Via the Wall Street Journal's China Journal, Paul Denlinger at China Vortex has translated an internal e-mail that Alibaba founder and CEO Jack Ma wrote and distributed to his staff recently. The e-mail promptly found its way to Sina and was duly published.

The e-mail is interesting because it is very candid about Ma's expectation of hard economic times ahead. It also reflects on the rather dizzying fall in Alibaba's share price from a high of over 40HKD shortly after its IPO last year to just under 10 now. In the e-mail Ma also exhorts his staff to think of Alibaba's customers, and the role Alibaba can play in their survival in the tough times Ma forsees:

For this terrible winter, all Alibaba employees think “If not now, when? If not me, who?” In 2001, we said “Be the last man standing!” Even if we were on our knees we would be the very last to keel over! With our resources today maybe we will not keel over, but today we have an even greater responsibility to our customers. Not only must we not fall over, but we have a responsibility to protect them, the tens of thousands of small and medium sized businesses all over the world who count on our services! We need to protect them so that they will prosper and not keel over! In the upcoming business environment, these companies will face major challenges to their survival; it is our mission to help them to survive - to make it easier for anyone to do business anywhere. Remember, if our customers fail, then we will not survive to see another day!

PR people have a basic expectation that any internal communication issued in written form, especially electronically, will go public. Someone will forward it to a journalist friend. This is especially true if the company involved is large, noteworthy or at an inflection point, or has a celebrity CEO. Think about the Bill Gates internal memos that are part of public lore now. If you believe in Ma's economic forcasting skills, then his communique fits all those criteria.

Crafty companies can take advantage of the tendency of internal memos to leak or to be seen as special windows of insight. Internal memos can be a nice way to get some basic principles and messages to the outside world in a way that seems sincere and skirts the tendency of media to ignore such proclamations when they are aimed directly at them via press releases or similar. After all, a leak takes on a degree of newsworthiness just by being a leak.

I wonder if that's what happened in this situation. Ma's e-mail is so shot full of things that look that company mission statement and key messages that it seems possible that it was always meant at least partially for external consumption. For example:

[Based] on our principles of “customer first, employees second and shareholders third” our goals now are:
  1. For Alibaba to become the world’s largest ecommerce company;
  2. For Alibaba to become the world’s best employer;
***
“Push consumer spending and creating jobs” will be our major missions in the next stage of Internet development!
***
The future of ecommerce is bright, and will help our small and medium sized customers to survive this crisis, and when we emerge in ten years, it will be a whole new world!

And so on. The legendary Jack Ma confidence is in full view, as is a vision for where Alibaba is going. Important for employees, certainly. But probably also good for the broader market. At any rate, Alibaba can't have been too scandalized to see the note leak to Sina two days ago and rocket around the Chinese Internet yesterday, because they published it on their own blog today.

Either way, that ten year horizon looks pretty long. Here's hoping we aren't headed for a decade-long downturn.