Alibaba Group, the China based e-commerce giant and multinational holdings company recently revealed in an announcement the shuffle up of its senior league leadership and management executive. The announcement revealed the shuffling of executives from the parent firm-holding group and its affiliate firm Ant Financial Services group which includes the appointment of a new Chief Executive Officer for the affiliate and a change of responsibilities among the affiliate and parent firm in leadership and management team. The first major change is the appointment of new Chief Executive Officer for Ant Financial with the promotion of Mr. Simon Hu – former President of the firm. The move was made public via an internal memo which was made accessible to Canadian internet news and media outlet Reuters. Mr. Hu has been a part of the Alibaba group for 14 years now having joined the group back in 2005.
Mr. Hu’s most recent role as President of the affiliate firm lasted a year from November of 2018 prior to which he served as Senior Vice President at Alibaba Group for nearly three and a half years and as President of Alibaba Cloud for four years. However, it should be noted that this is his second term with Ant Financial as he originally started out member of senior management at Ant Financial in June of 2005 and went on to establish one of its well known product Ant Microloans in July of 2009 China’s first SME loan service in history which credit substituted the pledge of assets bringing out a major change of internet finance in China. While Mr. Hu succeeds Mr. Eric Jing as CEO, Eric still retains his role as executive chairman of Ant Financial a role he held alongside his former role as CEO and will continue to act as the boss of Mr. Hu.
Aside from the promotion of Mr. Hu, we are seeing a relocation of Mr. Cheng Li former Chief Technology Officer of Ant Financial to CTO of Alibaba group replacing Mr. Jeff Zhang. Mr. Zhang will now serve in multiple roles namely Chairman for Alibaba’s Technology Committee, Dean of Alibaba’s DAMO Academy and President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. The memo also revealed that Mr. Jiang Fan who is the president of Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall e-commerce sites will gains the additional responsibility to oversee the Alimama advertising unit the holding company’s advertisement division.
Commenting on changes made to its c-level management and leadership team, Daniel Zhang – CEO of Alibaba Group said, “From where we stand today, we can clearly see the need for multiple business groups to have complex collaborations in each of our strategic pillars in order to win success”. It should be noted that this change comes as World’s highest valued FinTech company is gearing up for its upcoming IPO with an estimated valuation placing the company’s worth at US$ 150 billion.
