The management team has a "big change", can Taotian return to high growth?

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Towards the end of the year, Ali Taotian Group carried out a major management change.

On December 20, Alibaba announced that Wu Yongming, CEO of Alibaba Group and chairman of Taotian Group, will also serve as CEO of Taotian Group. Dai Shan, former CEO of Taotian Group, will assist in the establishment of Alibaba Group's asset management company.

Alibaba also said that Wu Yongming will serve as the CEO of Alibaba Group, Taotian Group and Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group at the same time, which will help lead Taotian's transformation with technological innovation, ensure that the group focuses on core strategic e-commerce and cloud, and forms a unified command and high-intensity continuous investment.

Two days later, Wu Yongming issued an all-staff letter in Taotian Group, announcing a major change in the management team. Six young managers are responsible for Taotian's key business. It has been reported that the new team is more than 10 years younger than the total age of the "previous session", and this is the first time in Taotian's history that the "post-80s" senior management group is absolutely dominant.

Under the leadership of a young senior management team, can Taotian Group show new vitality?

01

Taotian in the midst of change

In fact, the change that belongs to Taotian has already begun.

At the end of 2021, Ali upgraded its strategy from middle office to diversified governance, and newly integrated and established two major sectors, Chinese digital business and overseas digital business, which are respectively led by Dai Shan and Jiang Fan. At this time, Taotian is actually facing a slowdown in growth - for the quarter ended December 31, 2021, China's digital business revenue was 172.226 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 7%.

In the more than two years since then, Dai Shan has supported Taotian's transformation and tried to drive Taotian's growth.

In January 2022, Dai Shan took over as the president in charge of China's digital business sector, and on the basis of maintaining the dual-brand operation of Taobao and Tmall, the original Taobao and Tmall business groups were broken up to form three centers: industrial operation and development center, platform strategy and operation center, and user operation and development center, and the two major businesses of Taobao and Tmall were fully integrated at the back-end level.

At the same time, Dai Shan stopped the development model with GMV as the growth target. In May of the same year, Dai Shan announced that Taobao Tmall's core strategy is from transaction to consumption, and emphasized content, "Taobao will make a huge investment in the new gear of content." The importance of the two independent central content venues of shopping and live streaming has been further enhanced."

Focusing on content, Taobao APP has been revised and upgraded, and the status of search, Taobao shopping and live broadcast has been improved, and various attempts have been made in content. But it will not be easy for Taobao and Tmall to return to high growth. For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2023 (i.e., fiscal year 2023), China's commercial revenue was 582.731 billion yuan, down 1% year-on-year.

In February 2023, it was reported that live streaming, private domain, content, local retail, and price power have become Taobao's top five strategies for the new year. In March, Ali split six, and Taotian Group became Ali's business group that started the transformation - Dai Shan further divided the original industrial center into three industry development departments: brand business, small and medium-sized enterprises, and supermarket business development center, so as to serve different types of businesses, and the original platform strategy and operation center, user operation and development center have not changed.

In May, Mr. Ma held a small internal meeting and argued that Alibaba should not focus on Pinduoduo and Douyin in its business ideas. At the same time, he believes that the competitive environment of Taobao and Tmall has reached a very severe point, and the speed in the Internet industry may be faster, and put forward three directions of "returning to users, returning to Taobao, and returning to the Internet".

Subsequently, Dai Shan announced that Taotian Group's strategy was adjusted to "user first, ecological prosperity, and technology-driven". At the same time, the human resource system has been changed - the P sequence has been cancelled and changed to 14-28 levels, corresponding to the original P4-P8, and every three levels corresponds to a P level;

In July, Taotian Group further established the KA Service Department, covering all major industries of Taotian's three major business development centers, including nearly 20 industries such as clothing, FMCG, consumer electronics, home furnishing, sports and outdoor.

However, Taotian Group's growth rate is still in the single digits. For the six months ended September 30, 2023, Taotian Group contributed 46.33% of Alibaba's revenue, or RMB212.607 billion, up 8% year-on-year, and adjusted RMB EBITA963 96 million, compared to RMB88.216 billion for Alibaba as a whole. The adjusted EBITA of the two business groups of Cainiao and Cloud Intelligence was 1.783 billion yuan and 2.325 billion yuan respectively, and Alibaba's other businesses were in a state of loss.

Obviously, Taotian Group is still the backbone of the development of Alibaba's other businesses. However, it has been reported that Dai Shan is trying to better serve consumers with a modular organizational structure, but it is also very complex. Taotian has been developing for 20 years, and the hierarchy has been too bloated, and this idea is difficult to convey and implement.

Taotian Group needs a bigger change.

02

Young managers take office

In September 2023, three days after serving as CEO of Alibaba, Wu Yongming released an all-staff letter, which wrote, "We will resolutely implement the rejuvenation of the team." Within four years, it is necessary to refresh the business management team with the post-85s and post-90s as the main managers, and create a mechanism and cultural environment for more young Ali people to become the core strength of Alibaba."

At the same time, Wu Yongming, who was born in 1975, is also the youngest of Ali's "Eighteen Arhats".

