WHAT CAN ONE COMPANY DO?
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So last week, I went to Hangzhou to learn directly how Alibaba, AliPay and Ant Financial grew their business in the last 30 years. While their growth is remarkable, I think what more remarkable is the impact their business had towards the society. To give some perspective :
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- There many villages that transformed from barely USD3Mil in GDP to now doing US50MIl annually.
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- Many families lifted out of poverty thanks to their education and platform
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- 100Mil trees planted in Ant Forest in less than 5 years.
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- Almost 100Mil ppl insured at less than RM0.005 per day in less than 1 year.
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- Provide billions of Yuan lending to micro trader/SMEs
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Everything they do at the end of the day, is sustainable CSR. The business must be able to make enough profit, in order to do sustainable CSR. They solve a real problem in the market that initially helps millions, then 100 millions people. They are willing to do what other business wont do, like spending years educating even to the most rural of folks, and giving credit to traders that banks wont finance. They run a good business, and do plenty of good things socially as well.
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As I listen and learnt for 1 week, I cant help but wondering will the companies we build, able to have similar impact? And sadly, the realistic answer is a no, for many reasons. We dont have their financials and user base to have similar impact. But If a 6 year old company like ( Ant Financial ) can launch an initiative to plant 100mil trees, then maybe Im just making excuses instead of doing it.
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So Im not gonna make anymore excuses. I thought of waiting until i reached 55 years old to execute this, but coming back from Hangzhou made me understand that I can start small and build a snowball. Leverage on the community so that we have a far bigger impact instead of trying to do everything quietly, and all by myself. So starting from this year, we’ll launch something meaningful enough that will benefit hopefully more than 100,000 Malaysian in the next 5 years. I think it’ll change many lives, maybe save a few too. Maybe prevents a few divorces too. I think its important enough that I allocate the resources I have towards this.
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InsyaAllah we’ll announce soon. Pls help pray that we succeed in making a difference.
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p/s : We asked them about what that one-eyed mascott means for Alipay. They smiled and said ----> "FOCUS"