Alibaba has made another structural adjustment, and this time the personnel arrangements involved include Jiang Fan, who was still controversial because of the previous derailment.
Ali's adjustment this time is obviously an adjustment of organizational strength, Daniel Zhang hope that the enterprises with such a large structure and complex business of Alibaba Group can explore newer governance methods through adjustment, use the advanced nature of production relations to drive the release of productive forces, and use organizational innovation to drive business innovation.
It is understandable that mega-enterprises explore organizational innovation when they encounter growth bottlenecks. There is still much room for discussion in this readjustment, ranging from the domestic economic and policy environment to Jiang Fan's personal resettlement.
Producer: "Wanjing New Voice" Studio
Business New Language column group
Author: Shi Yue
EDIT: Remote
In simple terms, Alibaba divides the entire group's business into two parts: domestic business and overseas business. In an internal letter Daniel Zhang December 6, these two parts of the business were called "China Digital Commerce" and "Overseas Digital Commerce" respectively.
In terms of personnel appointments, Dai Shan is responsible for the "China Digital Business" section, while Jiang Fan is responsible for the "Overseas Digital Business" section. The "Overseas Digital Commerce" segment includes two overseas businesses, AliExpress and International Trade, as well as a number of subsidiaries such as Lazada for overseas markets.
Being sent to take charge of overseas allowed Jiang Fan to get out of charge of the core business of Alibaba Group such as Taobao Tmall. Many people felt at the first time that, needless to say, Jiang Fan must have been exiled overseas because of the derailment incident.
After all, Jiang Fan's matter makes Ali very difficult, after the derailment not only involves family morality and ethics, whether it involves the transmission of interests, but also makes people think about it. Not directly dismissing Jiang Fan has made many people question Ali's inconsistent requirements for employee values and executives.
If you just depose him overseas, it is already considered that Ali is particularly enlightened, and he wants to keep this executive, right?
This idea is a bit too simple. Jiang Fan was exiled? Don't be funny.
Who is Jiang Fan? Jiang Fanke is a young executive who really relied on combat performance in the process of Ali's mobility, and a cadre who can really manage people and has business achievements.
Although Jiang Fan has been the vice president of Ali Group Company with a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars, in fact, he was born in 1985, graduated from the Computer Department of Fudan University, entered Google China after graduation, and then was taken to the innovation workshop by Kai-Fu Lee, and incubated youmeng internally, Jiang Fan is the founder and CEO of youmeng.
Youmeng is the earliest mobile data service provider and mobile application developer service platform in China. In 2013, Jiang Fan secretly sold himself to Ali for $80 million, which also made Kai-Fu Lee and a group of investors unhappy. At that time, the mobile Internet situation was very good, 80 million US dollars? You must be teasing me. Of course, in hindsight, compared to many startups incubated by the innovation workshop in the same period, Youmeng did sell at a good price.
In 2013, the tide of mobile Internet has emerged, and new hardware and technologies have triggered an endless stream of new scenarios and new applications. At that time, countless new products spread wildly as soon as they came out, gaining a large number of users; on the other hand, the big players of the PC Internet were slightly forward-looking and were making every effort to transform the mobile Internet.
In the new battlefield of the mobile Internet, at the time node of 2013, Alibaba is quite passive and nervous. In the past few years, Ali's development of Taobao, including Tmall Mall, has gone too smoothly, and in 2013, Ali is still preparing to go public, and it does not pay enough attention to the mobile business, and the overall mobility process lags too far behind many competitors. The most obvious data is that in 2013, which is close to the end of the year, Tmall Double Eleven, mobile terminal transaction volume accounted for only 15.4%.
At that time, Alibaba was permeated with pessimism that large companies were slow to turn around, and questions about whether the cheap and old people could still eat. After years of rapid development, it seems that it is about to be thrown off by the high-speed train of the new era. At that time, there were giants at home and abroad who were dumped by the new era, and one more Ali was not too novel.
In this context, it can be said that there is a bit of a life-and-death node, and the heavy responsibility of Taobao mobility has been handed over to Jiang Fan.
Born in 1985, Jiang Fan was only 29 years old in 2014.
Ali Group does not say that the generals are like clouds, but also go with merit, and there are many elders like dogs. You can put this responsibility on a 29-year-old young man.
Of course, this decision was mainly promoted by Ali's COO Daniel Zhang at that time, and Jiang Fan also fed back the Daniel Zhang with excellent results, and now Daniel Zhang sit firmly in the position of chairman and CEO of Alibaba's board of directors.
The story is known to everyone. Since 2014, Jiang Fan has pushed the reconstruction and functional research and development of the mobile Taobao APP, and promoted the construction of the mobile content system of the Taobao system. In 2014, the mobile phone Taobao daily active from 30 million to 60 million, at the end of 2014, the proportion of double eleven mobile terminal transaction volume has gone to 42.6%. By September 2015, the daily life of mobile Taobao had reached 110 million.
In 2015, the mobile terminal transaction volume accounted for more than 70%; by the 2017 double eleven, the mobile terminal transaction volume accounted for more than 90%. Ali Elephant turned around and completely changed most people's e-commerce shopping habits.
Then, in December 2017, Jiang Fan, 32, who had only been with Ali for 4 years, was officially appointed as the fifth president of Taobao, and in April 2019, Jiang Fan was appointed president of Tmall. Jiang Fan, 34, is responsible for the two most core businesses of Alibaba Tmall Taobao.
It can be said that Jiang Fan is an Ali heavenly descendant, an executive who is stacked with solid performance data, and a great talent who can fight a hard battle.
