Source |Zijin Finance
The big factories are getting bigger and bigger, the number of employees in Alibaba has exceeded 200,000, and ByteDance has also entered the 100,000 club. You know, there are still many countries in the world with a population of less than 100,000, and the big factories are already more like a small society.
For enterprises, it is not the size of the workforce that can show strength, on the contrary, too many people are more likely to produce inefficiencies.
Not long ago, in ByteDance's internal speech, CEO Liang Rubo said that after the company became bigger, sometimes he felt that the company's efficiency was 30% lower than that of other excellent teams, and even 50% lower was not shocking. But in retrospect, this kind of non-shock itself makes people "break out in a cold sweat", because it means that their own standards are falling.
A huge, heavy ship that could only keep moving slowly, moving in the same direction. Not only is the speed decreasing, but when the storm comes, flexibility is also questioned.
In November 2023, the market value of Pinduoduo, which has been established for eight years, surpassed Ali, which has been on the same track for 24 years, and has become the largest façade of Chinese concept stocks. When Pinduoduo reached the top, its staff size was only 1About 30,000 people.
Pinduoduo has once again proved to the market that only by maintaining a flatter structure can enterprises always be in a state of vigilance and stress, ready to fight at any time. Liang Rubo also said that it is necessary to break complacency, raise standards, and build a capable organization. Only in this way can it be possible to "escape the gravity of memeality".
In the face of more fierce competition, a reform to eliminate the "disease of large companies" has been quietly put on the agenda. Alibaba, JD.com, and Byte are all looking for the optimal solution that is more suitable for their own reforms, which will also be the main theme of Internet giants in 2024.
Ali eliminated the "fat" of the business
This is not the first time that Ali has realized that the symptoms of its "big company disease" are already very serious, and over the years, Ali has carried out several reforms to strive for a leaner organizational structure. But there has never been such a change, and it can be recorded as 1+6+n in 2023.
Judging from the current situation of Alibaba, the "stamina" of this organizational structure has not yet ended, and it is still the focus of 2024. At the moment, Ali's every step is revealedIn the future, what Ali wants is a more streamlined and anti-fight competitiveness. This can be seen from the action of spinning off the six major businesses last year and facing the market with a more independent attitude. The overall strength is of course important to Alibaba, but each business must also have the ability to stand alone.
At the same time, this also means that Ali will eliminate more businesses that have no imagination and no benefits. After drastic reforms in 2023, Alibaba's spin-off strategy has now come to an end. On December 20, 2023, Alibaba announced that Wu Yongming, CEO of Alibaba Group and chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Group, will also serve as CEO of Taotian Group. After the transfer, Wu Yongming shouldered the two core businesses of e-commerce and cloud. In this regard, Alibaba said that it will help lead Taotian's transformation with technological innovation, and help ensure the group's unified command and high-intensity continuous investment in the two strategic priorities of e-commerce and cloud.
Judging from Wu Yongming's position and his work priorities, Alibaba will pay more attention to the development of its core business. Wu Yongming has made it clear that Alibaba's priorities for the next ten years are mainly:Technology-driven Internet platform business, AI-driven technology business, and global business network. Based on this, Wu Yongming sorted out the priorities of the existing business and defined the core business and non-core business. For the core business, Alibaba will maintain long-term focus and high-intensity investment; For non-core businesses, the value of these assets will be realized through rapid profitability or other means. The same is true for the investment strategy, Xu Hong, chief financial officer of Alibaba, said that the company is now focusing on its core business, and the investment focus is mainly on domestic and overseas e-commerce and cloud computing.
From a business perspective, there is no doubt that Taotian Group and Alibaba Cloud are the core sectors of Ali at present. The former is the foundation of Alibaba, and the latter can become Alibaba's greatest confidence in the era of artificial intelligence. More importantly, the combination of the two will burst out more imagination space for AI e-commerce in the future.
