Daniel Zhang leaves the top, who will be the new CEO – Corriere.it

FROM OUR REPRESENTATIVE IN BEIJING
In the midst of a restructuring that divides it into six business branches, Alibaba changes the president and CEO. Daniel Zhang, who since 2015 led as CEO all the operations of the giant born with e-commerce and expanded into finance has resigned: he remains in the group to deal with only one of the units of the stew, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group.

Beijing stops on Alibaba

These have been very difficult years for Alibaba and for Daniel Zhang, known as the accountant due to his accounting expertise. In 2019 he took over the chairmanship of the board of directors from Jack Ma who had announced his early retirement to devote himself to teaching, his old passion. In reality, the Zhang-Ma couple continued to work together and prepare the great IPO of all records for the financial arm Ant, set for November 2020. Beijing intervened at the last minute, blocking the landing on the stock exchange for 37 billion dollars and obscuring Jack Ma, who had taken the liberty of calling the state financial system a pawn shop choking on enterprise.

The new CEO of Alibaba Group will be Eddie Yongming Wu

After the worst of the storm, Daniel Zhang leaves the helm in a situation yet to be interpreted. The new CEO of Alibaba Group will be Eddie Yongming Wu, which currently leads the jewelry of Taobao and Tmall online sales. Wu was among the founders of the giant, alongside Jack Ma: in 1999 he entered as technology director, he also participated in the launch of Alipay, the payments platform that has built up a huge center of financial power in China. Precisely this unbridled growth of the private sector prompted the Chinese government in 2020 to intervene with the squeeze that forced Jack Ma to leave the scene definitively. Eddie Wu will continue to preside Tmall and Taobao, says the Hangzhou-based company. The big maneuvers in Alibaba’s cave began in March, when the party-state signaled that the big squeeze on the private technology sector may have come to an end.

The restructuring plan

Faced with the slowdown in the economy, the new premier Li Qiang said the government wants to be friendly to industrialists, create a favorable environment for business and take care of private entrepreneurs. Simultaneously, the Chinese e-commerce giant unveiled a plan to split its operations into six branches, creating six separate companies and becoming a holding company. The six new companies that are entering the market in a restructuring plan that will be completed in 18 months will each manage the sectors in which Alibaba has developed: Chinese e-commerce, international e-commerce, cloud, food delivery, logistics, media and entertainment. Each branch will have its own CEO responsible for results. At the age of 24, we are seizing a new growth opportunity, CEO Daniel Zhang announced in a letter to employees in March. On his business card, the outgoing president had also written Xiaoyaozi, which translates as free and unbridled. A battle name, a game between friends who had joined Jack Ma in the founding of Alibaba. It will not be Daniel Xiaoyaozi Zhang who will carry out the great transformation.