Therefore, it is impossible for Ali to easily abandon Jiang Fan. Even after the previous derailment incident, Ali only made a painless punishment to Jiang Fan by downgrading his rank by one level and deducting the year-end bonus.
However, this matter is indeed controversial, and now Jiang Fan has re-emerged to work and sent an overseas affair, which seems to be deposed, far from the pressure of domestic public opinion, and indeed has the meaning of avoiding the limelight.
However, from the current situation at home and abroad, Jiang Fan is responsible for Ali's overseas business, not only is he not degraded, but he wants to reuse Jiang Fan, a general who can open up territory and expand the territory.
After all, today, times are different again.
In 2019, when Jiang Fan was also in charge of Tmall Taobao, everyone thought that Jiang Fan continued to lead Ali to continue to roll with domestic rivalries such as JD.com and Pinduoduo, especially the war with Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo, who was also a young man after 80 and came from Google, attracted more attention.
It seems that this is going to roll into the sky and the wasteland old.
However, in 2021, everyone found that the domestic roll could not be moved.
On the one hand, there are changes brought about by national policies. The state has strengthened compliance supervision of various industries, and the barbaric growth of Internet companies has borne the brunt of it, and has been subject to increasingly stringent supervision. In terms of national income, the policy also tends to lead to common prosperity, and the income of Internet companies is too high, and it has become the object of regulation.
On the other hand, after the long-term blow of the epidemic, the people who were repeatedly brainwashed by consumerism in the early years are now more and more cautious about consumption, and are squeezed by high housing prices, and the domestic consumption situation in 21 years is really not optimistic. This sluggish consumption is directly reflected in the double eleven.
Compared with the lowest growth rate of Double Eleven transaction volume in previous years, the minimum growth rate of Double Eleven trading volume in 21 years is 540.3 billion, an increase of only 8.45%, and the increase in volume moisture is afraid that it is a little more than in previous years.
In addition, due to the more serious contraction of offline consumption affected by the epidemic, in terms of policy, it may be necessary to introduce standardized management behaviors such as taxation and tax reimbursement for e-commerce, so that the consumption part returns to offline, which will also have a huge impact on the subsequent growth of domestic e-commerce.
There is no increase at home, and it is natural to look overseas. After all, the mobile phone industry has already done this once.
In the past, we said that Silicon Valley has a generation gap with China, and you can copy to China. Now we look overseas and find that from Africa to Southeast Asia to South America, they are all in the same process of smartphone booming and mobility as China a few years ago. We can copy from China and export the Chinese model.
Moreover, the overseas epidemic continues to repeat, consumers are beginning to get used to online shopping, e-commerce platform users and transaction volume in many regions and other data are surging, and the cake of overseas e-commerce is rapidly expanding.
However, the reason is such a truth, Ali is not without action.
Alibaba began to acquire Southeast Asian e-commerce company Lazada in 2016 in a first-investment-then-acquisition manner, with a total investment of US$4 billion before and after. In 2018, Alibaba wholly acquired Daraz, the largest e-commerce platform in South Asia, for $194 million in cash. That same year, Alibaba acquired about 85 percent of Trendyol for $728 million. Subsequently, Ali also invested in Tokopedia, Indonesia's number one e-commerce platform, and so on.
This medical-like investment acquisition shows that Lazada, which Ali has placed a heavy bet on, is not developing as expected. Lazada was invested by Ali and parachuted several core elders from China to manage, but the data could not come up. In 2019, Lazada's data in Southeast Asia was not only inferior to Sea Limited's Shopee, but even toKopedia, which is why Alibaba invested in Tokopedia.
And The Sea supported by Tencent is not only the e-commerce platform Shopee. Sea is known as the "Southeast Asian Little Tencent", starting from the game business, Tencent also handed over the Southeast Asian operation rights of the League of Legends to sea, and the game business became Sea's basic disk and cash cow. At the same time, Sea has also built Tencent's e-commerce, payment, local life and other businesses in Southeast Asia that cannot be done in China.
Shopee topped Southeast Asia in 2021 in terms of number of downloads and monthly active users. At present, Shopee is already entering the Latin American market and has achieved good results. At the same time, Sea launches specific payment applications such as ShopeePay, Shopee PayLater, etc. in different markets and different application scenarios, collectively known as SeaMoney.
These achievements have pushed up Sea's stock price, and when the stock price peaked in October 2021, Sea's market value exceeded $170 billion, reaching half of Alibaba's market value today. However, Since November, Sea's stock price has continued to fall, and now it still has a market value of more than 120 billion US dollars, slightly more than 1/3 of Ali's current market value.
Alibaba Overseas is not only the threat of Tencent and Sea, but also ByteDance to share a piece of the pie. After TikTok became popular all over the world, it launched an e-commerce business like a domestic one. In addition to TikTok Shopping, which is based on TikTok, ByteDance has also launched an independent e-commerce app: Fanno.
Nowadays, the overseas business is handed over to Jiang Fan, which is to rely on this young fierce general who dares to rush and dare to fight and can really make achievements. There was no increment in The country, let Dai Shan to shoucheng, and handed over the opportunity to do increments and make achievements to Jiang Fan.
After all, although the rank seems to have been reduced, there are more than twenty vice presidents Ali who were at the same level as Jiang Fan before. In this adjustment, Ali added 4 presidents in charge, namely Dai Shan, Jiang Fan, as well as Zhang Jianfeng and Yu Yongfu, who are responsible for the four major sectors of China's digital commerce, overseas digital commerce, cloud and technology, and life services.
This is clearly a promotion.
Overseas has made achievements, still Ali little prince, back to continue to pick up Daniel Zhang class.