(Yicai Global) May 18 -- Jack Ma, founder of China’s Alibaba Group Holding, will step down from the board of SoftBank Group next month after serving as a director at the Japanese tech giant for 13 years, it said today.

No reasons were given for business tycoon’s resignation but he has been focusing more on philanthropic work in recent years and retired as executive chairman of Hangzhou-based Alibaba last September. Ma has long had a good relationship with Softbank, one of Alibaba’s angel investors in 2000.

Three new directors will be appointed at the annual shareholders' meeting on June 25, two of whom will be from external bodies, the Tokyo-based firm said. They are Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto, Lip-Bu Tan, chief executive at California-based Cadence Design Systems, and Prof. Yuko Kawamoto of Waseda Graduate School of Business and Finance.

SoftBank today also reported a JPY1.35 trillion (USD12.6 trillion) loss for last year, one the largest ever by a Japanese firm, due to bad investments in the sharing economy such as WeWork.

The Tokyo-based conglomerate plans to spend JPY500 billion (USD4.7 billion) to buy back around 6.7 percent of the its shares before next March, it said. Softbank issued a buyback plan on a similar scale in March and so far has re-purchased around JPY250 billion of its own stock.

Editor: Kim Taylor