China’s online trading giant Alibaba wants to split into six parts. The Alibaba Group is to stand in the background as a holding company, with former Alibaba boss Daniel Zhang as CEO. Each of the business groups is led by its own CEO and board of directors. “The market is the best litmus test, and each business group and company can independently raise capital and go public when they are ready,” Zhang said, according to the press release.
The six corporate groups include the cloud business, which will also be home to the AI division, where work is currently underway on generative AI services in the style of ChatGPTs. Daniel Zhang will also be in charge here. The other areas include international and China-related online trade, media, logistics and other local services.
Founder Jack Ma resurfaced
The step should be a signal that Alibaba is ready to raise money on the capital market in the future, after the Chinese government has cracked down on Internet companies in some cases in recent years. Recently the pressure had eased a bit here. Shares rose significantly premarket in the US.
For the first time in more than a year, the Chinese billionaire and Alibaba founder Jack Ma reappeared in China on Monday. As reported by the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post, which he owns, Ma attended a school in the eastern Chinese metropolis of Hangzhou. Previously, he had visited friends in Hong Kong and the Art Basel art fair, which took place there over the weekend. According to the report, Ma had been abroad for more than a year before returning to China.
The founder of the online giant Alibaba and the fintech company Ant Group, who has apparently fallen out of favor, has only rarely been seen in public since autumn 2020. At that time, the Chinese regulators cracked down on Ant Group’s IPO. Ma had also relinquished control of Ant Group earlier this year, another step in his retirement from the online empire he built.
(sigh)