In the who’s who of Chinese tycoons, the “three horses” top the list. Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Tencent boss Pony Ma, and Ping An chair Peter Ma — whose surnames mean “horse” in Mandarin — have built some of the world’s largest companies, and boast fortunes in the tens of billions. But Peter Ma, who last week engineered a bombshell activist attack on HSBC, had previously kept the lowest profile.
That all changed when Ping An, the largest investor in HSBC with 9.2 per cent of its shares, made the surprise move of calling on the lender to split its Asian and western operations: which would be the largest restructuring in HSBC’s 157-year history. It was all the more unexpected given the Chinese insurance company was itself once part-owned by HSBC.
It was also an uncomfortable step into the limelight for 67-year-old Ma, who founded Ping An — which translates as “peace and safety” — in 1988 and has turned it into the world’s second largest insurance company by market capitalisation, at $116.7bn. Unlike Jack or Pony Ma, he rarely appears in public, almost never gives interviews and his business has attracted neither the attention of Beijing’s regulators nor Chinese state media. “He is a more deft and less flashy player,” said a veteran financier in Hong Kong who mixes in Ma’s social circles. “He has cultivated a quiet attitude. He understands that he is on a boat where he’s not the captain.”