Meet the New CTO: Alibaba’s Executive Shuffle Places CEO as Acting Head of Cloud Services | Expert Analysis by ZDNet

Alibaba Group has made several changes to its top management team, swopping out its CTO and giving its chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang an additional role as acting president of its cloud business. The shuffles amongst the top seats are an annual routine, says the Chinese tech giant.

Wu Zeming is Alibaba’s new CTO, taking over the position from Li Cheng who was appointed to the role in 2019. Cheng will remain in the company as a technology advisor, Alibaba said in a statement Thursday. Wu would continue as CTO of local services.

Daniel Zhang’s additional role as acting president of Alibaba Cloud sees Jeff Zhang, who held the position previously, moving to now head the company’s research arm, Damo Academy . Jeff Zhang also retains oversight of the chip development team, T-Head, and Internet of Things (IoT) projects.

Alibaba said the shuffles amongst its top management team were carried out “annually” to ensure the company could keep pace with market changes as well as the growth of its team.

Elaborating on Jeff Zhang’s new role at Damo, Alibaba said its researchers would look to resolve last-mile e-commerce delivery issues with the use of robots and consumer challenges related to the metaverse .

All changes are effective immediately.

In its latest quarterly earnings , ending September 2022, Alibaba reported a 3% year-on-year climb in revenue to 207.18 billion yuan ($29.12 billion). Total cloud revenue, which comprised Alibaba Cloud and DingTalk, clocked at 26.76 billion yuan ($3.76 billion).

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