The ex-President Xie Wen was previously the chief executive of Chinese financial Web portal Hexun.com before taking on the role with Yahoo! China in October this year. Xie Wen's departure was for personal reasons, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
Instead of working with the search engine, Xie Wen will become a strategic advisor to Alibaba, while Yahoo! China's head of strategy development, Zeng Ming, will take over the helm as the interim president. Xie has, as of yet, not been available for comment.
Yahoo! China has seen major changes since Alibaba, China's largest e-commerce company, took over one year ago. For example, Yahoo! China's product search manager, Ya-Bing Chu, recently commented on changes regarding the integration of knowledge from the Yahoo! Answers community to enhance a user's search experience. Chu said:
"[We now] feature an excerpt of the best answers to questions that are relevant to your search. The Excerpt gives you a more detailed preview of the content from the Answers community before you click through."
So if users want to incorporate personal experiences into their search, they can easily do so with Yahoo!'s extra search options; and innovative features such as this are continuously on the rise as Yahoo! persists with its rigorous programme of development to keep up with the evolving search engine market.
Yahoo! China was absorbed by Alibaba last year when Yahoo Inc. of the United States bought a 40 percent stake in Alibaba for $1 billion.
While Christine Splinder, associate director of Communications at Alibaba, claimed, "Essentially, [Xie] has left for personal reasons," an anonymous internet expert said the reason behind Xie's resignation was a direct result of conflicting strategies in moving forward with Yahoo! China.
Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba told Reuters that Yahoo! China would become profitable in 2007 once the reshuffling settled down.
China is the world's second-largest Internet market, but researchers say Yahoo! China lags far behind leading Chinese search engine, Baidu Inc., which currently holds roughly half of the market, and Google Inc, who agreed a censorship deal with the Chinese authorities earlier this year.
In October, Baidu also suffered a setback as it lost its Chief Technology Adviser, Jerry Liu.
