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After the age of 35, where does Jiang Fan, a senior worker, go?

After the age of 35, where does Jiang Fan, a senior worker, go?

Image source @ Visual China

Text | Bohu Finance, author | Tang Bohu

After the age of 35, where does Jiang Fan, a senior worker, go? Fudan graduated, an early entrepreneur, achieved financial freedom at the age of 28, and the legendary Ali "prince" ...

These labels were attached to Jiang Fan, who has been at the helm of Taobao for 5 years, and they are destined to attract the attention of the outside world when he leaves Taobao.

"Prince" transferred

Recently, Jiang Fan stepped down as the legal representative and chairman of Taobao, Tmall and Xunxi Technology, officially bidding farewell to the Taobao system that has poured 7 years of energy.

In fact, the changes began as early as the end of last year. Daniel Zhang, Chairman of Alibaba's Board of Directors and CEO, issued an internal letter in early December 2021 announcing that the company had upgraded its "diversity governance" system.

The so-called "diversified governance" is actually a drastic integration of the original decentralized business sectors, including the integration of the Taoshi platform (including Taobao, Tmall and Alimama), B2C retail, Taocaicai, Taote and domestic trade (CBU) into the "China Digital Commerce" section, which is responsible for Dai Shan; the global AliExpress, international trade (ICBU) and other businesses are consolidated into the "Overseas Digital Commerce" section, which is responsible for Jiang Fan.

This is another important adjustment of Alibaba's organizational structure after the "big middle office" in 2015.

Of course, everyone is also very concerned about the important people involved. At that time, the focus of the outside world was mainly on Dai Shan, a veteran who followed Jack Ma and was responsible for businesses in the past 5 years, including Alibaba International Station, AliExpress, Taote and Digital Agriculture.

Datao is the strongest business sector within Alibaba. In The third quarter of fiscal 2022 released by Alibaba in February this year, the revenue contribution of "China Retail Business" was as high as 69%.

Dai Shan is in charge of Taobao, which seems to the outside world to be a signal that she has become Ali's "new number two person", which has also allowed her to gain unprecedented heat.

In contrast, Jiang Fan, who was once rumored to be the "Prince of Ali", ran away from the Tao family and went overseas with a bit of frustration.

Before that, Jiang Fan's life experience can be said to be smooth sailing. He graduated from the Department of Computer Science of Fudan University, worked at Google China, and founded the mobile developer service platform Youmeng in 2010.

In 2013, after Alibaba acquired Youmeng for $80 million, Jiang Fan joined Alibaba. This year, he was only 28 years old.

When ordinary young people are still confused about their career paths, he has completed several leaps in entering a big factory, starting a business, and wealth freedom, and can be called "the chosen son".

Jiang Fan's work experience in Taobao also has many shining points. He has been working in Taobao since 2014, leading the construction of a thousand-faced "guess what you like" recommendation system and successfully laying out Taobao live broadcast.

Before taking office, Jiang Fan was in charge of Taobao, Tmall, and Alimama at the same time, growing Taobao's monthly active users from 448 million in 2017 to nearly 850 million at its peak (plus Tmall's more than 900 million).

He holds the business closest to Ali's "heart". Therefore, the news of the transfer of the relatively immature overseas digital business sector came, and the voice of Jiang Fan being marginalized was endless.

However, is it really reasonable to regard mobility as simply "exile"?

Enter the bottleneck period

Big Taobao is still firmly in the first echelon of domestic e-commerce platforms, and Jiang Fan's work actually has no major mistakes.

However, the situation of Tao's e-commerce in the past two years is no longer the reality of the past, and at present, Jiang Fan is still not strong enough in internal management.

From the perspective of the market share of the domestic e-commerce industry, although Ali still sits in the top 1 position in domestic e-commerce, compared with 75% at its peak, Ali's market share has declined for 5 consecutive years.

Some people may say that in recent years, JD.com, Pinduoduo, Suning Tesco and other platforms have caught up, and it is very normal to divide the market, what is the relationship with Jiang Fan?

