On the morning of December 6, Alibaba announced the latest round of structural adjustments: Alibaba's chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang issued an internal letter announcing that the company had upgraded its "diversified governance" system and appointed Dai Shan and Jiang Fan to be responsible for the newly established "China Digital Commerce" and "Overseas Digital Commerce" respectively.
Dai Shan will represent Alibaba Group in charge of Taobao (including Taobao, Tmall, Alimama), B2C retail business group, Taocaicai, Taote and 1688 businesses, jointly forming the "China Digital Business Sector". Jiang Fan will be in charge of aliExpress and international trade (ICBU) two overseas businesses, as well as a number of subsidiaries such as Lazada for overseas markets, together forming an "overseas digital business sector".
Alibaba also announced that Wu Wei will no longer serve as the Group's Chief Financial Officer (CFO) from 31 March 2022, and will be replaced by The Group's Deputy Chief Financial Officer (Deputy CFO) Xu Hong (Toby), who will continue to serve as the Group's Executive Director and serve as a member of the Sustainability Committee under the Group's Board of Directors.
The structural adjustment after Double 11 every year is called "roof repair on sunny days" within Alibaba: the rotation of executives and the adjustment of business architecture have attracted much attention from the outside world, and are also regarded as the observation window of Ali's strategy and business priorities in the coming period. This year, under the complex international environment, fierce market competition and new regulatory environment, Alibaba has carried out a maximum integration of commercial sectors, which reflects Alibaba's organizational capabilities and strategic determination.
Deeply cultivate the domestic market and seek overseas breakthroughs
The heads of the two business units involved in the adjustment this time are well-known within Alibaba. Dai Shan, the new head of "China Digital Commerce", is one of Alibaba's "Eighteen Arhats" (founding team) with 11th place in Alibaba's work number, and has served as the head of Alibaba's human resources and customer service departments, taking over the traditional business B2B (including AE, ICBU, 1688) started by Ali in 2017, and began to serve as the head of key business departments, and emerging businesses such as Taote and Taocaicai are also under his rule. Over the years, the old B2B business has come to life, and the emerging business has also grown rapidly. According to Ali's latest financial report, in the third quarter of this year (natural quarter), Taote's annual active users exceeded 240 million, adding 50 million in a single quarter, equivalent to nearly 3 times that of Pinduoduo; Taocaicai's quarterly GMV increased by 150% month-on-month, achieving a late catch-up in half a year. As one of Alibaba's female executives, partners, and founding team members, Dai Shan's business leadership ability has withstood long-term tests.
Jiang Fan is the representative of Ali's post-85 executives. Fudan graduated, sold it to Alibaba after starting a business, and then joined Alibaba, and became a young talent emerging from Alibaba's mobile transformation in 2013-2014. In the seven years of Taobao, Jiang Fan's contribution to Taobao's wireless, personalized and content-based development cannot be underestimated: in 2015, the mobile monthly active users of mobile Taobao were only 289 million, and the latest financial report data shows that the consumer market in the Chinese market has reached 953 million. In recent years, Taobao Tmall's GMV (transaction volume) has also been rising, and more importantly, people have "bought" things from Taobao to "shopping" Taobao, and the richness of Taobao has been greatly improved in recent years, and the business opportunities provided have become more and more extensive.
This structural adjustment of Ali has broken the boundaries between the B series and the Tao business, which is the first time in Ali's more than two decades of history. The original B (merchants) and C (consumers) were converted into internal and external (domestic and foreign) divisions. The boundaries between retail and trade have been broken, and the extent of the adjustment is evident. Behind this is the deep integration of the consumer Internet and the industrial Internet, and Ali's commercial capabilities will better improve the efficiency of the supply side and serve the real economy.
It can be seen that the goal of Ali's structural adjustment is to further strengthen the advantages of the domestic market and seek breakthroughs in overseas markets.
