Technology , Financials , Automotive Author：Fan Zhang Nov 29, 2018 09:54 PM (GMT+8)

Ant Financial announced that HU Xiaoming (胡晓明) was named as the president of Ant Financial Group, who had worked as the president of Alibaba Cloud. HU had made an outstanding contribution to Alibaba Cloud in the past four years, and whose return might bring huge imagination to Ant Financial.

Nov 29, 2018/EqualOcean/ - Ant Financial announced its upgrade of organizational structure: HU Xiaoming (胡晓明) was named as the president of Ant Financial Group, who had worked as the president of Alibaba Cloud. Since then, HU Xiaoming should report to JING Xiandong (井贤栋, Eric JING), the Chairman and CEO of the company. JING Xiandong warmly welcomed Hu Xiaoming's return and said that HU’s return is the major upgrade of the organizational structure of Ant Financial.

HU Xiaoming is actually an "OG" (old guy) of Alipay and Ant Financial, who joined Alibaba in 2005 and participated in and even led the creation and development of Alipay and Ant Financial’s several different business units and used to be the chief risk officer of Ant Financial.

Later in 2014, HU Xiaoming became the president of Alibaba Cloud, under whose management, Alibaba Cloud had become the absolute leader of China’s cloud service market, and even Alibaba Group’s new engine of growth.

According to the data since 2015, Alibaba Cloud's average growth rate had exceeded 100%. The global cloud computing market presents a “3A” competition pattern of “Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud”. ZHANG Yong (张勇), the CEO of Alibaba Group, thus spoke highly of HU Xiaoming: “HU has made an outstanding contribution to Alibaba Cloud in the past four years, by realizing the company’s technological dreams as well as the business dreams.”

By returning to the Ant Financial as the president, HU Xiaoming had actually returned to a more familiar battlefield. And for the Ant Financial itself, the company gained an important leader with management experience of cloud computing technology business. In the internal welcome letter, JING Xiandong said, "I hope the return of SUN Quan (孙权, the nickname of HU Xiaoming) will bring new breakthroughs to the development of financial services which could benefit much more people, and to the development of credit system. And with HU’s help, the company’s open cooperation could also be enhanced.”

Positioned as a technology company, Ant Financial has always been committed to providing safe, convenient and transparent services to consumers as well as the small businesses, with the help of technology and innovation. In October 2017, Ant Financial announced its “BASIC” technology strategy, which means exploration on technologies in the areas of Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Security, IoT, and Supercomputing. HU Xiaoming's return will bring huge imagination.

In June 2018, Ant Financial completed a new series financing of USD 14 billion, with a valuation over USD 150 billion, which could rank ninth among all the Internet companies worldwide.

Recently, Alipay announced that Alipay has more than 900 million users worldwide, and 70% of active users in China use 3 or more Alipay services.

- Author: ZHANG Fan; Write to ZHANG Fan at ZhangFan@EqualOcean.com