In terms of institutional holdings, Japan's SoftBank Group is Alibaba's largest shareholder, holding 34.4% of the shares. Yahoo! is second, holding 22.5%. The two together hold 57%. In terms of individual holdings, Alibaba's chairman Jack Ma holds only 8.9%. Alibaba co-founder Joseph Tsai holds 3.6%, while Alibaba CEO Daniel Lu and COO Daniel Zhang hold less than 1%. The process of a normal large company, such as Alibaba, growing and developing is a process of constantly raising funds and using huge capital to defeat competitors one after another. When a company grows to a certain scale and continues to expand and reproduce, it is usually difficult for the founder to complete such an investment with his own ability, and it is inevitable that external funds will be needed. Therefore, in 2000, Alibaba completed the second round of financing of 25 million US dollars, of which SoftBank from Japan alone contributed 20 million; in the third round of investment, SoftBank invested another 60 million US dollars. In August 2005, Yahoo exchanged 40% of Alibaba's equity for $1 billion and Chinese assets. With this money, Taobao and Alipay grew rapidly. These capitals gradually laid the foundation for Alibaba's "status" in the Chinese Internet in the future. But money is not given for nothing. Through these transactions, Jack Ma and the founding team completely gave up their position as the largest shareholder of Alibaba. Before Alibaba's B2B business went public in 2007, Yahoo and Softbank held 39% and 29.3% of Alibaba's equity respectively. Jack Ma tried to improve this situation.

In 2012, Alibaba introduced a new shareholder with a national name, which invested $7.6 billion, but only redeemed about 20% of Yahoo's equity. As a result, Japan's Softbank became Alibaba's largest shareholder. Although Japan's Softbank is Alibaba's largest shareholder, it is still far from being a Japanese company. Because, in Alibaba, the control of the company is still decided by Jack Ma, not the largest shareholder, Japan's Softbank. In order to guarantee the control of Jack Ma and the founding team while owning only a small portion of the shares, Alibaba proposed a workaround called the "partnership system". This "partnership system" created by Alibaba is somewhat similar to the traditional "dual-class share structure" in a sense: it allows insiders of a company to maintain control over the company even after the company goes public. Specifically, it is a special clause for nominating directors set in the company's articles of association - a group of people called "partners" nominate the majority of directors on the board, rather than allocating the right to nominate directors according to the proportion of shares held (legal provisions of the partnership system).