Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang is stepping down

A few hours after there were rumors about the resignation of Daniel Zhang, the current president and CEO of Alibaba, the company has now confirmed that Zhang will step down.

Zhang will be replaced by Joe Tsai, the current executive vice president of Alibaba, as chairman, and Eddie Wu, the current head of Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall units, will serve as CEO and chairman of the board. Known as the main architect of several Alibaba platforms, Wu was able to move Alibaba into the mobile era by launching the Taobao app.

After Zhang steps down in September, he is expected to focus on Alibaba’s Intelligent Cloud Group, which includes the company’s cloud computing business, Alibaba’s large language model businesses, as well as messenger Dingtalk. This group was recently formed in the new organization of Alibaba and the division of this company into six separate units.

Alibaba has a long history of regularly moving its top executives around to better meet new challenges. Zhang replaced Jack Ma as CEO and President of Alibaba in 2015 and 2019, respectively.

With the unprecedented growth of artificial intelligence and large language models in recent months, Alibaba’s focus on its cloud technology group has increased, and in April it announced the integration of Tongyi Qianwen’s language model into its businesses. Alibaba’s cloud business generated revenue of $2.7 billion in the first quarter of 2023, accounting for 9% of the company’s total revenue.

Now we have to see what direction this company will take with its new managers.

Source: Techcrunch