Alibaba Names Eddie Yongming Wu as CEO, Joseph C. Tsai as Group Chairman
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SHANGHAI — Alibaba‘s boardroom reshuffle took on a surprising spin. On Tuesday, the Hangzhou-based tech giant said that Daniel Zhang, Alibaba’s chairman and chief executive officer, will be stepping down from the post.
Eddie Yongming Wu, chairman of Taobao and Tmall Group, will succeed Zhang as CEO, as well as replace Zhang on the company’s board of directors.
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Joseph C. Tsai, Alibaba’s executive vice chairman, will succeed Zhang as chairman of the company.
Both appointments will be effective Sept. 10.
Zhang will transition to Alibaba’s Cloud Intelligence Group as chairman and CEO, a spin-off unit that includes a ChatGPT-like generative AI research arm. It was revealed in May that the cloud unit would be heading for the public market in the next 12 months.
“This is the right time for me to make a transition, given the importance of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group as it progresses toward a full spin-off,” said Zhang in an announcement. Zhang was named company CEO in 2015 when Jack Ma stepped down from his corporate roles. He was later named chairman in 2019.
“Daniel has made exceptional contributions to the development of Alibaba Group since joining the company in 2007, and he demonstrated extraordinary leadership in navigating unprecedented uncertainties affecting our business over the past few years,” Tsai said.
Tsai, one of the 18 cofounders of Alibaba, is also the chairman of the Barclays Center and owns the Brooklyn Nets with his wife.
Wu, also a founding team member, held various technology-related executive roles at Alibaba’s core business units before being named the chairman of Taobao and Tmall Group last month after the e-commerce platform became an independent business unit under a fresh round of restructuring.
“While our current transformation brings in a new corporate organizational and governance structure, Alibaba’s mission remains unchanged. We will continue to enable individuals and businesses to benefit from the digital economy and serve our customers with unique value proposition supported by innovation and our leading technology,” Wu said.
It is widely believed that Ma, Alibaba’s charismatic founder and former CEO, is behind the latest management revamp. According to local media reports, Ma organized a closed-door meeting with Alibaba executives in May and said the company’s Taobao and Tmall unit was facing “very fierce competition” from latecomers such as Douyin and Pinduoduo.
Ma remains the biggest shareholder in the company and is currently a guest lecturer at a university in Tokyo. But most recently, Ma has been spending more time in China, Alibaba president Michael Evans revealed at the VivaTech conference in Paris last week.
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