Jack Ma, co-founder of Chinese tech heavyweight Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, affirmed on Wednesday the courage Alibaba's new leadership team had to embrace new changes, saying the company has returned to a healthy growth track and will continue to innovate.

Ma wrote in an internal letter to employees that Alibaba's most fundamental change last year was to abandon the blind pursuit of key performance indicator, or KPI, and focus on customer value.

He emphasized Alibaba hacked away at the big company's disease, and has returned from an organization that makes decisions slowly back to one that is simple and agile, where efficiency and the market comes first.

He said the innovation is not to pursue higher profits, but to try to survive in an era full of rapid change, while admitting this path of reform and innovation has never been accompanied by applause.

Ma also noted, "The artificial intelligence era has just arrived. Everything has just begun, and we are in that moment."

Alibaba has set its focus on growing its core e-commerce and cloud computing businesses in the wake of a sweeping restructuring, which was announced a year ago. Joe Tsai succeeded Daniel Zhang as the chairman of Alibaba in September, while Wu Yongming took over the CEO role from Zhang.

fanfeifei@chinadaily.com.cn