Meet the Canadian banker taking Alibaba to the world

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Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is already the world's largest e-commerce company. But for Michael Evans, it's just getting started.

The Canadian Olympic champion and former Goldman Sachs executive spent decades working with the Chinese government to privatize state-owned enterprises and open up the Asian economy to capital markets.

Now, as president of the Chinese e-commerce giant, Mr. Evans is racing to fulfill Alibaba Founder Jack Ma's mission of quintupling the company's number of consumers and rapidly expanding Alibaba outside of China.

The Alibaba president constantly reminds people that Alibaba is not the eBay of China. Alibaba is not the Alphabet of China. Alibaba is not the Amazon of China.

"We aren't the Amazon of anything," Mr. Evans said in an interview. "We have a very different business, a very different business model."

That model looks like this: Alibaba connects merchants from around the world – including Canadian maple syrup producers and lobster fisheries –with millions of Chinese consumers and businesses on its electronic shopping platform.

And Alibaba has other businesses, too: online payment services, cloud computing, data management, marketing, media and entertainment, food delivery, an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, a movie production unit and financial services.

But Alibaba's heft lies in its e-commerce. The company pulled in $4.84-billion (U.S.) in revenue in the most recent quarter, a 60-per-cent increase over the previous year. The bulk of it came from China, where the company commands a staggering two-thirds market share.

Mr. Ma wants to double merchandise transaction volumes to $1-trillion by 2020 and increase the number of active buyers to two billion by 2036 from 434 million currently. Part of the plan is to pull in half of Alibaba's revenue from outside China, and Mr. Ma is counting on Mr. Evans to execute it.

"We will get there," Mr. Evans said. "The way that we are thinking about our strategy is that there are going to be very important consumer markets that we must be in because that is where five of the seven billion people in the world live. So China, India, southeast Asia, but also Brazil, Russia, many of the emerging markets of the world."

"For our strategy, it's very important to understand the distinction between markets which will provide products that are demanded by consumers and markets that will consume those products," Mr. Evans said. "People say when are you coming to the U.S. to compete against Amazon? That's a very low priority for us to compete against Amazon because Amazon is already here in this market. The big consumer markets of the future are in Asia."

Alibaba snapped up Singaporean e-commerce company Lazada for about $1-billion to gain a foothold in southeast Asia. It has been expanding aggressively outside of its core e-commerce business, gobbling up tech companies such as Chinese app store Wandoujia and video sharing website Youku Tudou. Rumours surfaced that Alibaba was interested in Netflix. Mr. Evans said it is not.

Turning Alibaba into an even bigger global tech giant will not be easy. The Chinese economy is slowing. India's market is fragmented. New competitors are playing on Alibaba's home turf. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is probing the company's accounting practices. Anti-globalization sentiment is on the rise and Alibaba is battling a raft of counterfeiters on its platform.

For the 59-year-old Mr. Evans, breaking into new markets is nothing new. During his time at Goldman, he was chosen by former chief executive officer Hank Paulson to help shepherd the first major privatization of a Chinese state-owned enterprise.

The 1997 initial public offering for the national telecom company was carried out amid the tumult of the Asian financial crisis and helped reform China's economy.

His work pleased the Chinese government so much that one of its leaders said that if there were 10 people like Michael Evans he would have turned around all the state-owned enterprises and if there were 100 people like Michael Evans he would have turned around the entire country, according to Mr. Paulson.

"When you are working in China to get big deals done, the Chinese negotiate for sport, they negotiate the price of a medical procedure in a hospital, when they go in a supermarket – they negotiate the price of food. One obstacle after another," said Mr. Paulson, who was treasury secretary under former U.S. president George W. Bush, in an interview.

"Mike is a guy who doesn't let obstacles deter him, he does what it takes."

Envisioning a connected world

Mr. Evans first got to know Jack Ma when he was working in China in the 1990s. At Mr. Paulson's suggestion to look for entrepreneurs, they met Mr. Ma when he was developing his e-commerce idea. Goldman became one of Alibaba's first investors.

When Mr. Evans left Goldman at the end of 2013, one of the first people he consulted was Mr. Ma, whom he considers a good friend. Mr. Evans had no idea what he wanted to do next.

"If I thought I wanted to stay in banking, I would have stayed at Goldman because I think it is the best bank in the world. And if I had an idea of what I was intending to do, I would have just gone off and done it. I didn't leave with a view that I wanted to do this," he said.

Mr. Evans worked at Goldman for two decades, serving as global head of equity capital markets, co-head of the equity division, global co-head of the securities division, chairman of Goldman's Asia Pacific business and global head of growth markets. He was also chosen to co-chair Goldman's Business Standards Committee, which was set up to help repair the bank's reputation with clients after SEC fraud charges, a congressional investigation and a slew of negative stories.

