After two and a half years at the helm of Alibaba's local life sector, the 48-year-old Yu Yongfu stepped down.
Yu Yongfu previously served as the chairman of Alibaba Local Life Group and the CEO of Ele.me, and was the No. 1 position in the entire business. On March 1, Wu Yongming, CEO of Alibaba Group, issued an internal letter announcing thatYu Yongfu will step down from his management role at Local Life Group at the end of the current fiscal year (March 31).
After stepping down at the end of this month, Yu Yongfu will turn to Alibaba's EWTP technology ecosystem** to explore more internationalization in the form of investment, while providing more strategic support for the business.
With the departure of Yu Yongfu, the two core businesses of Ali Local Life Group, Ele.me and AutoNavi, will have a chairman and CEO respectively. The chairman of Ele.me was taken over by Wu Zeming (nickname: Fan Yu), CTO of Local Life Group, and the CEO was taken over by Han Liu, the head of Hummingbird delivery; AutoNavi was succeeded by President Liu Zhenfei, and COO Guo Ning was appointed as CEO of AutoNavi.
In 2014, Yu Yongfu joined the company with Alibaba's acquisition of UC and served as the president of UC Mobile Business Group. The following year, he became a partner of Alibaba and became one of the core management of the entire group.
In the past ten years, Yu Yongfu has been responsible for many businesses such as UC, AutoNavi, Alimama, Dawen Entertainment, and EWTP. In July 2021, Alibaba merged AutoNavi, Local Life Business and Fliggy into the life services segment, which was managed by Yu Yongfu. In August of that year, Yu Yongfu concurrently served as the CEO of Ele.me.
For more than two years in charge of local life,Yu Yongfu started from the dimensions of strategy, business, organization and culture, and brought a series of positive changes to the entire business segment.
In terms of overall strategy, Yu Yongfu determined the formation of "Ele.me to home + AutoNavi to destination" for Ali's local life, and promoted the integration of different business resources; At the same time, on the premise of maintaining the growth of business scale, we will vigorously promote the loss reduction of Ele.me and the entire local life sector.
At the same time, Yu Yongfu has formed a team of class committee leaders who understand the essence of local life, business and service, and has repeatedly emphasized the "entrepreneurial" culture internally to improve the operational efficiency and competitive confidence of the entire team.
In the latest open letter, Wu Yongming spoke highly of Yu Yongfu, saying that the latter has served as the No. 1 position in many business sectors of Alibaba, and has been appointed many times in times of crisis, making important contributions to the innovation and development of a number of businesses, and laying a solid foundation for the growth of the team.
Wu Yongming said: "Under the leadership of Yongfu, AutoNavi has become a well-deserved industry leader, and Ele.me has a clear position in the fierce market competition. It has cultivated and trained two business teams with deep knowledge and strong combat effectiveness in the field of local life. ”
Ali Local Life Group is facing unprecedented fierce competition. Meituan, the "first brother" in the industry, is deploying troops and increasing investment, and new players such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu are also eyeing up, trying to use content as a breakthrough to cut the cake of the local life market. Ali's local life is stressful.
Under these circumstances, Yu Yongfu, who was born in 1976, retreated bravely and handed over the steering wheel to a younger manager.
The willingness and courage to reuse young people is one of the characteristics of Ali's organizational culture. Ma Yun, Daniel Zhang, Wu Yongming and others are actively promoting the "back wave" to take management positions and provoke business girders; Wu Yongming proposed in September last year that the post-85s and post-90s should be the main managers within 4 years to refresh the business management team.
Wu Yongming believes that to achieve this goal, it is necessary to create a mechanism and cultural environment for more young Ali people to become the core force. This means that the previous generation of managers took the initiative to give up the power to the new people willingly.
At the end of December last year, Alibaba's mainstay, Taotian Group, took the first step towards younger management, promoting Cheng Daofang, Wu Jia, Wang Tingxiang and other post-80s leaders. Now, Local Life Group is also in responseYu Yongfu, who was born in the 70s, faded out, and Wu Zeming and Han Liu, who were born in the 80s, came to the forefront.
aWhat is false can only be false after all. ”
At the end of January, Ele.me fell into ** rumors again, and Yu Yongfu came forward to refute the rumors in person. In addition to denying **Ele.me, Yu Yongfu and other management also issued the "Three Questions of the Class Committee" within the company, reviewing the business progress in the past year and planning the next work direction. When referring to the development status of Ele.me, Yu Yongfu believes that the company is developing healthily at the pace of efficiency improvement.
