Will the house that Jack Ma built be safe into the next century as Alibaba chief bids adieu?

When Alibaba’s Jack Ma said last September that in 12 months’ time he was going to hand over the role of executive chairman to chief executive Daniel Zhang Yong and step away from managing the e-commerce behemoth he founded, the announcement came as a surprise.

Alibaba’s stock price fell nearly 4 per cent in New York on the news, before recovering over the next two days.

The reason was simple – for nearly two decades, Ma has been the face of Alibaba, the company he founded in his Hangzhou apartment in 1999 together with 17 others.

Ma, who turns 55 on September 10, is considered young to be stepping away from the company he helped to build from the ground up in a country where founders are inclined to wield a tight grip over their companies well into their eighties in some cases.

Ma’s departure from the executive chairman role, which coincides with Alibaba’s 20th anniversary, is perhaps the biggest indication that Alibaba has fully transitioned to a new era, with control handed over to a younger generation of leaders that have been tasked with keeping the firm going for at least 102 years – by which time its history (from inception in 1999) will have spanned three different centuries.

The company is also the owner of the South China Morning Post.