Talking about JD.com and Pinduoduo, the former has logistics and quality endorsement, and the parity of the latter is a big highlight. We can see that the market share of Pinduoduo was 6.1% in 2019 and increased to 15% by 2021.

In fact, these platforms changed the situation that has been firmly suppressed by Taobao after the "two alternatives" were strictly prohibited.

In addition, the live broadcast mode of up-and-coming stars such as Douyin and Kuaishou has also attracted a large number of consumers, allowing them to get a share of the e-commerce market and are still on the rise.

In contrast, Ali's current market share of 52% is still the leader, but the downward trend is difficult to reverse. As the former helmsman of Taoshi e-commerce, it is difficult to say that this phenomenon has nothing to do with Jiang Fan.

What's more, Taobao does have some long-criticized problems.

Taking business operation as an example, under the traffic distribution mechanism of the Tao system platform, small and medium-sized businesses are almost "surviving in the cracks". Tmall, which has a higher threshold, has shut out many small and medium-sized businesses, and although Taobao has no threshold, it distributes most of the traffic to Tmall (Tmall's brand customers tend to have stronger delivery strength).

For merchants who are not strong enough, they need to pay higher operating costs to occupy a foothold in the Tao system platform.

Therefore, some small brands or emerging fashion brands are difficult to get out of the circle on Taobao and Tmall, and they can only turn to other platforms. Factories with immature brands may choose Pinduoduo, tide brands may enter the market, each looking for their target consumers, and users with personalized needs will also leave.

So we can see that although Taobao's monthly active users are still the largest, the up-and-coming stars are also accelerating their development.

The bottleneck of Taobao is also the bottleneck of Jiang Fan. When we revisit Jiang Fan's past work experience, it is not difficult to find that he is from a technical background and has done many years of management work after starting a business.

But he didn't care much about the soft features in the details. For example, after WeChat announced that it supported modifying WeChat in 2020, users shouted to Taobao hoping to modify the member ID, but Taobao chose to use the top blog post to "not change" hard.

For another example, in the previous consumer's return refund operation on Taobao, orders of more than 200 yuan needed to be manually reviewed by the merchant before the merchant did not ship.

However, nowadays, e-commerce platforms have built "infrastructure" such as live broadcasting and community, and the competition between platforms has shifted to the retention and conversion rates of merchants and users, which requires strong operation and heavy experience of the platform.

In this sense, Jiang Fan's continued stay in Da Taobao is somewhat "difficult for a smart woman to cook without rice".

In contrast, the overseas market is in the ascendant for Ali, and it is in need of a pioneering striker like Jiang Fan.

Is it a good thing for Jiang Fan?

In April this year, Xu Lei, who has only been the president of Jingdong Group for more than half a year, took over liu Qiangdong's position as CEO of Jingdong Group and officially stepped to the front of the stage.

Xu Lei had experienced a second entry into JD.com, and in the early days, he could not get the understanding of the board of directors in some marketing directions, such as the layout of 618, etc., but finally proved his strength with market reaction.

In July 2020, Chen Lei took over Huang Zheng as the CEO of Pinduoduo, turning Pinduoduo from the route of burning money for scale to agricultural research and development and profit margin improvement.

Although these "two bosses" who were once the same e-commerce platform have their own styles, the overall career path is very steady.

Jiang Fan is an exception, once regarded as the "Prince of Ali", and now he is about to be stationed overseas. Is it good for him to be in charge of overseas business?

First of all, the size of the global market is indeed a very tempting piece of cake. According to eMarketer, global e-commerce sales of $4.938 trillion in 2021 are expected to grow to $5.542 trillion by 2022 and could achieve $7.391 trillion by 2025.

No one would turn down a trillion-dollar market, and Alibaba is even more so.

