One of China’s best known corporate leaders, Jack Ma (馬雲), will step down as CEO of Alibaba Group (阿里巴巴), the e-commerce firm he founded in 1999 to tap the nation’s enormous online shopping potential.
Ma said that younger people would be better placed to run the company.
Ma said he would name a successor by May 10, when he switches to the role of executive chairman.
He said most of Alibaba’s leaders “born in the 1960s” would also pass their leadership responsibilities to younger colleagues.
“As a founder CEO, stepping down ... is a difficult decision. It’s not because I wanted to take things easy [though the job of Alibaba CEO is no easy task], it is because I see that Alibaba’s young people have better, more brilliant, dreams than mine, and they are more capable of building a future that belongs to them,” Ma wrote in an e-mail to employees.
The shift is a significant one for Alibaba and follows moves announced last week to chop the group into 25 smaller divisions — to give managers more flexibility.
It also comes after a transformative deal Alibaba struck with Yahoo Inc last year, in which the Chinese company agreed to buy back about half of the stake in itself held by its US partner.
The news came ahead of a potential initial public offering (IPO) by Alibaba.
“A series of changes at Alibaba Group may suggest that an IPO is imminent,” said Wendy Huang, an analyst at CIMB Securities Ltd in Hong Kong.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained