"Young talents need to wait for opportunities according to their seniority." Alibaba is trying to break this shortcoming from top to bottom.
Recently, Hema, which has been at the forefront of the storm, suddenly announced that founder Hou Yi will step down as CEO. In an internal email, Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming announced this personnel change and said that Hema CFO Yan Xiaolei will concurrently serve as CEO, while Hou Yi will retire from Hema emeritus.
In the letter, Alibaba spoke highly of Hou Yi's contribution to the start and development of Hema. However, it is undeniable that Hema has indeed experienced many "strategic iterations" in its development in the past few years, and it is also currently undergoing After experiencing the "pains" of the transition period, Hou Yi announced his retirement at this time. The timing is indeed very delicate.
In fact, since Zhang Yong resigned and Tsai Chongxin returned as chairman of Alibaba, a series of personnel changes have occurred within Alibaba. A new group of Alibaba management has grown up, and Alibaba, which has become "younger", seems to be dialing in Open the fog.
Alibaba’s “big retreat” in physical retail?
Since last year, Hema has been “torturing itself”. In January last year, then Hema CEO Hou Yi announced that Hema Xiansheng had achieved profitability in 2022. This is undoubtedly good news for Hema, which has been losing money for seven consecutive years.
In March 2022, Zhang Yong, then chairman of Alibaba, announced the launch of Alibaba’s “1+6+n” organizational reform, and even stated that “one mature company will be listed on the market.” At that time, the market speculated that Hema, which was already operating independently, would most likely be the first to be split and listed. Hou Yi also responded, "With Hema's scale and brand influence today, it is ready to go public."
Next, Hema will be listed on the market. Ma seems to have really become "richer", for example, it has expanded its delivery range, and the community supermarket Hema mini store is also expected to restart. But what comes faster than expansion is Hema’s disruptive changes.
Since the second half of last year, Hema has successively launched discount reforms and supply chain reforms, and has "forced" consumers offline by canceling membership fees, raising freight thresholds and charging packaging fees.
Behind Hema's frequent "knife" on itself is the "low-price strategy" that has become more and more intense among e-commerce platforms last year. The high-end positioning that Hema has always established seems a bit out of date in the current consumption cycle.
However, Hema’s corrective measures seem to be moving too fast. Frequent price reductions are considered to be backstabbing members. One-size-fits-all supply chain reforms have aroused dissatisfaction from brands, and even threatened to “cut off supply”; and increase shipping costs. , the behavior of increasing packaging fees is also not accepted by consumers.
In the eyes of most consumers, Hema’s advantage over Sam’s is that it has smaller portions and is suitable for small families. However, Hema is now turning itself into Sam’s. It may be closer to profitability, but it is closer to consumers. Farther away.
When promoting Hema’s discount reform, Hou Yi once said bluntly, “This is a battle of life and death. If we cannot win, there will be no future.” In the long run, transformation may not be unfeasible, but the key is whether Alibaba has the patience to wait for Hema to "grow" again?
Hema had high hopes from Alibaba when it was first founded. In the past 9 years, Hou Yi, as the "grandfather" of Hema, has been constantly trying and making mistakes, upgrading from innovative business to an independent business group, launching Hema Fresh, Hema x Member Store, Hema Neighborhood, and Hema Station , Hema Market, Hexiaoma, Hema Mini, Hema Fresh Outlet Store, Hemali, etc. There are more than 10 business formats.
But many businesses are just short-lived. Hou Yi attributes the responsibility to himself. He believes that "these decisions were made by me alone, and I decided to close them alone."
But no matter who is responsible, the final decision As a result, Hema has always struggled to make a profit. Recently, there was news that COFCO was interested in acquiring Hema. Although Hema refuted the rumor, judging from the fact that Hema has postponed its listing, it may be because its valuation has always been difficult to meet investors' expectations.
Therefore, Hema’s “change of leadership” during the critical period of transformation inevitably makes people speculate that Alibaba may really not want to give Hema any more time to “struggle”. Combined with Alibaba’s frequent high-level personnel changes since last year, another conjecture is that Alibaba has made choices among different businesses, and focusing on its main e-commerce business is the main development direction in the future.
Alibaba is accelerating its "rejuvenation"
In June last year, Zhang Yong announced that he would step down as chairman of the board of directors and CEO of Alibaba, and Tsai Chongxin, who had retreated to the second line, would return to the position of chairman of the board of directors.
html In September, Cai Chongxin officially succeeded Zhang Yong, and Wu Yongming took over the positions of CEO of the group, chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud. Three months later, Wu Yongming concurrently served as CEO of Taotian Group.In less than 48 hours after Wu Yongming concurrently became the CEO of Taotian Group, Wu Yongming carried out drastic organizational adjustments. Six young managers led the key businesses of Taotian Group and reported directly to Wu Yongming.
After this adjustment, Wu Yongming made a request, hoping that everyone would "face the current situation and start a new business." It is not difficult to understand that after Dai Shan left, Taotian Group has become a brand new team, and Wu Yongming is the new helmsman.
The "change of generals" in Alibaba's core sector is just the prelude. Alibaba owns Taotian Group, Alibaba International Digital Business Group, Cloud Intelligence Group, Cainiao Group, Local Lifestyle Group, and Big Entertainment Group. In fact, all major groups are already in order Make personnel adjustments.
Jiang Fan, who was transferred from Taobao business to overseas business, returned to serve as CEO of the International Digital Business Group; rookie CEO Wan Lin and Jiang Fan were newly added as Alibaba partners.
Yu Yongfu, chairman of the local life group and CEO of Ele.me, also announced his resignation. Ele.me and AutoNavi will set up chairman and CEO respectively.
Zhan Zhonghui, the head of Lingxi Interactive Entertainment, the game business parallel to Alibaba Entertainment, also announced his resignation.
It is not difficult to see that most of the new management are born in the 1980s. Within Alibaba, young people are accelerating their rise to the top. As early as when Wu Yongming took office, he mentioned in a letter to all employees that "within four years, the post-85s and post-90s generation will be the main managers to refresh the business management team."
According to Huxiu.com, after Wu Yongming took over as CEO of Taotian, he personally inquired about the space and path for the growth of young talents within Taotian, and expressed a clear understanding of the situation that "young talents need to wait for opportunities according to their seniority." Worry. Wu Yongming hopes to open up a new growth space and promotion system for young talents. This may also be the original intention of Ali's "rejuvenation".
At the same time, Alibaba also launched a rank reform in July last year. Taotian Group was the first to respond, canceling the p sequence that had been followed for many years, and changing the original p4-p8 to 14-28, with every three levels corresponding to a p. This gives younger employees more opportunities for advancement.
Jack Ma once said that he hopes Ali can live to be 102 years old. The reason is that starting from 1999, Ali will span three centuries in 2101. But no one can stay young forever. For a company to be revitalized in the long term, management iteration and personnel turnover seem to be necessary.
Jack Ma seems to be very clear about this. In 2013, he announced that he would no longer serve as CEO of the group. He also announced that most leaders born in the 1960s would withdraw from management and executive roles. In this year, Jack Ma, who was nearly 50 years old, also completed Hand over the baton.
Next, Zhang Yong took over as the head of Alibaba. Eight years later, a group of managers born in the 1970s headed by Zhang Yong also stepped down one after another, giving the opportunity to the younger generation born in the 1980s, allowing the 25-year-old Alibaba to "Always young".
Betting on "New Quality Productivity"
The "young blood" within Alibaba has indeed begun to bring new changes to the group. The most obvious is the "pivot" of Taotian Group in some strategies.
For example, Taobao e-commerce under the leadership of Dai Shan will put more emphasis on the growth of DAU (daily active users), but according to some merchants, this trend has begun to change, and Wu Yongming's team seems to value GMV more.
Industry insiders pointed out that the dau priority strategy means that Taobao places more emphasis on low-price strategies, and low-priced products and stores with higher purchase frequency are more likely to receive traffic weighting; but if it returns to the gmv priority strategy, it means that high-customer single products and brands Merchants and high-premium and high-margin products will be more popular. The conversion of
different strategies means Taotian Group's shift in e-commerce strategy. For Taobao, simply rolling prices may lead to lose-lose situations, and thus sacrifice Taobao's own traffic monetization ability.It can be seen that Taotian Group does not want to simply "exchange price for volume", but hopes to develop better profit channels.
Earlier, Wu Yongming revealed Alibaba’s strategic direction for the next ten years. He said that the driving force for the development of the industry in the future will be the technological driving force represented by AI, so Alibaba will have three important priority directions in the future, namely technology-driven Internet platform business, AI-driven technology business, and global business network.
It is not difficult to see that Alibaba's future development direction is "new quality productivity", a hot word in the industry during this period. It is characterized by innovation, the key is high quality, and the essence is advanced productivity.
Judging from Alibaba’s recent layout, its goal is also very clear, which is to bet on large AI models. At the end of February, Alibaba led an investment of over US$1 billion in the Chinese AI startup Dark Side of the Moon; less than half a month later, Alibaba appeared as one of the core leading investors in a new round of financing for Minimax, another major model startup.
According to incomplete statistics, Alibaba has participated in at least 6 AI start-up companies, with a total financing of at least more than 15 billion yuan, including Dark Side of the Moon, Minimax, Zhipu AI, Zero One Thousand Things, Baichuan Intelligence, and Shengshu Technology. Most of these companies have become unicorns in the large model industry.
In addition, Wu Yongming himself also has a profound technical background and has served as the chief technology officer of Taobao, Alipay and other businesses. Most of the younger generation of managers who have been promoted in recent years are also technical talents. For example, Chen Weiye is the founder of Xianyu, and Wu Jia incubated and cultivated Quark.
For Alibaba, the large AI model has great enabling value for cloud intelligence, e-commerce business, and even gaming business. For example, Alibaba has developed multiple AI applications for merchants; and large model algorithms are also conducive to increasing the gross profit of cloud computing business.
In contrast, the value of AI large models in empowering local life and new retail business is relatively small. From this point of view, there is obviously a deeper consideration behind Hema's "change of leadership".
Industry insiders believe that Alibaba’s large-scale investment in large models is actually paving the way for the future. Wu Yongming once said that Alibaba will become an open technology platform company that serves the whole society's AI innovation in the future.
From this point of view, Alibaba is once again betting on new incremental opportunities as the times change, or it should be said that Ali is betting on future industrial transformation opportunities.
Every era has its own future industry. More than 20 years ago, Taobao was born and changed the domestic retail model. Perhaps 10 years later, Alibaba will create a "new species". Everything is worth looking forward to.
