HONG KONG – Alibaba Group Holding is replacing eight-year veteran chief Daniel Zhang at the helm of a Chinese e-commerce leader bleeding market share and struggling to revive growth in the post-Covid-19 era.

Executive vice-chairman Joseph Tsai, a long-time confidant of billionaire co-founder Jack Ma, will take Mr Zhang’s position as the chairman of the board.

Mr Eddie Wu, now chairman of Alibaba’s core Taobao and Tmall online commerce divisions, will take over as chief executive of the US$240 billion (S$322.7 billion) company.

Mr Zhang’s shock departure comes after Alibaba announced a six-way restructuring to try and juice growth and create a family of standalone leaders in businesses from cloud computing and logistics to international commerce.

He unveiled his grand vision in detail just as Alibaba posted its third consecutive quarter of single-digit revenue growth, reinforcing concerns that a Chinese consumer spending rebound may be further out than anticipated.

“The good thing is that the new CEO and chairman are all co-founders of the company and are the closest to Jack Ma. That means Ma remains the spiritual leader of Alibaba,” said KGI Asia head of investment strategy Kenny Wen. “I don’t think the management change signals a big strategy change.”

Mr Zhang will remain head of the cloud business. He took the helm in 2015 after rising to prominence as one of the architects of the company’s “new retail” initiative, intended to marry physical and online retail and extend the firm’s dominance into areas ranging from malls to supermarkets.

He became chairman a few years later as growth surged and Alibaba at one point became China’s most valuable company.

Then in 2020, regulators cracked down on Mr Ma and his Ant Group after the billionaire angered regulators.

Beijing began a clampdown on the privately owned tech sphere shortly after, accusing Alibaba of monopolistic behaviour before levying a record fine for the alleged violations.

The company thereafter never regained its stratospheric growth, particularly as new entrants such as ByteDance and PDD Holdings sapped its core business.

It began to lose market share in the cloud, its other engine of growth, to state-backed rivals.

This brings “old Alibaba management back to the stage again”, said Forsyth Barr Asia senior research analyst Willer Chen.

“I’m not sure whether this is a good thing for Alibaba, given how the key should be new growth drivers and the restructuring plan.” BLOOMBERG