Judging from the latest appointments, Taobao and Tmall have once again set up separate business divisions to no longer promote deep integration, and M2C (manufacturer to consumer), apparel, and content have set up separate business divisions to focus on making efforts.

Among them, Wu Jia is in charge of the User Platform Division and Alimama Division, Chen Weiye (nickname "Chuduan") is in charge of Taobao Division, Taotian Merchant Platform Department and Taotian Customer Satisfaction Department, Liu Bo (nickname "Jialuo") is in charge of Tmall Division, Liu Yiman (nickname "Yiman") is in charge of M2C Division, Wang Tingxiang (nickname "Shaoyou") is in charge of the Apparel Development Department, and Cheng Daofang (nickname "Daofang") is in charge of Taobao Live and Content Division.

According to the data, Wu Jia has successively served as a technical expert of Alibaba Cloud, the general manager of Ali UC Business Division, the president of Ali Intelligent Information Business Group, and has incubated products such as quark and Shuqi novels; Chen Weiye is the creator of Xianyu and has also served as the chief operating officer of Ele.me; Liu Bo is good at marketing, and has been responsible for Taobao Marketing Department, Taobao University, Juhuasuan Division, Tmall Marketing Platform Division, Alimama, etc.; Liu Yiman was formerly the person in charge of the supermarket business development center, and was responsible for Tmall Marketing Department, Tmall Global, Tmall supermarket related business; Wang Tingxiang was previously responsible for the operation of Taoxianda, Taocaicai, and shopping; Cheng Daofang used to be the technical director, and then gradually took charge of Taobao live broadcast division.

Under the new organizational structure and young senior management team, a new round of reform of Taotian Group has been launched.

According to Taobao's official news, Taobao plans to change the relevant rules of Taobao's platform dispute settlement rules. The rule change was announced on December 19, 2023 and will take effect on December 26, 2023. The first core change is that Taobao will be added based on the platform's own big data capabilities, identify multi-dimensional combinations, and make a rule basis for quick refunds or return refunds for buyers who initiate after-sales sales that meet the relevant circumstances.

To put it simply, Taobao will support buyers for "refunds only". This mechanism started with Pinduoduo, which protects the rights and interests of buyers to a large extent, but also puts forward higher requirements for merchants.

03

How does the future change?

At present, the competition of e-commerce platforms is not only about price, service, etc., but also AI technology.

In November, in response to the market value discussion, Ma Yun replied to employees on Alibaba's intranet, and mentioned that "the era of AI e-commerce has just begun, and it is both an opportunity and a challenge for everyone." In Alibaba's quarterly earnings conference call for September 2023, Wu Yongming said that Alibaba's important priorities for the next 10 years are clearly defined as three directions: technology-driven Internet platform business, AI-driven technology business, and global business network.

In a letter dated December 20, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Alibaba Group, Joe Tsai, said that Wu Yongming will serve as the CEO of Alibaba Group, Taotian Group and Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, which will help lead Taotian's transformation with technological innovation, ensure that the group focuses on core strategic e-commerce and cloud, and forms a unified command and high-intensity continuous investment.

In other words, e-commerce and cloud will be further synergistic.

Under the leadership of Dai Shan, Taotian Group has already begun to deploy in AI. According to media reports, since "technology-driven" became one of the three major strategies, Taotian's internal discussion of AI was mainly to use it as one of the tools to help small and medium-sized businesses improve efficiency. Many teams within Taotian have explored AI business, but there have also been serious problems of reinventing the wheel and homogenization.

At the end of November, Wu Zeming, CTO of Alibaba Group, integrated many teams into four teams, which are responsible for Alimama, C-end consumers, B-end merchants, and industry characteristic applications.

In addition, on the large model, Taotian Group has also trained its own large model product "Xingchen", which is mainly used in two businesses: one is search, advertising, and recommendation, and the other is the content of shopping. At the same time, Taotian is also preparing to build a new large-scale model research team.

Taobao is also gradually applying AI to the system. In November, Taobao Tmall released a series of AI tools and services for merchants, and said that from 2024, it will release 10 intelligent tools and services to all merchants one after another, including AI scene maps, AI retouching, AI model maps, AI store opening, intelligent weekly reports, business consulting, automatic new releases, document interpretation, automatic image expansion, title expansion, etc. In the face of buyers, Taobao launched Taobao Ask this year, supporting buyers to compare products and generate purchase suggestions.

In the field of AI e-commerce, Pinduoduo and JD.com have also begun to lay out. In July 2023, JD.com released the AI model "JD Yanxi", which will be applied in the fields of e-commerce, logistics, and health. It is also reported that Pinduoduo has set up an AI large model team of dozens of people, which will explore the application of AI large models in customer service, dialogue and other scenarios, and will be expanded to its cross-border e-commerce platform Temu's intelligent customer service, search, recommendation and other business scenarios. Douyin has launched the "Instant Creation" AI tool, which integrates various creative forms such as video, graphics and texts, and live broadcasts.

The outside world is also very concerned about whether the young management team can keep Taotian Group in the leading position in AI e-commerce under the future development trend of AI e-commerce, and how to find combat effectiveness under the price involution?

Author丨Chen Xiangyu

来源丨征探财经(ID:teccj6)