ALIBABA Group Holding Ltd. on Sunday announced that Daniel Zhang will step down from its cloud business, in a surprise move just two months after the firm said he would leave his roles as group CEO and chairman to focus on the cloud unit.

Zhang had previously been concurrently serving in three roles, heading the group as well as the cloud intelligence unit. The unit is China’s largest cloud provider and is set to be spun off from Alibaba as part of the group’s restructuring.

Alibaba announced his decision to depart the unit in an internal letter to staff. Zhang had been scheduled to hand over the role of group CEO to Eddie Wu on Sunday and the letter said Wu will also take charge of the cloud business after Zhang’s departure.

The cloud business is a major part of a restructuring Alibaba announced in March that breaks the firm up into six units, each with its own boards and CEOs.

Alibaba said in May it aimed to complete the public listing of its cloud unit within the next 12 months. On Sunday, the company said it would continue to execute the spinoff plan under a separate, to be appointed management team.

“Daniel has expressed his wish to transition away from his role as chairman and CEO of Cloud Intelligence Group,” the company said in the letter that was signed by Joseph Tsai, an Alibaba co-founder who also took over the chairman role from Zhang as planned Sunday.

Zhang’s departure ends a storied eight-year tenure, during which Alibaba became China’s largest company and ventured into new arenas such as physical retail, which grew into one of the company’s fastest growing businesses.        (SD-Agencies)