From a financial point of view, Taotian and Alibaba Cloud are also the two pillars of Ali at present. After all, at present, Alibaba's only profitable businesses are Taotian, Alibaba Cloud and Cainiao, and most of the rest of the businesses are in a state of loss. In particular, Alibaba's Dawen Entertainment still lost 5 in the latest financial statements1.7 billion yuan.
In the future, Ali will regain its home advantage in the e-commerce track, and try its best to make Tmall always the first choice for online shopping and resist competition from other platforms; Alibaba Cloud, on the other hand, plays the role of a technical blade to polish the future of e-commerce and even Alibaba. Non-core businesses may have to withdraw from the stage of Alibaba, and in its recent financial report, Alibaba merged several businesses such as Yintai and Fliggy into the "other" category.
In addition, Tsai Chongxin, chairman of the board of directors of Alibaba Group, who has just returned to the "front line", said that so far in fiscal year 2024 (US stock fiscal year), Alibaba has withdrawn $1.7 billion in non-core assets. At present, Alibaba still has many traditional brick-and-mortar retail businesses on its balance sheet, which are not core businesses, and it is reasonable to exit them.
Not long ago, there were rumors in the market that Ali would ** its Yintai shopping mall. Judging from Yintai's positioning and Alibaba's current pace, perhaps more conclusive news will be heard soon. Ali's intensive actions have practiced the sentence left by Ma Yun in 2023 "Ali will change, Ali will change". In the future, we will see an Ali who has been away for 25 years, but is still full of energy. Ma Yun and Tsai Chongxin frequently increase their shareholdings, which also shows that the founders of Ali are full of confidence in this giant ship.
Liu Qiangdong shouted slogans, and Jingdong was ready for battle
Not long after Ma Yun shouted the phrase "Ali will change", Liu Qiangdong also shouted a similar slogan. He said on the internal platform,In any case, I will not lie flat, and I hope that my brothers will never lie down。Although the organization is now huge, bloated and inefficient, the foundation of Jingdong is still there, and I believe it will definitely get out of the bottom.
JD.com's current situation is very similar to Ali's, as the earliest group of players in China's Internet giants, after more than ten years of vigorous development, it has become a large-scale combat army. Especially in 2017, after JD.com proposed the concept of "unbounded retail", its organizational structure expanded rapidly. Data shows that at the beginning of 2018, the number of JD.com employees was 1570,000 people, and by the end of 2022, the number has exceeded 450,000, an increase of nearly 2 times in just five years. By the end of 2023, JD.com has more than 590,000 employees, making it the largest private enterprise in China. But the doubling of the number of people did not bring too many surprises, Liu Qiangdong also bluntly said that we are attracted by too many external opportunities, it does not create much value for the ** chain itself that we do, it makes us lose the consistency of the strategy.
Liu Qiangdong told the current situation of JD.com through a case, he said that with the success of the 3C home appliance business, many brothers began to be arrogant and complacent. Executives in retail have "too many bells and whistles" but not enough on core strategies such as cost, efficiency, and experience.
It's almost an undeniable truth, and when the number of people suddenly increases, the cost of uploading and distributing can quickly increase. Liu Qiangdong, who has always been good at fighting, constantly emphasized that he should change as quickly as possible after discovering the problem. He reflected, "With so many problems, of course, I mismanaged and blamed myself. But in any case, I will not lie flat, and I hope that the brothers will never lie flat, now the organization is large, bloated and inefficient, and it does take time to change. ”
As a result, JD.com will usher in a series of changes in 2023. At the senior management level, Xu Ran, the former CFO, succeeded Xu Lei as the CEO of the group. Only half a year later, Xu Ran concurrently served as the CEO of JD Retail. This means that Xu Ran has stood at the front end of the front line of the business, which is also the first time in many years that JD.com has combined the two key roles of group CEO and retail CEO. The two key roles are the same person, which facilitates top-down execution. Let JD.com's low-price strategy go deeper and give full play to JD.com's advantages.
In addition, JD Retail has also started to change its organizational structure, changing the original business group into a business division, and each business unit under the overall management of the original business group is divided into specific business units according to subdivided categories. At the same time, the category leader is given greater rights in business decision-making, management, and personnel appointment and dismissal.
The bold move can be seen in Jingdong's determination to change this timeIt also indicates that JD will pay special attention to the execution level in the future. An insider from JD.com once revealed that after the business group was cancelled in the procurement and sales business, ordinary employees reported to the CEO, and there were only three levels at most in the middle. After the redundant reporting chain is compressed, JD will travel lightly and its combat capability will be improved. This will also be the new look that JD will bring to the market in 2024.
Bytes are prepared for danger in times of peace and return to the state of entrepreneurship
Compared with Alibaba and JD.com, ByteDance's "big company disease" came a little earlier. This company, known as the dark horse with the fastest growth rate of China's Internet and the creation of a phenomenal social platform, is also unable to escape the cliché plot.
From the perspective of staff scale and business scope, Byte has more than 100,000 employees. Liang Rubo believes that the current situation is already very dangerous, and even includes "strengthening the sense of crisis" in his annual goal. He was very concerned that Bytes, as an organization, was becoming mediocre and unable to make new breakthroughs. Not long ago, at the all-staff meeting of Douyin, Liang Rubo talked about the low efficiency of ByteDance's organization: some colleagues went to a start-up company and said that he was working in a start-up company for 6 months in 1 month, and the inefficiency of bytes set off the mediocrity of the organization. He also mentioned that the semi-annual technical review at the company level did not start discussing GPT until 2023, and the large-scale model startups that did better in the industry were founded from 2018 to 2021.
This is one of the true portrayals of the "big company disease" to enterprises, not only the internal response is sluggish, but also the sensitivity to external changes and future predictions will be reduced. As early as the end of 2022, ByteDance has experienced a slowdown in revenue growth and DAU growth that has not met expectations.
It is true that although Douyin is extremely fierce, it is already a product of eight years ago, and from the current market share of Douyin, the future upside is limited. In the past eight years, although ByteDance has penetrated its tentacles into many tracks such as education and games, it has been unable to replicate the next Douyin. Therefore, at present, for ByteDance, it is necessary to return to the entrepreneurial state and improve the agility of future prediction. In order to improve the current situation, in 2022, Liang Rubo chose to solve the dilemma by drastically reducing the 2022-2023 HC planning and taking stock of retreats and redundant organizations. In 2023, Liang Rubo will be more radical and ruthlessly eliminate the business that ByteDance previously bet heavily on but has not received significant growth.
First of all, ByteDance made internal adjustments to its VR equipment manufacturer PICO. According to the revelations, a number of PICO's core business leaders have left and been transferred, the most influential of which is Ren Lifeng, vice president of PICO and head of the content culture department. In addition, ByteDance merged the mobile OS team into the middle platform of ByteDance's product development and engineering structure to strengthen the middle platform investment and unified management of OS core technology research and development, and carried out major layoffs in the market, game, and ** departments. At that time, PICO could be described as the top business of ByteDance, and spent a huge amount of nearly 9 billion yuan to incorporate it, and the valuation of PICO at that time was only 3 billion yuan. After the acquisition, ByteDance continued to transfuse no less than 10 billion yuan. However, PICO has not been able to bring much positive feedback to ByteDance. Under the weak shipments of the entire VR equipment, ByteDance seems to need to stop losses first.
At the end of 2023, ByteDance will reform its game business. The projects that have not yet been launched, except for a small number of innovative projects and related technology projects, will be shut down. At the same time, Sunrise Lightyear will focus on the exploration of some innovative games and related technologies. Judging from the above actions, under the leadership of Liang Rubo, ByteDance has made many changes. But when Liang Rubo set the keyword of 2024 as a sense of crisis, it is not difficult to find that ByteDance's "disease of going to large companies"** is not over yet. ByteDance wants to take an entrepreneurial attitude, and then reproduce the shocking power of Douyin to the market, and become agile is a must.
Summary