Text: Zero State lt Wu Nannan.On March 28 last year, Ali announced the launch of the "1+6+N" organizational change, and now less than a year, the fourth largest business among the six major business groups has also ushered in its personnel changes.Edited by Hu Zhanjia.
According to LatePost, on March 1, Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming issued an internal letter to all employees of Local Life Group, announcing that Yu Yongfu, chairman of Local Life Group and CEO of Ele.me, will step down at the end of Alibaba's current fiscal year (March 31).
Ele.me and AutoNavi of Local Life Group will set up a chairman and CEO respectively: the chairman of Ele.me will be replaced by Wu Zeming, CTO of Local Life Group, and the CEO will be replaced 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 the view of Zero State LT (ID: Lingtai LT), this seemingly sudden personnel change is actually a key step in Ali's series of "organizational changes" - so far, in addition to the big entertainment group, Alibaba Group and the five major business groups have completed personnel adjustments. At the same time, in the positive situation of narrowing losses, Local Life Group has replaced with "new blood" and can also prepare it to meet future challenges.
1. The veteran retired with honor, and the young manager took over from Yu Yongfu, who had been in Ali for 10 years, and officially bid farewell to the front line, which often leads to unnecessary speculation. However, after the news of the resignation came out this time, most of the evaluations of ** were still biased towards "honorable retirement".
The first reason is that Yu Yongfu is still a partner of Alibaba, but he is not on the front line of business. According to the internal letter, after leaving the front line of the business, it will carry out more international exploration in the form of investment based on EWTP**, and at the same time provide more strategic support for the business.
For Ali's "veterans", there is a precedent for retiring and becoming investors. For example, Xie Shihuang, one of the founders of Alibaba, founded a private equity company in 2019; After Daniel Zhang stepped down as chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba also announced its decision to invest $1 billion to support Daniel Zhang in setting up technology**.
The second reason is that Yu Yongfu has completed his task of laying the foundation for the local life group. Looking at his resume at Alibaba, it is not difficult to find that in the past 10 years, Yu Yongfu has been responsible for almost all of Alibaba's core businesses except Taotian, and has successively taken over including AutoNavi, Alimama, Dawen Entertainment, Local Life, EWTP Technology Ecology**, etc.
Therefore, he is also known as the "fire captain" by the outside world, although it sounds like a difficult and not necessarily thankless role, but it also just shows Yu Yongfu's excellent management ability and business integration ability.
It is rumored that after Ali acquired AutoNavi, it signed a VAM agreement with it, including "within three years, AutoNavi will achieve 200 million daily active users". Since then, under the leadership of Yu Yongfu, AutoNavi Map has not only achieved its goal, but also achieved the highest peak of daily active users of 2800 million, surpassing the map to become the first in the industry", fully proving itself; When Yu Yongfu took over, the number of daily active users was less than 10 million.
Now, Yu Yongfu, the foundation of the local life group, has been laid, and in the face of future challenges, Ali has arranged a younger management team for this business: it is reported that Wu Zeming, the new chairman of Ele.me, was born in 82, and CEO Han Liusheng was born in 88, and the two are respectively known as one of the youngest partners of Ali who grew up from a front-line technical position, and one of the youngest presidents of Ali's post-85 business.
Although the ages of Liu Zhenfei and Guo Ning have not been mentioned, it can be seen from a series of personnel adjustments of Ali that "the younger management team" is inevitable.
In the past year, Cai Chongxin, chairman of the board of directors of Alibaba, and Wu Yongming, CEO of the group, successively mentioned youth in all-staff letters, saying that they would "fully enable the young management team that has been trained at the grassroots level and has emerged".
It is worth mentioning that on December 20 last year, within less than 48 hours of Wu Yongming serving as the CEO of Taotian Group, six young managers were appointed to lead the key businesses of Taotian Group and report directly to him. Among them, Wu Jiawei, who is in charge of Taotian's user platform division and Alimama division, is born in 85, and Wang Tingxiang, who is in charge of the clothing development department, was born in 87.
2. Behind the "change of generals", local life still has an important valueWhen Ali adjusted its organization, it was divided into six groups: Taotian Group, Ali International Digital Business Group, Cloud Intelligence Group, Cainiao Group, Local Life Group, and Dawen Entertainment Group.
Now it is not difficult to find that Ali is "changing blood" one by one in order: Tsai Chongxin replaced Daniel Zhang as chairman of the board of directors of the group; Jiang Fan served as the CEO of the International Digital Business Group; Cainiao CEO Wan Lin and Jiang Fan became new partners of Alibaba; Wu Yongming replaced Dai Shan as CEO of Taotian Group, and served as the CEO of Alibaba Group, Taotian Group, and Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group. As of this "change" of local life, Alibaba Group and the top five groups have completed personnel adjustments.
In a series of personnel adjustments, Ali did not ignore local life, which just shows that this business, which was once known as "dragging down Ali's performance", still has very important value for Alibaba.
Value one, the performance of local life has improved, and it is time to start to entrust it with important responsibilities.
Judging from Alibaba's financial report for the third quarter of fiscal year 2024, the loss of Local Life Group has narrowed significantly year-on-year: revenue in the quarter increased by 13% year-on-year to 151600 million yuan, adjusted EBITA loss of 20600 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 29 compared with the loss in 20222%, narrowing to 30%, greatly exceeding market expectations.
According to the financial report, the orders of the local life group increased by more than 20% year-on-year, and the annual active consumers continued to grow month-on-month, exceeding 3900 million, and the annual consumption frequency of users also showed strong year-on-year growth, which is undoubtedly a good trend.
For Alibaba, local life is a business module with huge traffic potential like domestic e-commerce and international commerce, and under the premise that the main goal is to accelerate growth at this stage, such a business facing a huge market cannot be easily abandoned, and it is still an important engine for the overall growth of the group.
Value two, local life is also a great opportunity for Alibaba's future growth.
Nowadays, JD.com and Meituan have come out to do instant retail, and Ali naturally wants to seize this "new outlet". According to the "Instant Retail Industry Development Report" released by the International Economic Cooperation Research Institute of the Ministry of Commerce, the market size will reach 5042 in 2022$8.6 billion; It is estimated that in 2026, the number of instant delivery orders will exceed 100 billion, and the scale of instant delivery will reach one trillion yuan.
In addition to e-commerce business, in addition to instant retail, it is difficult to find a trillion-dollar market in China to reclaim. Therefore, Ali has focused on arranging a technology expert, an e-commerce and logistics expert for Ele.me, which can be said to be paving the way for the growth of the double flywheel of "catering takeaway + instant e-commerce" in Ele.me's takeaway business.
At the same time, the local lifestyle market is still uncertain, and Alibaba can use Ele.me to continuously expand the scale of users and riders to form a competitive position in food delivery and retail. On the other hand, after AutoNavi merges with Koubei, it can also develop more "destination consumption" business, laying the groundwork for competition with Meituan and Douyin local life.
3. Write at the end
On the whole, Alibaba's pace of adjustment to the six major groups one by one is firm and timely, and the new atmosphere and new potential energy brought by the personnel adjustment will inevitably provide energy for its goal of "rekindling the growth momentum" to promote this giant ship to a brighter future.
Operated by Chen Jiahui.