Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meeting with entrepreneurs last month gave businesses confidence to make investments, Chairman of Alibaba Group Joe Tsai said at CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE in Singapore on Wednesday.
“People underestimate the importance of that meeting,” he said. “What that meeting did to the entire entrepreneur sector, or … the private business sector, is it gave private business people confidence to make investments in their business.”
Last month, Xi held a closed-door symposium with some of the country’s most prominent business leaders, including Alibaba founder Jack Ma, in a rare show of support for the long-sidelined sector.
Beijing urged the entrepreneurs to “show their talents” and maintain their competitive spirit, in a move seen as a shift of stance following the multi-year effort to reign in some of the country’s largest technology companies over concerns that they were growing too large and powerful.
Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s attendance at the meeting, presided by Xi, was seen as a highly symbolic.
The outspoken businessman has mostly stayed out of the public eye since Chinese authorities scuttled a blockbuster initial public offering of Alibaba affiliate Ant Group in late 2020, after his public criticism of the country’s regulatory system enraged Beijing.
Confidence boost
The summit last month indicated a softer stance from Bejing toward the companies it is betting on to fuel its faltering economy, as sluggish domestic demand dragged on growth.
When asked to comment on the state of China’s domestic consumption, Tsai said consumers are “standing on the sidelines waiting to spend” with a “very, very strong” household balance sheet. “What’s going to get them to spend them: confidence and sentiment,” he stressed.
“The combination of private business and the excitement about technology development will eventually translate into consumer confidence,” Tsai said on Wednesday.
“Companies are making investments … making hiring decisions [and] actually hiring people again,” he added, “ultimately, that will trickle through consumer confidence.”
The tech juggernaut has been ambitious in its AI strategy, announcing last month a plan to invest $52 billion in cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the next three years. Alibaba claims its Qwen AI has performed well in official benchmark tests and demonstrates the company’s growing clout in the field.
Last Thursday, the tech giant unveiled QwQ-32B, its latest AI reasoning model, which it claimed “rivals cutting-edge reasoning model, e.g., DeepSeek-R1.”
The Xi meeting “gave us the confidence to put our earnings back into CAPEX and investments, also hire people,” Tsai said.
