Alibaba's annual report shows the company has removed all Ant Group executives from its partnership and says only its own staff will be able to become partners
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the final formal cut in a two-year unwind. Under intense pressure from Beijing, Ant Group agreed in April 2021 to restructure as a financial holding company regulated more like a bank, and by late 2023 the People's Bank of China listed Alipay as having no controlling shareholder, completing the removal of controlling stakeholders Jack Ma had promised.
Alibaba's annual report now closes the loop on the group side: every Ant Group executive is out of the partnership, and only Alibaba's own staff can become partners going forward. It lands alongside the broader decentralization Alibaba began during the crackdown, when it started delegating more responsibility to business-unit presidents to shed its monolithic image.
First-order effects
- Ant Group executives lose their seat in the body that nominates and aligns Alibaba's leadership, ending a formal channel of cross-company influence at the top of the partnership.
- The partnership is now a closed Alibaba-only institution, concentrating partner selection entirely inside the listed company rather than across the Ma-affiliated ecosystem.
Second-order effects
- With no shared personnel layer between the two companies, Alibaba and Ant become cleaner to regulate, audit, and value separately — reducing the entanglement that Chinese regulators spent the crackdown dismantling.
- Investors and counterparties can now treat Alibaba's governance as independent of Ant's fate, which matters for how the market prices each entity's regulatory risk.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, China's platform groups keep converting founder-and-affiliate control webs into regulator-legible corporate structures: separate entities, no controllers, no cross-directorships — with the state as the effective arbiter of who controls what.
The trend: China's tech giants are systematically unwinding founder- and affiliate-based control networks into standalone, regulator-legible corporate structures.