Mr. Evans was considered one of the potential successors to Goldman CEO and chairman Lloyd Blankfein. When asked if he aspired to the top job, Mr. Evans said: "My judgment was that Lloyd was going to stay and stay for a long time, and so you could wait a long time for that seat. I was more interested in thinking of what else is out there that could be really fun and interesting to do for the next 10 to 15 years."

About six months after his talk with Mr. Ma, the company asked him to join as an independent director. It was ahead of the Alibaba's record breaking $25-billion IPO on the New York Stock Exchange and Mr. Evans was figuring out his next steps. Mr. Ma and his co-founder, Alibaba's executive vice-chairman Joseph Tsai, soon asked Mr. Evans to join the company full-time.

"The job was always very clear in Jack and Joe's mind as I discussed it with them, which is globalization was a critical part of the future growth and development of Alibaba," Mr. Evans said. "They had almost nothing outside of China and they needed to find someone to lead that effort that first of all understood China, was familiar with the leadership of Alibaba, and had enough experience and credibility in the markets around the world, whether it was Asia, Europe or the U.S., to credibly come up with a strategy."

They agreed that everything had to be connected "internationally with everything domestically so that you didn't end up with Alibaba in China and Alibaba everywhere else."

"Jack's vision of the business is a business that connects the world, not separates it into component parts."

'Mike has a very high pain threshold'

Over the past few years, Mr. Evans has become more involved in Canadian business. He joined Barrick Gold Corp.'s board as an independent director at the request of John Thornton, a former Goldman Sachs president and now the Canadian gold miner's executive chairman. Since becoming Alibaba's president, Mr. Evans has met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa as well as during the G20 in Alibaba's hometown of Hangzhou.

Although he has lived outside of Canada for 40 years and considers New York his home, Toronto-born Mr. Evans has only a Canadian passport. "I don't need to be an American," he said.

His name is floated in the press when high-level banking positions open up, such as Governor of the Bank of Canada. But Mr. Evans said he has never been approached and that he was not interested in politics, either. "I think I can make much bigger contributions to Canada in the seat I am in than running for office."

One of the contributions he has made to Canada was winning a gold medal at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles as part of the eight-man rowing crew that included his twin brother Mark.

As one of six siblings, he grew up in a competitive environment.

"He was a pretty intense independent guy," said Derek Evans, his older brother and CEO of Calgary-based Pengrowth Energy Corp. Derek Evans said for the longest time he did not realize his brother had started rowing. "He is not a flashy guy."

Their father, the late John Evans, was a medical doctor who co-founded tech incubator MaRS, served as University of Toronto's president, as well as dean of McMaster University's innovative medical school. A companion of the Order of Canada, John Evans was also good friends with former prime minister Pierre Trudeau.

Michael Evans graduated from Upper Canada College in 1976 and then attended Princeton University, which had recruited him to row for the Ivy League school.

After earning a bachelor's degree in politics, he graduated from Oxford with a master's in international relations and went to work for Salomon Brothers in London. In 1993, he moved to Goldman.

Like his move to Alibaba, Mr. Evans stumbled upon his career as an investment banker.

In his final year at Princeton, he took the spring semester off to train for the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow. But he was unable to compete because Canada joined the U.S.-led Olympics boycott in protest of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. Because he could not return to Princeton until the following fall semester, Mr. Evans worked at Wood Gundy in Toronto where he was introduced to investment banking.

When asked if his Olympic gold medal win has helped his career in banking, Mr. Evans said: "I never believed that it would be meaningful in terms of the decision to hire you."

"What really matters in terms of the decision that someone is going to make to either hire you or promote you … it is not going to be about whether you won the gold medal at the Olympics, especially 30 or 40 years after you did it," he said.

Mr. Paulson has another view: "Rowing is a gruelling sport. Gruelling. And Mike has a very high pain threshold. He is an unbelievable worker, he is tough, has great stamina and is resilient."

Mr. Evans' departure from Goldman in 2013 came at a time when North American banks were beginning to face increasing pressure from competitors like Apple.

Ironically, Mr. Evans' new company is now competing with banks for customers as Alibaba attempts to bring its financial services businesses to North America. Ant Financial, whose businesses include its mobile payment app, Alipay, is expected to go public.

"United States, Canada, many countries have fallen behind in the development of technologies in which would change the way that people pay for things," Mr. Evans said.

"The next generation forms of payments for e-commerce, for whatever, are probably here already. They may not exist in this country, but they exist elsewhere and banks should embrace it. They should be embracing the change and figuring out how do we thrive in that new world."