Eddie Wu gears up to take charge of Alibaba empire – with a little help from mentor Jack Ma. You won’t believe what they have planned!

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When Alibaba co-founder Eddie Yongming Wu set out on his own eight years ago, he didn’t stray far from mentor Jack Ma.

For the investment fund he was setting up, he chose an office in the central wetlands of Hangzhou, a few ponds from where Ma held court and practiced tai chi. Wu also remained as Ma’s special assistant and remained a member of the Alibaba partnership, which serves as the de facto board of directors for the group.

“Jack and Eddie have a close and trusting relationship,” said a former Alibaba executive.

Now nearly two decades after founding Alibaba with Ma and 16 others, the 48-year-old Wu is set to preside over the disruption of the tech empire they’ve built. Wu will assume the position of chief executive officer in the fall while group vice president Joe Tsai will take over the presidency.

Alibaba is betting that losing weight and returning to its e-commerce roots will help it regain market share ceded to fledgling online platforms like ByteDance’s Pinduoduo and Douyin. He is spinning off other major business lines, from food delivery to supermarkets, with e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall set to remain the group’s top wholly-owned businesses.

“Eddie and Teacher Ma are really symbiotic,” said a longtime Alibaba employee. “Eddie admires Master Ma, his ideas and his philosophy and will be excellent in executing his vision,” the person said.

Ma will remain without an official position at Alibaba but plans to become more deeply involved, according to people close to the group. Photos of Ma having a farewell coffee at Alibaba’s headquarters with outgoing CEO Daniel Zhang flooded the Chinese internet on Tuesday.

But it tackles the delicate task of engineering Alibaba’s turnaround without setting off alarm bells in Beijing. High-ranking Communist Party officials may be concerned about her attempt to rekindle his political influence, which they do sparked his downfall more than two years ago after giving a crusade speech in Shanghai.

“It could speak to the situation of Jack not really making a full comeback given the 2020 speech,” said Duncan Clark, author of Alibaba: the house built by Jack Ma. “Having a proxy makes sense,” she said.

The former Alibaba executive said Ma has no interest in returning to running the day-to-day business. “Jack plays the role of the architect. What he knows best is people and how to match them together,” he said. “Jack is trying to take Alibaba back to its roots: as it got bigger, the culture got diluted.”

Wu joined Ma’s start-up China Pages after graduating from university in 1996 as one of its first developers. “Mom told me about her business and vision; I found it witty and inspiring,” Wu later said in an interview at Tsinghua University.

China Pages soon disbanded, and Ma took some of the team north to Beijing to manage a website for China’s trade ministry. “We picked team members and Wu Yongming went with Jack,” China Pages co-founder He Yibing recalled in an interview with the Financial Times.

“Wu is very hardworking,” he said. “At one point we imported some workstations and servers and all the manuals were in English. His knowledge of English wasn’t very good, but he dove into those manuals, checking words in the dictionary so he could put machines together.

After Ma left Beijing, Wu was one of 18 co-founders who flocked to his Hangzhou apartment in 1999 to set up his next venture, Alibaba. “He was a talented young man who believed in Jack and Jack trusted him,” He said.

A few years later Ma entrusted him with building Alimama, the ad engine that would go on to mint money for the company’s e-commerce businesses. Her time there earned him the nickname Mama Wu internally, several employees said.

“Part of the nickname came from creating Alimama, but it was also because Mama Wu was always looking out for us, fixing bugs or new architectures,” said a former Alimama team member. “She always finds a way to fix it.”

The person added, “As a co-founder close to Ma, he could always provide us with the resources we needed.”

Wu then created the Taobao shopping app, which quickly evolved into a key part of Chinese consumers’ daily shopping habits. After Alibaba floated in New York, he became Ma’s special assistant. For a time, he followed Ma everywhere, people close to both men said.

In 2015, Wu retired from Alibaba, chairing its healthcare arm while launching Vision Plus Capital, the venture capital firm set up next to Ma’s personal office in the Wetlands. The group has backed several Alibaba employees who venture into their own business, such as Qiang Hui of digital health care company Come-Future and Jerry Wang of Tuya. It now has more than $1 billion in assets under management, according to filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Several Alibaba employees have suggested that Wu’s investment experience would be beneficial to the group as it transforms itself into a holding company, charged with directing the profits generated by Taobao and Tmall.

Wu’s first task will be to reverse the decline of the platforms. But he’s pushing the group to refocus on small- and medium-sized Taobao sellers instead of the big brands that dominate Tmall. He told employees last month that Alimama, the advertising platform Wu built, was key to the group’s future, according to two people briefed at the meeting.

“The company has kept changing its strategy without achieving anything substantial,” said an Alibaba manager. “The main problems lie in the management. There hasn’t been a great leader since Jack Ma,” the person said.

Additional reporting by Nian Liu in Beijing