“Over the past four years, Jeff has led the Alibaba Cloud Intelligence team to deliver outstanding results in technological innovation and industry influence,” Zhang wrote.
Zhou Jingren, who has been serving as deputy head of Damo Academy and will retain his current roles, has been appointed CTO of Alibaba Cloud.
In another key change, Wu Zeming, 42, has taken on the role of Alibaba’s CTO, replacing Cheng Li, while remaining in his current position as CTO of local services.
Cheng, who will transition to an “adviser” role, is one of several Alibaba veterans who joined payment services Alipay in 2005, rising “from foot soldier to general”. He was promoted to CTO of Ant Group – current operator of Alipay and an affiliate of Alibaba – in 2014 and then to chief operating officer in late 2019.
The appointments take effect immediately.
Alibaba’s cloud business is one of the company’s biggest growth drivers. Photo: Handout
While Alibaba said it “regularly reshuffles its management” and that the changes are routine, its cloud subsidiary has drawn public attention in recent days after its service suffered “the longest major-scale failure” in a decade in Hong Kong and Macau.
The outage on December 18 stretched for more than 24 hours at some customer sites, suspending withdrawals at major cryptocurrency exchange OKX and disabling the website of the Monetary Authority of Macau.
Cloud business has become one of the key growth drivers of Alibaba, as the company’s e-commerce operations such as Taobao and Tmall face increasing competition in a market where consumers are spending less.
Amid a slowing economy, Alibaba’s share price fell as low as HK$60.25 in October before rebounding along with other Chinese tech stocks.
Alibaba did not respond to a request for additional comments.
Other changes announced on Thursday include the promotion of Jane Jiang Fang, who will succeed Judy Tong Wenhong as Alibaba’s chief people officer on April 1. One of Alibaba’s 18 original co-founders, Jiang has been a senior executive in the human resources team responsible for personnel management, including community-building, as well as the safety and satisfaction of employees.
