Alibaba is bringing back two of Jack Ma’s longest-serving lieutenants to try and turn around a company that’s struggled to regain its footing since Beijing’s regulatory assault against the internet sector in 2021. Yet investors remain uncertain what they can do to restore an icon of Chinese private enterprise to its former glory.
Alibaba surprised markets by declaring Eddie Wu and Joseph Tsai will replace eight-year veteran CEO Daniel Zhang at the helm. Both men are business heavyweights of their generation, credited with steering the technology and strategy that underpinned China’s erstwhile most valuable corporation — before Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s tech crackdown obliterated growth across swaths of the industry and nixed once-aggressive expansion plans.
Their task now is to figure out how to follow through on a landmark six-way restructuring and spinoff that Zhang unfurled just months before. The idea was to create a family of leaders in businesses from cloud computing and logistics to international commerce that could seek funding and list separately, appeasing shareholders hungry for value.