Amid a slowing economy, China’s Alibaba Group has announced a major management reshuffle aimed at speeding up the e-commerce giant’s growth. Eddie Wu, president of its e-commerce group, will succeed Daniel Zhang as CEO, the company said in a statement Tuesday.
Zhang will be CEO and president of Alibaba’s cloud computing unit, which has been approved to be spun off and is expected to be listed for trading within a year. Joseph Tsai, the current executive vice president of Alibaba, will succeed Zhang as chairman of Alibaba Group. Tsai, who owns the NBA basketball team Brooklyn Nets, is a Canadian citizen born in Taiwan and helped establish Alibaba in the late 1990s.
Right time for me to make a change: Zhang
The changes will take effect on September 10. Zhang became CEO of Alibaba Group in 2015 and succeeded Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma as chairman in 2019. It moves toward a full-fledged spin-off, Zhang said in a statement.
“I look forward to working closely with Joe and Eddie over the coming months to ensure a seamless transition.” In March, Alibaba announced plans to reshape itself into six business divisions, with plans to allow all except its core e-commerce business to raise external capital and go public.
(with inputs from agencies)