Alibaba CEO Jack Ma sees fortune grow to £26bn

China's biggest online retailer Alibaba posted its best revenue growth since its record listing in 2014

Jack Ma met US President Donald Trump last month and announced his company would help create one million jobs in the US (Getty)

The fortune of Jack Ma, the founder and executive chairman of Alibaba, grew to more than $30 billion as his company’s profit beat analysts’ estimates.

Alibaba, China’s biggest online retailer, reported a better-than-expected 59 per cent surge in fiscal first-quarter on Thursday

Jack Ma, who is already the richest man in Asia, fortune grew to $34 billion (£26.25 billion) on the news, according to Bloomberg.

The company’s latest results mark its fastest revenue growth since its record $25 billion initial public offering in 2014.

Revenue for the three months ended June 30 surged to 32.15 billion yuan ($4.84 billion; £3.74 billion) compared with the 30.2 billion-yuan average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg, with revenue from its China retail marketplaces including Taobao and TMall rising 49 per cent compared to last year.

Alibaba also made more money from mobile shopping than from PCs for the first time, helping to send its shares up by more than 5 per cent to $92.10 in New York, its highest level in more than a year.

“We never had any doubt that we would be able to deliver increasing monetization of our users,” Joe Tsai, executive vice chairman told a post-earnings conference call.

“This is a decoupling of revenue from GMV (gross merchandise volume),” he said, referring to a measure of the total value of goods transacted on Alibaba's online shopping platforms.

The strong results came as Alibaba is facing many challenges.

China’s flagging economy could threaten the company’s growth.

“If there is a slowdown in the Chinese economy. ... I don't believe Alibaba is going to escape that,” Gil Luria, analyst at Wedbush Securities’, said.

Alibaba has also been strongly criticised for failing to do enough to stop counterfeit goods being sold on platforms such as Taobao.

The State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) said that many products sold through Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall platforms infringed trademarks or were substandard, fake, illegal or dangerous, in a report published in January this year.

“The problem is the fake products today are of better quality and better price than the real names. They are exactly the [same] factories, exactly the same raw materials but they do not use the names,” Jack Ma said during a speech on Tuesday at Alibaba's headquarters in Hangzhou.

Additonal reporting by Reuters