Alibaba Group will appoint Maggie Wu -- who has been with the company since 2007 -- as chief financial officer, effective May 10. At that time, the e-commerce giant's current CFO, Joe Tsai, will become executive vice chairman.
After joining Alibaba in July 2007 as CFO of Alibaba.com, Wu became deputy CFO for all of Alibaba. She is credited with helping institute the financial systems and organization that led to Alibaba.com going public in November 2007. She also led the company's privatization of that subsidiary last year. Since then, she has been responsible for Alibaba's finance organization -- from operations finance and reporting to internal control and tax. In her new role, Wu will be responsible for overseeing corporate finance and audit in addition to her current duties.
Tsai will continue to oversee Alibaba's strategic investments and share responsibilities for maintaining external relations with financial and other key constituents.
While working as CFO, Alibaba says, Tsai drove every round of the company's private financings -- from early rounds of venture funding to Yahoo!'s $1 billion investment in the company in 2005. More recently, in 2012, he led $2.5 billion of debt and equity financing to take Alibaba.com private. He has also worked on bigger company deals in the past, like repurchasing $7.6 billion of its shares from Yahoo!. Tsai is one of Alibaba's 18 co-founders and a member of the board of directors since the company's inception.
The new reorganization comes with a change at the CEO level. On May 10, Jonathan Lu will take over the CEO position from Jack Ma.
