(Yicai Global) May 31 --  Alibaba Cloud, the world’s third-largest public cloud provider, has reorganized its business into 18 departments, including telecoms, energy, and retail, to promote digital innovation in lower-tier markets after bidding farewell to a major customer.

Alibaba Group Holdings' cloud computing unit appointed 16 general managers to be responsible for localization operations to better serve regional customers, Zhang Jianfeng, president of Alibaba Cloud, said during a summit on May 28.

The changes may have been sparked by a recent setback. After a 58 percent revenue jump in the quarter ended March 2020, from a year ago, Alibaba Cloud recorded a 37 percent increase to CNY16.7 billion (USD2.6 billion) during the same quarter that ended a couple of months ago. The slowing pace was caused by the loss of one major customer in the internet industry, the Hangzhou-based parent revealed in its earnings report.

The focus is widening and zooming in on smaller cities. Alibaba Cloud should let its service teams move down into lower-tier industries and regions and create value rather than involving in low-level competition through price wars, said Zhang.

In 2019, Alibaba Cloud set up four departments of digital governance, financial cloud, new retail, and general industry in its restructuring. In a symbolic move, the latest regrouping removes “new” from “new retail,” a term coined by founder Jack Ma in 2016 to embody the integration of offline with online operations through data.

The unit of the Chinese e-commerce giant is the most popular cloud provider in the Asia-Pacific region, and third globally, according to a report Gartner published last month.

Editor: Emmi Laine, Xiao Yi