One of the key indicators of Ele.me's healthy development is that its unit economic performance has been positive for six consecutive quarters. In other words,Ele.me has come out of the quagmire of "sending one order and paying one order".to lay the foundation for the overall turnaround.
In addition to Ele.me, AutoNavi, another pillar of Ali's local life, also made a huge breakthrough during Yu Yongfu's administration, from doing a good job of professional map navigation, and then gradually extending to more meaningful destination services. The expansion of the business radius has brought more users, income and imagination to AutoNavi, and has become one of the super apps in the Alibaba system with a stable DAU of more than 100 million.
In the two and a half years since Yu Yongfu took the helm of Ali Local Life, the local life business has continued to maintain a double-digit percentage annual revenue growth rate, while reducing losses significantly, truly achieving growth from quality.
Looking back at the beginning of Yu Yongfu's leadership of Alibaba's local life in July 2021: at that time, the bottleneck in the development of this business segment was highlighted, Ele.me's market share was shrinking, AutoNavi was trapped in tool positioning, and there was a lack of synergy between the entire sector, and the gap with the industry No. 1 increased. In his latest open letter, Wu Yongming said that Yu Yongfu was "ordered in danger", which is not an exaggeration.
After taking over, Yu Yongfu started a drastic reform and formulated the strategic direction of "four vertical and four horizontal", on the one hand, to improve organizational efficiency, on the other hand, to sort out and integrate business assets, and to promote cost reduction and efficiency increase with the "bug-solving" way of working.
The most significant business result is the fixing of the biggest bug in Ali's local life, that is, the large losses under the subsidy dependency path for many years.
According to Alibaba's financial report, the loss of this business in fiscal year 2022 (April 2021 to March 2022) is as high as 21.8 billion yuan, which is the largest among all businesses in the group, of which Ele.me is a big loss-maker. The poor input-output ratio not only makes business operations difficult, but also erodes the confidence and morale of management and front-line employees. Yu Yongfu started from reducing losses to promote reform and grasped the bull's nose of many problems.
During the period of local life led by Yu Yongfu, the economic efficiency of Ele.me units quickly turned positive, and recorded positive figures for six consecutive quarters, and the profitability improved significantly. In fiscal year 2023 (April 2022 to March 2023), Alibaba's local life loss narrowed to 14 billion yuan. In the fourth quarter of last year, Ele.me continued to reduce losses, driving the adjusted EBITA (operating profit and loss) of the local lifestyle segment from -29 in the same period last year2.3 billion yuan narrowed to -206.8 billion yuan. While maintaining rapid growth, the loss closed by 1 3, which greatly exceeded market expectations.
Market analysts generally believe that compared with when it was first established, Ali's local life business strategy is clear and its business resilience is stronger. It is no wonder that Yu Yongfu said in an internal letter announcing his resignation, "Today, the business status and class committee ability of AutoNavi and Ele.me can make me feel at ease, and I have the courage to start again in the international market in the next decade." ”
Of course, it cannot be ignored thatThe second half of Ali's local life also faces stiffer competition.
In the local lifestyle market, Meituan is still the leader in terms of share, while Douyin is a challenger to rapid growth. According to the official data released by Douyin, in 2023, the Douyin life service platform will cover more than 370 cities across the country, and the total transaction volume will increase by 256%, which is an order of magnitude higher than the average growth rate of the industry.
On the other hand, the logic of competition in the local lifestyle industry has changed. In the past, the common flood irrigation and high subsidy methods have continuously reduced the efficiency and failed to allow enterprises to win the competition. In the new environment, every market participant needs to adjust their strategy as soon as possible to establish an efficient growth paradigm.
The management team of Ali Local Life has also been aware of this change. In the "Three Questions of the Class Committee" two months ago, a vice president in charge of the middle office business of Ele.me said that it would further drive growth in the futureIn addition to improving efficiency, you can't do business by inertia. He believes that the team should transform its capabilities from "how to spend resources" to "how to comprehensively consider from a business perspective".
