In Alibaba’s latest management reshuffle, theCEO of the group’s local life services division, Yu Yongfu, is stepping down to make way for a younger generation of leadership. The division includes the food delivery platform Ele.me, which was acquired by Alibaba in 2018, and the navigation provider AutoNavi. Both will get a new chairman and CEO as part of the reshuffle.
With Yu’s departure, Alibaba appears to be taking the division in a new direction and injecting fresh blood in the form of post-80s executives. Wu Zeming, born in 1982, and Han Liu, born in 1988, will be heading Ele.me as chairman and CEO respectively, an important task given the food delivery platform is the main driver of the local life division.
“The company is using managers with more technical background,” an analyst at 86 Research said. “We can clearly see the CEO Eddie Wu is reviewing the businesses of different sectors and may try to find different strategy priorities for the company.”
The news comes almost 1 year after Alibaba announced it would be splitting its empire into six separate business units, with the e-commerce division remaining wholly owned. The remaining five units would get their own CEOs and launch IPOs independently. Since then, plans for two of the divisions to go public have been shelved, with Alibaba citing tough market conditions.
