Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has decided not to sell a third of its stake in Ant Group Co. in the Chinese fintech leader’s upcoming share buyback, saying it wants to retain its stake in an important partner.

Alibaba said in a stock exchange filing that it will not participate in Ant’s plan to buy back 7.6 percent of its shares, which was approved by the latter’s board of directors. The decision came after the e-commerce company and Temasek Holdings Pte said it was considering selling some stakes during the program.

Ant, a fintech pioneer that once dominated the online sphere from mobile payments to money management, has lost much of its value after regulators at the eleventh hour scrapped a record IPO due in 2020. Singapore’s state-owned investment firm, for example, is seeking to better understand how Ant arrived at a buyout valuation of about 567.1 billion yuan ($78.9 billion). That’s nearly 70% below its estimated market capitalization of $280 billion in 2020.

Chinese regulators are wrapping up a two-year crackdown on the country’s once-free tech giants, imposing more than $1 billion in fines on Ant and Tencent Holdings Ltd. in July. Ant completed the reorganization ordered by Beijing, though it led to lower profitability and slowed growth of the sprawling platform, which spanned lending, insurance and asset management.

Alipay remains the central payment medium on Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall shopping platforms, as well as a key customer of its $11 billion cloud business. The company is looking to strengthen the position of its six main divisions, which will be split into six parts to create several independent corporations, most of which will be able to obtain their own financing and subsequently go public.

Alibaba’s decision not to sell the fintech company some of its shares in Ant Group raises the possibility that the latter’s contribution to Alibaba’s cloud computing revenue will hit a record high in fiscal 2024. Last year, Ant paid 52% more cloud payments to Alibaba and contributed nearly 11% of its cloud revenues compared to 7.4% the previous year.