In the above context, this organizational adjustment deeply means that the young people who have grown up from the business have completed the handover of the baton: the first half of the "reform chapter" of Ali's local life has ended, and the second half of the "development chapter" has begun.
b took over the steering wheel from Yu Yongfu, in addition to Liu Zhenfei and Guo Ning, two Gaode veterans, there were also two young people born in the 80s, Wu Zeming and Han Liu.
Wu Zeming, who is about to take over as chairman of Ele.me, joined ** in 2004 and has held a number of technical and management positions in the past 20 years, including president of the new retail technology business group, CTO of local life business, CTO of Alibaba Group, and vice president of Ali DAMO Academy. Currently, he is the CTO of Alibaba Group, the CTO of Taotian Group and the CTO of Local Life Group.
Han Liu's career focus is on the local life sector. Born in 1988, he has served as Senior Vice President, Head of Instant Retail Business, and President of Hummingbird Instant Delivery since joining Alibaba.
The arrival of the two young marshals marks that Ali's local life is entering a new era of post-80s governance. This is also the latest move of Alibaba's current round of management rejuvenation reform.
Ali has always paid attention to the replacement of new and old management, and the age group of core executives has gradually been pushed back from the post-60s and post-70s to the post-80s; Today, the post-85s and even post-90s generations have begun to appear on the stage. It took Ali only 10 years to reduce the average age of management by more than 20 years.
The pioneer of this tradition is Jack Ma. In 2013, Jack Ma stepped down as the group's CEO and announced that the vast majority of leaders born in the '60s would step down from managerial executive roles and hand over the baton to colleagues born in the seventies and eighties. In 2015, Daniel Zhang became the head of Ali after 70s, and the presidents of Ali's front-line business at that time were composed of post-70s. Daniel Zhang then proposed that young managers after the 80s should be pushed to take on important responsibilities.
In September 2023, the youngest "Eighteen Arhats" Wu Yongming became the new CEO of Alibaba Group. At the beginning of his tenure, Wu Yongming proposed to resolutely promote the youth of the team, and set the goal of making the post-85s and post-90s become the main managers within 4 years.
The internet is ultimately a world for young people. From the perspective of management advantages, young managers are more likely to resonate and empathize with the world of young people, have a more acute perception of new things, and are more likely to grasp new opportunities and find breakthroughs.
On the other hand, young managers have not been in power for a long time and are relatively less susceptible to being dragged down by the inherent organizational structure and structure. They often have greater willingness and courage to break the old pattern, refresh personnel and business, and achieve goals that are difficult to achieve through traditional management paths. And that's exactly what Ali needs today.
Before this round of personnel changes,Alibaba's young people have achieved a lot of impressive results, especially in areas where there is a high proportion of young users.
Chen Weiye, who was born in 1982 (nickname: Chuduan), previously served as the person in charge of the second-hand trading platform Xianyu, and spent five years to achieve a transaction volume of 200 billion yuan and more than 300 million users, of which more than 40% are post-95s.
Subsequently, Chen Weiye was sent to Ele.me as COO. During this period, Ele.me had many bright spots in brand marketing, among which the "guess the answer for free" activity once swept the whole network and broke the circle; also reached a cooperation with Douyin and hitched a ride on the short ** era. As the No. 1 operator of Ele.me, Chen Weiye has made a lot of contributions.
Wu Jia, who was born in 1985, incubated and cultivated Quark, relying on a distinctive user experience and functional matrix to attract a large number of young users and achieve a breakthrough in the long-established search market. Currently, more than half of Quark's users are young people under the age of 25. In November last year, Wu Yongming announced Alibaba's first batch of strategic innovation businesses, and Quark was among them.
Two excellent young managers have been reused in the last round of management rejuvenation.
In December last year, Chen Weiye was transferred to Taotian Group, responsible for the SME Development Center and other sectors. Wu Jia also transferred to Taotian, responsible for Taotian's user platform business department and Alimama business department, and continued to serve as the president of intelligent information.
The personnel adjustment of the local life sector is also the latest move by Ali to promote young people to take the lead. The combination of Wu Zeming + Han Liu not only has the advantage of being young, but also has rich technical experience and business management experience. This helps to ensure that Ali Local Life continues to be driven and imaginative while following a mature strategic path.