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of The establishment of Ali in 2019, Ali re-established three major strategies for the future, domestic demand, globalization, and cloud computing. Over the years, Ali has been working hard to do globalization, to be a company with global capabilities, and to expand the network capabilities of information flow, logistics and capital flow to more overseas regions. In the past two years, the rapid growth of Cainiao's international logistics services is one of them. However, in Southeast Asia and other strategic places where Chinese e-commerce goes to sea, Ali's strength needs to be enhanced: in 2015, Ali invested in Lazada until april 2016, and it was not early for Ali to be in the field of southeast Asian e-commerce. According to the latest quarterly earnings report released on November 18, Alibaba's international business segment revenue increased by 34% year-on-year to RMB15.092 billion, Lazada's order volume increased by more than 82% year-on-year, and Trendyol's GMV increased by more than 80% year-on-year.
But in Daniel Zhang view, Alibaba is still a long way from becoming a truly global company and from making greater achievements in overseas markets with great potential. Taking the Southeast Asian market as an example, Lazada has encountered a strong impact from competitors such as Shopee, and how to land Taobao's success in overseas markets according to local conditions is a problem to be solved by the newly established "overseas digital business sector".
How can large companies stay agile?
After double 11 every year, Ali's internal and even the Internet industry began to care about the direction of Ali's architecture adjustment this year. This is called "building a roof on a sunny day" in Ali, especially in the high-speed development, it is called "driving an airplane to change engines". According to statistics, since Daniel Zhang became ceo of Alibaba Group in 2015, many organizational structure adjustments have been made, among which the "middle office strategy" and plate governance have given inspiration to the corporate governance level of other Internet companies. Both Ali employees and Internet industry people are accustomed to Ali's "embrace change", and the changes in talent, strategy and business involved in structural adjustment are one of the ways for Ali to maintain vitality Daniel Zhang at the helm.
In May 2015, Daniel Zhang became CEO of Alibaba Group. In a management exchange that month, Daniel Zhang mentioned the issue of mechanism innovation, and mentioned "agile organization" for the first time. He believes that the most important thing about mechanism innovation at the organizational level is "how to make our organization act faster and more agile." Subsequently, in the restructuring of the company at the end of 2015, Daniel Zhang began to implement "large middle office, small front desk" in the company, the purpose of which is also to make the front-line business more agile. In the following 6 years, Daniel Zhang promoted the landing of agile organizations through structural adjustments, and also made corporate governance feel tangible for employees by reducing the actual actions such as level reduction and flattening of levels.
In July this year, Daniel Zhang made an architectural adjustment: the three major businesses based on geographical location services, namely AutoNavi, Local Life and Fliggy, will be formed into a life service segment, which will be managed by Yu Yongfu on behalf of the group and report to the Daniel Zhang. Plate governance has surfaced. In today's adjustment, Daniel Zhang make this point more clear: as the entire group is forming a pattern of multi-business engines driving future growth, facing the future, "diversified governance" will become a new organizational strategy of the group. We hope that through the exploration of more new governance methods, we will always use the advanced nature of production relations to drive the release of advanced productivity, and use organizational innovation to drive business innovation.
The large, medium, and small front desks have allowed Alibaba to precipitate capabilities and save the homogeneous resources of various businesses, and many businesses do not have to start from scratch. However, in the face of fierce competition in the same industry, in the face of new opportunities and new tracks in the future, in the eyes of Daniel Zhang, Ali, which has a total of more than 250,000 employees, is obviously not "agile" enough. Ali's culture of liking change and embracing change allows Ali to maintain organizational vitality and avoid mountains, while diversified governance, plate governance, business responsibility system, etc. allow Ali to achieve a balance between "change" and "professionalism" and "long-termism".
Since 2015, he has served as the CEO of Alibaba, and in 2019, he took over the chairmanship of Alibaba's board of directors, and Daniel Zhang helmed Alibaba for 6 years, Alibaba has changed continuously, repeatedly reaching peaks in performance, launching new business tracks, and the stock price has once risen to four times when he took office. When the complex domestic and foreign situations are superimposed, industry competition is intensified, the regulatory environment changes, and the upgrading and replacement of organizational talents, it is not easy to grasp all these uncertainties, and young Chinese Internet companies and their helmsmen have never faced them. Daniel Zhang and Alibaba are exploring and experiencing, which I believe will bring inspiration to Alibaba and the Internet industry and many Chinese companies that are striving for modern corporate governance.
（CIS）
Editor-in-Charge: Ringoon
![Ali has entered the era of big models, and the core is computing power and ecology[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)