Our advisory board

Since August 2012 Peter F. Schmid has been CEO and executive partner of Visable (formerly “Wer liefert was”).   After studying business at the LMU in Munich, he worked as Brand Manager at Procter & Gamble. 1999 he switched to the online vehicle market Autoscout24 shortly after its launch. In his position as Managing Director he founded the marketplace operator Scout24 Media.   Mr Schmid became Vice President at eBay Classifieds and CEO of mobile.de in 2006. Almost four years later Schmid took over the management of the online dating agency PARSHIP. 

Kuo Zhang joined Alibaba Group in 2011 and has been serving as President at Alibaba.com since 2017.   Prior to joining Alibaba, Mr Zhang worked at Taobao, Microsoft and IBM as a product expert and project lead for numerous projects on technology innovation. He graduated from Tsinghua University with a Bachelor and Master's degree in computer science. Mr Zhang has extensive consumer and enterprise R&D experience and is the co-inventor of more than ten U.S. patents in online services, healthcare and multi-touch point systems.  

Karl Wehner joined Alibaba Group in June 2016 and was appointed Managing Director of Alibaba DACH, CEE and Turkey in July 2017. In 2023 he was appointed Managing Director for Alibaba‘s B2B business in the DACH region. With over 20 years’ experience in digital commerce, he is responsible for helping partners across key European markets access global markets to sell and source through Alibaba’s cross-border e-commerce platforms.Mr Wehner started his e-commerce career at Amazon Germany in 1999, where he launched and managed the Marketplace business. Before joining Alibaba, he successfully built a third-party marketplace for Takealot.com in Cape Town, which has become South Africa's largest e-commerce company. 

Dr. Thomas Zhu joined Alibaba Group in 2019 and has since held various positions in the company, including Assistant CFO Alibaba Digital Entertainment Group, CFO Alibaba Sports, Deputy CFO AliExpress Russia and CFO Intime Group. He has been serving as Chief Financial Officer at Alibaba.com since June 2023.Mr Zhu was trained as finance professional at DSM and subsequently joined Chinese Online and Huace Group as Vice President NewMedia and Chinese Online as Vice President and General Manager Europe and IP Office.Mr Zhu gained a PhD in management from Erasmus University and an EMBA in finance from  Maastricht University in the Netherlands following the completion of a three-year management science and engineering course at Zhejiang University.