By LU Keyan

QIU Yuepeng has been named chief operating officer of Tencent’s Cloud & Smart Industries Group (CSIG) reporting directly to CEO Dowson Tong.

With Tencent for many years, Qiu worked on QQ before being appointed president of Tencent Cloud in 2014. 

CSIG is restructuring. This is the first major change of personnel since CSIG was founded in 2018. While Tong remains CEO, new presidents were announced for smart retail, cybersecurity and transportation divisions. Former vice president of SAP Software, LI Qiang joins CSIG as vice president in charge of industrial and service businesses. 

Behind the changes lie fierce competition in cloud computing. The “Infrastructure as a service” (IaaS) - a cloud computing form providing virtualized computing resources over the internet - market in Q4 last year reached US$3.5 billion (22 billion yuan) in China, with Alibaba, Huawei and Tencent as market leaders. Huawei Cloud doubled in size during Q1-Q3 last year.

“No one is surprised at Qiu’s appointment and he has been working with Tong for a long time,” an employee from CSIG told Jiemian News. “The group also established regional departments to further promote the business and a technical committee for R&D.”