In the past two years, Yu Yongfu has defined a new strategy for Ali's local life and activated the combat effectiveness and confidence of the entire organization. With the foundation laid during the Yu Yongfu era, Ele.me and AutoNavi continue to improve their profitability models while maintaining growth, and it is not far off to cross the break-even point.
Next, the focus of Ele.me and even the entire local life of Ali is how the new manager wields the "three-board axe"?
One of the foreseeable changes is that Ele.me will be closer to young people.
Takeaway is the business of young people in the city. In terms of brand rejuvenation, Ele.me has a natural advantage. Its founding team was college students, and the business first started on college campuses and became famous among young people's word of mouth.
After growing into the only two food delivery platforms, Ele.me has put a lot of energy into the marketing and promotion of young people, including establishing a younger brand IP system, inviting new generation celebrities such as Wang Yibo to endorse, cultivating a short content ecology, and innovating the image of delivery workers with "Blue Knight". According to a research report released by a third-party agency, Ele.me users under the age of 24 account for more than 65%, higher than the industry average of 50%.
According to the data of the three parties, Ele.me is still maintaining rapid growth.
According to the mobile data analysis platform "Diandian Data", in the third quarter of last year, the number of daily active users of Ele.me reached a new high. Alibaba also disclosed in the quarterly financial report that the number of Ele.me transaction users increased, the average purchase frequency of users increased, and the overall order volume increased year-on-year and month-on-month.
Ele.me's growth rate outperformed the market**, and young users with strong consumption power and high demand frequency contributed a lot. The popularity of marketing activities such as "guess the answer for free" also proves the importance of young people to the takeaway business from another dimension. After Wu Zeming and Han Liu, who were born in the 80s, took over, Ele.me will only have more business actions around youth.
The two young people took over the baton from the meritorious veteran Yu Yongfu, and to some extent, they also showed Ali againAbandon the determination to prioritize seniority and let young managers come to the top.
A few years ago, Ali put forward the "crawler strategy". This theory is reflected in the talent, that is, to continuously cultivate new talents, according to the 5 10-year cycle of systematic layout of talent reserves. Nowadays, Ali's talent track is also accelerating to the post-85s and post-90s, and has taken two measures.
On the one hand, Ali launched the rank reform in July last year, and Taotian Group took the lead in canceling the P sequence that had been followed for many years, changing the original P4 P8 to 14 28 levels, and every three levels corresponded to a P level. This gives young employees more opportunities to "run in small steps" and continue to be promoted, and at the same time, it also enhances the difficulty of promotion at higher levels, and it is no longer realistic to want to "boil up qualifications" to get promoted.
On the other hand, Alibaba has significantly accelerated the replacement of core management positions and opened up more opportunities for young managers. This is something that Wu Yongming is pushing hard and has set a 4-year schedule; Yu Yongfu and others were the core managers who were the first to respond.
Alibaba's round of younger management has already achieved initial results. According to Alibaba's 2023 fiscal year annual report, among the 28 partners, the post-80s generation has accounted for more than 20%. This proportion will continue to rise as the reform extends to more business segments.
Wu Yongming once said that the To B industry needs more experience and deep cultivation, while the To C industry is different. In other words, Ali to C's business should let young people come up, andLocal life businesses such as Ele.me are typical to C, and they are also one of the pioneers of this rejuvenation reform.
It is foreseeable that after Taotian Group and Local Life Group, Alibaba's top-down management rejuvenation reform will be implemented in more businesses. Entering its 25th year, Alibaba has refreshed its organization with a younger age, and is also building a talent foundation for the next decade's development.
References:
Alphabet list, "Yu Yongfu Accumulating Strength".
CBN, "Ali Announces Big News! 》
Late latepost, "Yu Yongfu stepped down from the front line of Ali's business, and the new management team of Ele.me AutoNavi took over".
CEIBS Business Review, "Ali set off a "younger" storm again, why can't big factories tolerate middle-aged people? 》
Yangtze River**, Ali's new CEO Wu Yongming: Let the post-85s and post-90s become the main managers within 4 years, and users are preferred and willing to open to opponents