What's wrong with staying in China? JD.com's CEO will depart for the United States for family reasons and take a lesser role within the Chinese e-commerce company.

Chinese B2C e-commerce website JD.com announced that due to family reasons, JD's chief executive officer Shen Haoyu will move to America and the company has appointed Shen as JD's international business president.

Shen reportedly sent an internal email to JD's management team, stating that he will move to America due to family reasons. Local media report that he had communications with JD's chairman and group CEO Liu Qiangdong and the core management team. In the second half of 2015, they jointly launched JD's business unit reform and completed the training of new business unit leaders. In order to balance his work and family, Shen will locate in America in the future to support JD's expansion in the overseas market. Meanwhile, he will continue to participate in and support other major projects.

Shen joined JD in 2011 as chief operating officer. He helped JD build a complete operating system and a large operatiions team that competes with behemoth Alibaba. In 2014, Shen was promoted to CEO of JD.com. In addition, Shen played a key role in JD's milestone events. As a core member of JD's leadership team, he assisted Liu in increasing JD's trade scale from CNY20 billion to over CNY450 billion. Shen received his MBA degree from the University of Iowa in the United States.

So far, JD has not yet revealed candidates for its new CEO.

In June 2016, JD.com acquired Yihaodian.com, which is owned by U.S.-based Walmart. As part of the agreement, Walmart will receive 144,952,250 newly issued JD.com Class A ordinary shares, amounting to approximately 5% of total shares outstanding and the companies will partner in several strategic areas.