The proposed sell-off of Freshippo and RT-Mart comes amid Alibaba's restructuring and China's tightened scrutiny of IPOs

Along with Ma, Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai also purchased about $151 million worth of Alibaba's US-traded shares

China's Alibaba and Tencent have reportedly told Nvidia that they will be switching to domestic firms such as Huawei for some advanced chip orders

The closure of the lab is the latest internal change at Alibaba, which surprised investors earlier this month by scrapping its plan to spin-off its cloud business

Just hours before the firm pulled its cloud unit’s listing, it had emerged Ma's family trust intended to sell 10 million American depository shares

"The shelving is a surprise and makes us wonder if there are issues behind the scenes that we aren't aware of," one analyst said, but news that Jack Ma's family trust was selling shares likely also hurt the stock

The e-commerce outfit had unveiled plans in March to list its cloud business as part of the biggest restructuring in its 24-year history

Patent applications filed by Chinese companies have surged in the last five years since the US began its tech curbs campaign

Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba, ByteDance and Baidu, had placed orders worth billions for 2024 and Nvidia had planned to deliver some of them by mid-November

The Belgian security service is monitoring Alibaba’s operations, with scrutiny on software systems that collate sensitive data and the need for the group to share information with Chinese authorities

The logistics unit’s launch would make it the first to be split off since the Chinese e-commerce giant announced its restructure six months ago

Eddie Wu, a long-time lieutenant of former Alibaba chief Jack Ma, takes charge of the company amid its biggest organisational restructure of its 24-year history