Jack Ma disappearance prompts $520b loss for Alibaba in just one year

Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma in 2018 when his business was flourishing. Photo / Getty Images

It has been exactly a year since Chinese businessman Jack Ma publicly criticised his communist government and since then he's lost hundreds of billions of dollars of his vast fortune.

Over the past 12 months, his business, Alibaba — pegged as China's version of eBay, Amazon and PayPal all rolled into one — has lost around US$373 billion ($520 billion).

According to Bloomberg, Alibaba's fall from grace is the single biggest financial loss a business has ever endured.

On October 24 last year, Ma made a now-infamous speech at a business summit where he went viral for condemning the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

"We shouldn't use the way to manage a train station to regulate an airport," Ma said at the time. "We cannot regulate the future with yesterday's means."

His remarks came hot on the heels of a government announcement over plans to increase regulation into its financial sectors, and was perceived as a criticism.

The CCP's wrath was swift and unforgiving. Ma disappeared for months and Alibaba lost almost half its value in the space of a year.

An Alibaba warehouse, the Chinese equivalent of Amazon. Photo / Getty Images

The company's market capitalisation slid sharply from US$850 billion just before Ma's speech to $477 billion, at time of writing, according to Nasdaq.

That's a drop of $373 billion.

The price of Alibaba's stock was hovering around US$176 ($245), as opposed to the US$306.87 a year earlier on October 26.

A number of things have caused the staggering loss in Ma's wealth, who was once considered the richest man in China.

He is currently ranked 30th on Bloomberg's billionaire index with an estimated net worth of US$46.1 billion, down from $60.3 billion this time last year when he was at his peak in terms of wealth.

Last year, the tech pioneer was about to launch an initial public offering worth a staggering US$37 billion ($51 billion) for Ant Group, a spin-off of Alibaba.