Jack Ma. Photo credit: World Economic Forum/Jolanda Flubacher, under Creative Commons license

Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma is resigning from the board of Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank Group, the company has announced. He will officially resign on the 25th of June, 2020, his departure coinciding with the appointment of three new board members. Ma is leaving SoftBank’s board after 13 years of being a member. SoftBank didn’t provide a reason for his departure but it seems Ma has been withdrawing from business duties as of late to focus on other initiatives. In September of last year, he stepped down from Alibaba, the e-commerce giant he co-founded and guided through enormous success.

Ma notably has a long-running relationship with SoftBank’s founder and CEO, Masayoshi Son. In fact, Alibaba is currently SoftBank’s most valuable investment, with a stake in the company worth more than $100 billion. That stake traces its roots to a reported $20 million investment that SoftBank made in Alibaba in the year 2000.

Out of SoftBank’s current 11 directors, Ma is the only person departing. The three new nominees coinciding with his departure are Lip-Bu Tan, the CEO of publicly-traded software company Cadence Design Systems; Yuko Kawamoto, a professor at Waseda Business School, a prestigious business school in Japan; and Yoshimitsu Goto, SoftBank’s Chief Financial Officer.