It is revealed that JD Cloud PaaS's top position was dismissed by Liu Qiangdong!

Zhi Thinker

Author | Cheng Qian

Editor | Yun Peng

Zhi Thinker April 1 news: According to information from Leifeng.com and Xin Xingqing, JD Group Vice President and head of JD Cloud’s PaaS business unit, Liu Chen, has officially left the company recently, apparently approved and dismissed directly by Liu Qiangdong.

▲ Liu Chen, Vice President of JD Group and head of JD Cloud’s PaaS business unit (Image source: People’s Daily)

The PaaS team led by Liu Chen has been transferred as a whole to JD Cloud’s IaaS business unit, where it is managed centrally by Gong Yicheng, head of the IaaS business unit.

According to publicly available information, Liu Chen graduated from Beijing University of Technology. He is a 2008 master’s student and a core veteran of JD Cloud. He has held roles such as head of JD Cloud’s customer success department, vice president at the Group level, and then head of the PaaS product R&D department. Liu Chen led JD Cloud’s teams for many years to support high-traffic scenarios such as the 618 shopping festival and the Spring Festival Gala, and helped build one of the world’s largest cloud-native clusters.

It is rumored that the reason for his departure is that his performance failed to meet targets and there were compliance issues. The PaaS business performance under Liu Chen did not meet expectations, and there are reports that his responsible department encountered compliance issues at the contract level and that these have been verified.

JD Cloud was established in 2016, which is 7 years later than leading companies like Tencent and Alibaba. According to information shared by users on Maima, the goal JD Group set for JD Cloud was to grow by 60% in 2026, but internally the judgment was: “This task basically can’t be completed.”

In addition, at the business level on March 18, JD Cloud announced that all core products would not have price increases, and it would offer even greater discounts on multiple products. JD Cloud will clearly refuse to follow the trend of raising prices. The prices of all core products, including cloud servers, AI computing power, storage, and networking, will remain stable. No new price increase items will be added, and no charging standards will be raised. In addition, it will implement even greater discount measures for multiple products such as databases and middleware, with an average discount of more than 16% and a maximum discount of up to 40%.

This time, Liu Chen’s departure and the PaaS team’s overall transfer to the IaaS business unit may indicate that JD is slimming down and entering a period of full-on performance push.