Ma’s decisions now may be a way to align with President Xi Jinping’s vision of achieving “common prosperity.” His companies are trying to meet the demands of China’s watchdogs, who have pledged to curb the “reckless” expansion of technology firms. 

The Communist Party’s evolving stance toward the private sector has become one of the most closely watched developments in global markets in recent years, with some observers going as far as to call China’s sprawling internet sector uninvestable.

Even before Ma drew the ire of Chinese regulators, he had been distancing himself from the twin empires of e-commerce giant Alibaba and Ant. Ma stepped down as CEO of Alibaba in 2013 and then as chairman in 2019. He said as early as in 2014 he intended to reduce his stake in Ant to no more than 8.8% and he intends to donate 611 million shares to charity. 

The ownership changes could delay the revival of Ant’s much anticipated IPO. China’s securities regulations state that companies can’t list on the A-share market if the controlling shareholder has changed in the past three years. The Nasdaq-like STAR market has a two-year waiting time, while Hong Kong’s is one year.

“While there will be a waiting period for Ant with this change, it will make little difference as the weak markets will mean that Ant is in no rush to be listed,” Tang said. 

Ant is currently waiting for the central bank to agree to review its application for a financial holding license, a key step for the company to move forward for any chances of going public. 

Once valued at $300 billion, Ant’s projected worth has plummeted after regulators curbed operations at the company’s most profitable units including consumer lending. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Francis Chan estimated in June that Ant is worth about $64 billion.

As part of Ant’s restructuring, the company has ramped up its capital base to 35 billion yuan ($5.2 billion) and has 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.

Assets under management at its proprietary money-market fund Yu’ebao -- once the world’s largest -- dropped about 35% from a peak in March 2020 to 813 billion yuan as of June.

While Ant said in June it has no plans to initiate an IPO, the company’s Chairman Eric Jing said last year that it would eventually go public.