Daniel Zhang / Photo credit: Alibaba
Jack Ma has picked his successor. Alibaba’s founder and chairman today announced he’d step down in September 2019, exactly a year from now.
Daniel Zhang, 46, who joined Alibaba in 2007 and was appointed CEO in 2015, will take up the torch.
Ma, who founded Alibaba 19 years ago, will stay on the board until 2020. By stepping aside from the company – now worth US$418 billion – Ma can do more philanthropic work in a field that excites him: education, where he began his career.
Who is Daniel Zhang?
The free-spirited one. All employees at Alibaba have nicknames borrowed from fictional characters that inspire them. Zhang is known as “Xiaoyao zi” – a handsome-looking man with a long beard and white hair who founded the Xiaoyao Sect, or the Unfettered Sect, in a famous Chinese martial arts classic.
Perhaps diverging slightly from his free-spirited doppelganger, the executive has been praised by Ma for his rigorous thinking.
“His analytical mind is unparalleled, he holds dear our mission and vision, he embraces responsibility with passion, and he has the guts to innovate and test creative business models,” Ma wrote of Zhang in his handover letter today.
Former CFO of gaming firm. Before joining Alibaba, Zhang was the chief financial officer of Shanda Interactive, which was a force in China’s gaming industry before slipping behind rivals like Tencent and Netease over the past decade. Zhang graduated from a top Chinese university in Shanghai and is a former senior manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Brain behind Singles Day. Zhang is perhaps best known for overseeing the development of Alibaba’s Tmall as a marketplace focused on brands separate from Taobao. The goal was to shed the perception that Alibaba is riddled with fakes after its issues with the Taobao bazaar.
Zhang is also the architect of Alibaba’s annual Singles Day event, which has morphed into a global shopping spree and a battlefield that’s drawn its archrival JD into the fray.
Digitizing offline stores. In the early 2010s, Zhang spearheaded Tmall’s transition from PC to mobile. And in 2015, he was instrumental in the creation of Hema, Alibaba’s supermarket chain that blends online and offline shopping – a strategy that China’s tech titans have raced to embrace in recent years.
Editing by Steven Millward and Eileen C. Ang
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