Strategic management expert available to discuss Alibaba leadership change

EXPERT ALERT

David Ruth
612-702-9473
david@rice.edu

Strategic management expert available to discuss Alibaba leadership change

HOUSTON – (May 8, 2015) – Anthea Zhang, professor of strategic management at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, is available to discuss Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s new CEO, Daniel Zhang.

Photo courtesy Brandon Martin/Rice University

Two years ago Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma announced that he was stepping down as CEO and appointed Jonathan Lu to lead the company. After spectacular growth in recent years, Alibaba has seen its shares drop by more than 30 percent since November, opening the door for Zhang, who was the company’s chief financial officer, to take over. Lu will stay with Alibaba in a vice chairman role. According to Anthea Zhang, Ma still exerts control and power at Alibaba, regardless of who the CEO is.

“Welcome to Alibaba’s roundtable of CEOs,” Anthea Zhang said. “Jonathan Lu is leaving the CEO position but he is not gone. The new CEO, Daniel Zhang, came from an ‘unlikely’ background, at least in Jack Ma’s previous perspective. Ma once said that the worst scenario is a CFO becoming a CEO. Other people rotate, but Jack Ma will remain steering Alibaba.”

News media interested in interviewing Zhang should contact David Ruth, director of national media relations at Rice, at david@rice.edu or 713-348-6327.

Rice University has a VideoLink ReadyCam TV interview studio. ReadyCam is capable of transmitting broadcast-quality standard-definition and high-definition video directly to all news media organizations around the world 24/7.

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