known Chinese globally after President Xi Jinping, has decided to retreat from his online empire in the wake of Beijing’s crackdown on technology behemoths.
The media reported on Saturday that China’s medical products regulator, the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA), is in talks with Pfizer since December to secure a license to allow its domestic drugmakers to manufacture and distribute a generic version of the US pharmaceutical major’s Covid-19 antiviral drug Paxlovid in China. Beijing is trying to finalize the deal before the Chinese Lunar New Year, beginning January 22.
Earlier, reports said, many overseas Chinese are either sending foreign drugs and vaccines to their relatives in China or the Chinese themselves are getting these through smuggling from India and other countries in the black market. Because of a severe shortage of antivirals, many Chinese are exploring underground channels to secure foreign-made drugs, even paying exorbitant prices.
China, which had so far resisted vaccine imports and, instead, vaccinated its vulnerable people with indigenous, ineffective ones, had approved Pfizer’s Paxlovid in February 2022 itself.
In the middle of these efforts to contain the pandemic ahead of the Chinese Lunar New Year two weeks from now, reports said a low-lying Jack Ma, spotted in Japan recently, is giving up controlling rights of his Ant Group Company. The firm will give 10 persons, including Ma and others, voting rights independently, effectively removing Ma’s voting control of the company.
The Xi Jinping regime cracked down on technology majors in 2020, beginning with Jack Ma, forcing him to mostly disappear from public view after he criticized regulators on the eve of the scuttled Ant listing in 2020. Many of his peers were also forced to relinquish their formal corporate roles and increase donations to charity to ‘align’ with their President’s ‘vision’ of achieving “common prosperity.”
The media reported that Ant has since focused on overhauling its business operations to appease regulators. It ramped up its capital base for its consumer loan affiliate and moved to build firewalls in an ecosystem that once allowed it to direct traffic from payment platform Alipay, with a billion users, to services like wealth management and consumer lending.
Ma still holds voting rights and economic interests in the company. In a filing in July, affiliate Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. reiterated that Ma “intends to reduce and after that limit his direct and indirect economic interest in Ant Group over time” to a percentage not exceeding 8.8 percent.
China’s multi-year crackdown on tech companies since 2020 has reined in breakneck growth for the entire internet sector and sent shockwaves to global investors. Beijing has changed the playbook for Chinese tech champions who once prioritized growth at all costs, introducing a new paradigm for the country’s private sector.