HONG KONG: China’s Alibaba Group has announced a major management reshuffle aimed at spurring the e-commerce giant’s growth at a time when the Chinese economy is slowing despite an end to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions a half-year ago.

Eddie Wu, chairman of its e-commerce group, will succeed Daniel Zhang as CEO, the company said in a statement Tuesday.

Zhang will be CEO and chairman of Alibaba’s cloud computing unit, which has been approved to be spun off and is expected to be listed for trading within a year.

Alibaba’s current executive vice chairman, Joseph Tsai, is to succeed Zhang as chairman of the Alibaba Group. Tsai, who owns the NBA basketball team Brooklyn Nets, is a Taiwan-born Canadian citizen and helped to found Alibaba in the late 1990s.

The changes take effect Sept 10. Zhang became Alibaba Group’s CEO in 2015 and succeeded Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma as chairman in 2019.

“This is the right time for me to make a transition, given the importance of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group as it progresses towards a full spin-off,” Zhang said in a statement.

Alibaba in March announced plans to reshape itself into six business divisions with plans to allow all but its core e-commerce business to raise outside capital and go public.