Alibaba's layoffs are fake, but the layoffs are real

Zebra consumption Ren Jianxin

Recently, Alibaba has really not been peaceful.

The happy event of the third quarterly report has not yet been completed, and all kinds of true and false negative news have been recorded one after another.

The Ma Yun family's plan to reduce its holdings aggressively, the suspension of the split of the Cloud Intelligence Group, and the suspension of the Hema IPO are all testing Alibaa's stock price at all times.

In the past two days, rumors of Ali's layoffs have once again been provoked on the Internet, which caused the company to urgently refute the rumors and call the police.

Now that the company has refuted the rumors, Ali's plan to lay off 25,000 employees is fake news. However, in recent years, the company's overall downsizing is an indisputable fact.

Refute rumors of layoffs

For ordinary workers, Ali is just a legend. Ali high P employees, the corresponding high salaries and options, are even more out of reach.

But only Ali himself can deeply understand the warmth and coldness.

In recent days, news of Alibaba's layoffs has once again circulated on the Internet, with a nose and an eye, and the exact number of 25,000 has been given.

If this cut continues, it means that more than 10% of Ali employees will lose their jobs, which is not a big deal.

In this regard, Ali officially refuted the rumors on the evening of the 19th, "Rumors come one after another, but what is false is false." In order to crack down on the rumor, Ali also defended his rights and interests by calling the police.

It's not the first time that rumors of Ali's layoffs have emerged. In May this year, the company specifically refuted this rumor. Immediately, the company's official WeChat announced that the six major business groups need to recruit a total of 15,000 new employees this year.

In September this year, some Internet celebrities publicly apologized to Ali on multiple social platforms for spreading rumors of Ali's layoffs.

On the other hand, Alibaba is also using performance to refute rumors.

On November 16, the company released its Q3 results, with an operating income of 224.790 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9%, an operating profit of 33.584 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 34%, and a net profit of 26.696 billion yuan, compared with a loss of 22.467 billion yuan in the same period last year.

However, the two abrupt withdrawals that followed poured cold water on the market: the complete spin-off of Cloud Intelligence Group was no longer pushed forward due to various uncertainties, and the IPO plan of Hema Xiansheng was suspended.

In March this year, Alibaba, which has been established for 24 years, implemented the largest organizational change in the company's history, moving from a single Alibaba business group to a new governance structure of "1+6+N" multiple business groups and business companies operating independently. Each business group can be independently financed and independently listed.

At that time, it was widely believed that Alibaba Cloud, Cainiao and Hema would be the first to take the step of independent listing. Today, only Cainiao's listing plan is steadily advancing.

A wave of unevenness has risen again and again. The news of the Jack Ma family's reduction of holdings has brought a dark cloud over Alibaba's head. According to the news disclosed on the official website of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Jack Ma family plans to reduce its holdings of 10 million shares of Alibaba on November 21, with a market value of about 6.4 billion yuan.

Affected by the news, in just one day, Alibaba's total market value in the U.S. stock market and Hong Kong stock market evaporated by more than 300 billion yuan.

Attrition is real

The earliest recognition of Ali employees by the outside world is their "flower names", such as Ma Yun called "Feng Qingyang", Daniel Zhang called "Xiaoyaozi", and Wu Yongming called "East Evil".

In the early days, most of the nicknames of Ali employees came from Jin Yong's martial arts novels, but with the expansion of the number of employees, the characters in Jin Yong's novels were insufficient, and the company could only relax the restrictions and let employees play freely.

This move is to reflect the equal communication between employees of Internet companies. Driven by Alibaba, the trend of nicknames has also become popular among Chinese Internet companies.

In addition, Ali also defined the age of employees as "Nian Chen", which means that like liquor, it will be aged for a long time. Employees who have been employed for one, three, five and ten years are respectively called "one-year fragrance", "three-year alcohol", "five-year Chen" and "ten-year Xin". Employees who have reached the "five-year age" can get a customized ring issued by the group.

However, many employees, for various reasons, cannot wait for the moment of the ring, actively or passively leave.

Behind the rumors of layoffs, it is an indisputable fact that Ali has reduced its staff significantly in recent years.

In October 2020, Alibaba merged with Sun Art Retail, and by the end of the year, the company's headcount doubled to 252,100. At the end of 2021, it reached a peak of 259,300 people.

Subsequently, the number of employees in the company showed a clear downward trend. By the end of September this year, the number had shrunk to 225,000. During this period, the most serious attrition was Sun Art Retail, which decreased from 122,000 at the end of March 2022 to 102,100 at the end of September this year. During the same period, Alibaba's number of employees fell from 254,900 to 225,000. This means that in addition to Sun Art Retail, the employees of the original Alibaba system are still attribution by tens of thousands.

What about the big Internet companies?

Alibaba's downsizing in recent years is not an exception among major Internet companies.

In 2021, the number of Tencent Holdings employees increased significantly, exceeding 100,000 for the first time, reaching 112,800 at the end of the year. After that, the big waves washed the sand, the increase and decrease were staggered, and by the end of September this year, it was 105,300.

The number of employees in Kuaishou has also shown a downward trend as a whole. In 2021, the number of employees was 28,100, a year later, it became 25,400, and by the end of June this year, it had further decreased to 23,500.

In 2021, the number of full-time employees in Meituan also exceeded 100,000 in one fell swoop, dropped to 91,900 at the end of 2022, and increased to 99,300 at the end of June this year.

As a long-established manufacturer, Baidu's number of employees is relatively stable. From 2020 to 2022, they will be 41,000, 45,500 and 41,300, respectively. The same is true for NetEase, which has made a fortune quietly, with 28,200, 32,100 and 31,100 respectively from 2020 to 2022.

Launched in 2015, Pinduoduo, which grew rapidly in the gap between Taobao and JD.com, had a small employee base in the past. With the rapid growth of the company and surpassing Taobao in the number of users in one fell swoop, the demand for labor has also increased significantly. From 5,828 in 2019 to 13,000 in 2022.

Among the listed Internet giants, JD.com has the largest number of employees, which is also a special case. Because of its self-operated express logistics business, all JD.com's express brothers are reflected in the company's financial reports.

In 2022, JD.com's acquisitions of Dada and Debang led to a huge increase in the number of employees that year, from 385,400 at the end of the previous year to 450,700 at the end of the year.

Among the huge group of JD.com employees, more than 302,400 people are delivery personnel. They are all Liu Qiangdong's "brothers".