Alibaba has introduced that outgoing CEO Daniel Zhang will depart the corporate, in an sudden transfer simply months after reaffirming his dedication as president and CEO of the agency’s Cloud Intelligence Group.
Following a company restructuring in March 2023, Alibaba is within the strategy of spinning off six of its divisions as separate enterprise teams. In Might, it confirmed its Cloud Intelligence Group would spin off and develop into publicly listed by Might 2024.
The announcement was made on 10 September, the identical day that Eddie Wu, co-founder and SVP at Alibaba Group, took over as CEO.
Following Zhang’s sudden departure, Wu is anticipated to supervise the cloud group along with his newfound obligations. Joe Tsai has taken over as chairman of Alibaba Group as deliberate.
In a letter to shareholders in July 2023, Zhang introduced that though he would step down as chairman and CEO of the Alibaba Group, he could be staying on on the firm to supervise its cloud group.
“As for myself, I might be totally devoted to my position as chairman and chief government officer of our Cloud Intelligence Group and tackle the brand new problem of exploring the immense future in reworking and innovating with a whole lot of 1000’s of industries by cloud computing, massive information, and AI,” he wrote.
Alibaba Cloud introduced value cuts of almost 50% in April 2023, in a transfer to compete with cloud rivals akin to Tencent and Huawei. The agency additionally introduced it should make investments $1 billion in cloud expansions throughout the APAC area.
In its This autumn earnings, Alibaba Group reported its Cloud Intelligence Group’s complete income reached $3.47 billion, representing a 4% year-on-year progress.
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The group made various investments over the previous yr into generative AI and massive informationin addition to into the growth of its cloud computing providers into the patron market.
Throughout the quarter it built-in its newest giant language mannequin (LLM), Tongyi Qianwen, inside its workspace collaboration platform DingTalk. The LLM can course of Chinese language and English language inputs, and performs comparable roles to Microsoft 365 Copilot akin to summarizing conferences, drafting emails, or producing doc outlines.
In a letter to the Hong Kong Trade, the board of Alibaba Group paid tribute to Zhang’s file on the agency and expressed its intention to nominate a brand new administration group for the Cloud Intelligence Group in time.
“The board of our Firm expresses its deepest appreciation to Mr. Zhang for his contributions to Alibaba Group over the previous 16 years, together with as chief government officer since 2015 and as chairman since 2019, in addition to his management of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group since 2022,” it wrote [PDF].
Alibaba inventory was down 3% on market opening, following the announcement.