However, the reality is that the global e-commerce industry has many players and a complex pattern. From the perspective of industry ecology, there are third-party platforms such as Amazon, ebay, etc., Ali's AliExpress is also counted as one; there are self-operated platforms such as SHEIN, JOY BUY, etc.; marketing service providers include Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok and so on.

Alibaba has laid out a number of platforms in the "overseas digital business sector", including AliExpress, Alibaba International, and many subsidiaries such as Lazada, Trendyol and Daraz, and its annual active buyers in overseas markets have also exceeded 300 million in 2021.

However, from the perspective of revenue, Ali's overseas business is not prominent in both internal and industry.

Ali's financial report for the third quarter of fiscal 2022 (that is, the fourth quarter of 2021) shows that Ali's total revenue was 242.58 billion yuan, and although its international business revenue increased by 18% year-on-year, it was only 16.449 billion yuan.

In addition, from the horizontal comparison of the industry, Amazon's revenue in the same period exceeded 100 billion US dollars, which is a proper "Big Mac" in the e-commerce market; ebay's revenue in the same period was 2.613 billion US dollars (equivalent to 16.653 billion yuan).

The reason for Ali's "up and down" overseas is that although there are factors that are not familiar with overseas markets, it is also important that the management power is dispersed.

For example, Dai Shan is in charge of AliExpress and Alibaba International, Peng Lei, who was the CEO of Ant Financial, is in charge of business such as Lazada, and several "brother" platforms are independent, and it is difficult to exert synergies.

On the other hand, there is the issue of platform development strategy. Alibaba has invested a lot in overseas e-commerce over the years, including investing in Lazada, Trendyol and other platforms, but the return has not been ideal.

Taking Lazada, which was originally the leader in Southeast Asia, as an example, Ali increased its capital several times from 2016 to 2018, with an investment of more than 4 billion US dollars, placing high hopes on it, but after holding Ali was not skilled enough in the local market, Lazada's visits were gradually surpassed by Shopee from 2018, and the decline was revealed.

The overseas market situation is more complicated, Ali is facing a brutal struggle, and really needs a young and energetic and pioneering executive to coordinate the "overseas digital business" sector.

Jiang Fan has been praised by Daniel Zhang "always maintain the momentum of entrepreneurs, and play a core driving role in the entire process of Amoy wireless upgrading", and is indeed a good candidate.

For Jiang Fan, his development in the Tao department has reached a bottleneck period.

Moreover, after the explosion of its derailment in 2020 had a negative impact on Ali, Jiang Fan was cancelled ali's partner status, demoted his rank by one level, and went to a new post to go to the overseas market after 2 years, one is helpless - Ali is already the "top stream" of e-commerce in China, and Jiang Fan has no better choice unless he starts a new business.

However, from his independent decision to sell Youmeng in 2013 without informing investors, it can be seen that Jiang Fan is not an unwavering entrepreneur for his positioning, and it takes more perseverance to start a business again.

Going to overseas markets within the Ali system is an opportunity to "wear guilt and make meritorious contributions". After all, the integrated "overseas digital business" sector already has a large scale advantage in the global market and is very promising to go to a higher level.

It is worth noting that under the complex situation of the overseas market, if Jiang Fan cannot make the overseas sector develop by leaps and bounds, it will be difficult for him to return to the center of Ali.

Jiang Fan has sat in the position of head of Taobao for 5 years, and Peng Lei has been in charge of Lazada for 4 years. Once the business development fails, Jiang Fan may also experience a 5 to 7 year precipitation period in the position of head of overseas digital business.

By then, Jiang Fan, who was born in 1985, was close to 45 years old and was no longer young.

References:

Dongge interprets e-commerce: Will Jiang Fan really leave Ali's "power center"?

Titanium Media: Ali organized a major adjustment: Jiang Fan was transferred to overseas business, and Dai Shan took over the domestic Taobao Tmall

ConnectIng Insight: Ali's overseas market has not been able to attack for a long time, can Jiang Fan win the new battle?

Sanyi Life: Finally, Taobao test member name modification, will expand the coverage of the crowd before the end of April

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