Alibaba Group has announced that it will combine the group's human and material resources in the coming three to five years to initiate a talent strategy and create a team to cope with the changing e-commerce market.

According to Daily Economic News, four executives from Alibaba, including its COO Li Qi, CTO Wu Jiong, Executive Vice President Sun Tongyu and Senior Vice President Li Xuhui, will collectively resign from their current positions and spend time studying.

The leave of the four executives is said to be part of the Alibaba's newly launched talent strategy. Wang Shuai, a spokesperson from Alibaba, says that ten people will go for further studies and all of them are top management of the company. Wang says that among the persons to leave, Li Qi and Wu Jiong will resign from the company on June 1, 2008 and January 1, 2008, respectively, and both Sun Tongyu and Li Xuhui will resign on March 1, 2008.

In the meantime, Alibaba will call back Zeng Ming, president of Yahoo China, to work as chief of staff for the group, transfer Senior Vice President Lu Zhaoxi to work as president of Taobao.com, Senior Vice President Jin Jianhang as president of Yahoo China, and vice president Shao Xiaofeng as executive president of Alipay. However, Alibaba has not announced who will fill the COO and CTO candidates.