Jack Ma, founder of China’s Alibaba.com, is stepping down as chief executive but will remain chairman.
Since forming the company in 1999, Ma, a former English teacher, has built up the company to become an ecommerce powerhouse. The company has 24,000 employees and is estimated to be worth $40 billion.
By its own measure, Alibaba grew to surpass Amazon and eBay combined in terms of sales volume last year. In the first 11 months of 2012, it recorded $157 billion in transactions on its platforms. $3.1 billion of that came in a single day on the company’s 11/11 Shopping Festival.
In a letter to employees, Ma said he would no longer be CEO after May 10 but will remain active as executive chairman.
He said a successor will be named by May but gave no indication who it will be.
Alibaba Group’s business-to-business Alibaba and consumer-oriented Taobao and Tmall platforms are among the world’s busiest e-commerce outlets. The group also manages Yahoo’s China arm.
Ma, a former English teacher, founded Alibaba in 1999 to link Chinese suppliers with retailers abroad. The Hurun Report, which follows China’s wealthy, estimated his net worth last year at $2.4 billion.
Ma said that at 48, he is no longer young by Internet industry standards and Alibaba needs to promote younger leaders.
He said Alibaba executives who were born in the 1960s would start to hand over responsibility to younger managers this year.
“It’s not because I want to take things easy,” he wrote. “It’s 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.”
The move comes a week after Alibaba announced it was reorganizing its seven business units into 25 smaller divisions meant to compete more effectively in China’s turbulent Internet market. Ma said that would be the hardest “cultural transformation” in company history.
China has the world’s biggest population of Internet users, with 564 million people online as of the end of 2012, according to an industry group, the China Internet Network Information Center.
The country trails the United States and Japan in total e-commerce spending but is forecast by the Boston Consulting Group to take the No. 1 position by 2015.
Yahoo paid $1 billion for its stake in Alibaba in 2005 and turned over control of Yahoo China. But the relationship grew strained as Alibaba grew quickly while Yahoo shrank in the face of competition.
In September, Alibaba paid $7.1 billion in cash and stock to buy back about half of the 40 percent of the company owned by Yahoo. The U.S. company still owns 23 percent of Alibaba.
