Alibaba Group Holding starts its overhaul to revamp cloud business

Alibaba Group Holding is taking the first steps toward revamping its cloud business by overhauling its leadership, aiming to revive growth and ride an artificial intelligence (AI) boom after cancelling a much-anticipated spinoff of the $11 billion unit.
 

The company has appointed three new executives to head up major business lines within Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, with two reporting directly to Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu, sources said.

Key among those is the so-called public cloud — the domestic cloud services arm aimed at enterprise customers in China — which will be led by Liu Weiguang, the person said, asking not to be named as the plans are not public.

The move, intended to reclaim market share lost to state-backed rivals, comes a week after Alibaba walked back plans to spin off and list the Cloud Intelligence business, disappointing investors and precipitating a $24 billion selloff over two days.

The reorganisation clarifies reporting lines after nearly a year of management turmoil starting with the departure of former president Jeff Zhang in 2022.

Alibaba Cloud has gone without a long-term CEO since then — Daniel Zhang briefly took charge of the business after stepping down as Alibaba’s group CEO in June, before he abruptly quit about three months later. 

Two other senior managers join Liu in the top ranks, running the smaller divisions of hybrid cloud services and cloud infrastructure. The three are veterans of the business and will split the bulk of the China market between them.

The moves were earlier reported by Leifeng. Wu currently serves as interim CEO and chairman of the cloud unit.

Alibaba Cloud did not reply to a written request for comment. The cloud division is at the heart of Alibaba’s AI initiatives. 

The new appointments could foreshadow a wider restructuring following Alibaba’s surprise deci­sion last week to cancel the plan­ned spinoff.

Taobao cancels Dec 12 shopping festival

Alibaba’s online shopping platforms Taobao and Tmall said on Friday they had cancelled their December 12 shopping festival and will instead host another shopping spree called ‘year-end good price’ from December 9.
 

“Compared with the 12.12 festival of previous years, the discount intensity, scale of merchants and the scale of commodities have all been greatly improved,” a written statement from Alibaba supplied to Reuters read in part.

It did not specify how long the festival would run.

This year marked the second time Alibaba declined to release its sales results for the Singles Day festival period, but data provider Syntun estimated cumulative gross merchandising volume (GMV) sales across major e-commerce platforms rose 2.08 per cent to 1.14 trillion yuan ($156.40 billion) compared with growth of 2.9 per cent last year.   

-Reuters