BEIJING, April 7 (TMTPOST)— Another saga who founded leading internet companies in China was on his way out. JD.com’s founder Liu Qiangdong, or Richard Liu, resigned as CEO of the e-commerce giant, succeeded by the president Xu Lei, who joined in over a decade ago, according to an announcement on Thursday.

Source: Visual China

“I’ll devote more of my time to JD’s long-term strategies and future drivers as we continue to work on the most challenging yet valuable things,” Liu said. He will remain chairman of the board of directors will and continue to focus on guiding the company’s long-term strategies, mentoring younger management, and contributing to the revitalization of rural areas. Xu, serving as an executive director of the board from that day on, has held various senior roles and led JD Retail to achieve high-quality growth for consecutive years. Under his leadership, JD launched 618 Grand Promotion, a major online shopping festival in China held each year in June next to Singles’ Day, an annual shopping event created by Alibaba.

Prior to Liu, three other Chinese internet giants witnessed their founders’ fading out. Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma stepped down as CEO back in 2013 and handed the chairman role to his successor Daniel Zhang in 2019. Huang Zheng, founder of Pinduoduo, quitted as CEO in July, 2020, and his successor Chen Lei took Huang’s position as the chairman in last March. In his letter to investors last year, Huang said the board was entrusted to exercise his voting rights and pledged not to sell his shares for three year. He disclosed he would devote himself to food and life science research to explore new spaces for his company’s quality and rapid growth.

Last May, Zhang Yiming, a co-founder of TikTok parent ByteDance, suddenly announced to step down as CEO. "I decided to quit and leave daily management to focus on those key works in the long run such as long-term strategies, corporate culture and social responsibilities”, Zhang wrote in his resignation letter. He showed desire for learning and systemic thinking, studying new things and making experiments and experience on them, so as to" create more possibilities for the company in a period of ten years”.