One year after Alibaba Group launched its 1+6+N organizational transformation in March last year, Ali's local life has once again embraced new changes.
On March 1, Wu Yongming, CEO of Alibaba Group, issued an internal letter to all employees of Local Life Group (AutoNavi and Ele.me), announcing that Yu Yongfu, chairman of the group and CEO of Ele.me, will step down from his management position at the end of this fiscal year, that is, at the end of this month. After stepping down, Yu Yongfu will return to the EWTP** investment business that he is familiar with.
In the past three years, the overall operating conditions of Ali Local Life under the leadership of Yu Yongfu have continued to improve, especially Ele.me, which has experienced continuous business adjustments, and its losses have continued to narrow significantly year-on-year.
After Yu Yongfu stepped down, the management teams of Ele.me and AutoNavi, the two major businesses of Local Life Group, changed again: 82-year-old Wu Zeming (pseudonym: Fan Yu) will serve as the chairman of Ele.me, and 88-year-old Han Liu (pseudonym: Haochen) will serve as the CEO of Ele.me; Liu Zhenfei, the former president of AutoNavi, will serve as the chairman of AutoNavi, and Guo Ning will serve as the CEO of AutoNavi.
This also means that after a series of organizational changes and strategic adjustments, Alibaba's offensive horn in the field of local life has been sounded; Eleme, the leader of the young Zhuang faction, is also starting a more imaginative second half.
After three years of accumulation, Yu Yongfu reshaped Eleme
In a blink of an eye, 48-year-old Yu Yongfu has been at the helm of Ele.me for 3 years.
Yu Yongfu, who graduated from Nankai University with a major in business administration, has always believed in technology and attaches importance to efficiency in the management of the companyBecause he is good at clarifying the strategic direction of the business and leading the team to play against the wind, Yu Yongfu is known as the "integration master" within Alibaba.
In July 2021, Alibaba merged AutoNavi, Ele.me, and Fliggy into the life services segment in a new round of organizational changes. At that time, it was Yu Yongfu who was appointed to command the "flying high" matrix, and Yu Yongfu also served as the CEO of Ele.me at the same time.
Taking over Ele.me is both a challenge and a mission for Yu YongfuOn the one hand, Ele.me was in a state of long-term losses at that time, and its development situation was not optimistic; On the other hand, at that time, AutoNavi had already won the third largest traffic pool of Alibaba, and had grown into the second largest taxi platform in the country, and also had service entrances such as takeaway and wine tourism.
Of course, more importantly, for the entire Alibaba Group, local life is very important, and this battlefield must not be lost, which also proves the deep trust of Alibaba Group in Yu Yongfu from another side.
Therefore, after Yu Yongfu took office, he soon started drastic changes, hoping to open up greater imagination space for Alibaba's local life through sorting out and adjusting strategies and businesses.
Strategically, Yu Yongfu determined the "home.""and "to the destination", the former with Ele.me as the core, and the latter with AutoNavi as the core.
In terms of business combing, at the end of 2021, Yu Yongfu announced the "four horizontal and four vertical" strategy of local life. "Four horizontals" refers to business assets, including the Ele.me app, real-time business flow supercomputing platform, real-time logistics super-network (Hummingbird), and real-time logistics supercomputing platform; The "four verticals" refer to operational capabilities, including the command and combat efficiency system, the testing efficiency system, the evaluation and incentive efficiency system, and the learning and precipitation efficiency system. The four horizontals can be regarded as four products, and the four verticals are for the organizational ability of the products.
With the support of this strategy, in the past three years, "Ele.me's face has secretly changed":
Clear strategy and formation:Under the new Internet business logic, Yu Yongfu has established a "two-wheel drive" strategic formation with Ele.me as the core of the home business and AutoNavi as the core of the destination business by reshaping the business strategy of Alibaba's local life.
Among them, it is worth mentioning the hummingbird. In Yu Yongfu's view, the barrier to competition in local life in the future lies in real-time logistics, so Hummingbird should be an independent company and become a "big hummingbird" that can be opened to the outside world. Today, Hummingbird has 3 million riders and has become a key infrastructure and core asset of Alibaba's local life.
Carry out business integration:Based on the business strategy, the business resources including Ele.me, Koubei and AutoNavi were adjusted, and after the business integration, Ele.me's business continued to focus and the service experience continued to improve.
Establish an efficient and professional management teamIn the past three years, Ele.me has established a professional management team that understands the essence of local life, business and services, and has conducted an in-depth combing of the overall business based on the company's business strategy.
Achieve high-quality growth:According to Alibaba Group's financial report, in the past two years, Ele.me has changed its development goals from "expansion priority" to "high-quality growth" after several adjustments, and has received corresponding results: since the second quarter of 2022, the company's unit economic performance has continued to record positive, order density has continued to increase, and losses have continued to narrow. According to the financial report for the third quarter of fiscal year 2024, local living group revenue increased by 13% year-on-year to 1516 billion yuan, driven by the strong growth of Ele.me and AutoNavi, orders increased by nearly 20% year-on-year.
Reinventing the corporate culture:By creating a pragmatic, self-driven, persistent, and sunny entrepreneurial culture internally, and continuously improving user value, Ele.me's morale has been significantly improved, and it is ready for future business expansion.
It is not difficult to see that in the past three years, Yu Yongfu's actions on Alibaba's local life have focused on streamlining the internal business and organizational mechanism, so as to reshape the business perspective and bring greater possibilities to local life.
Now, Yu Yongfu, who is good at "firefighting", has withdrawn from his management position, which has also released a signal: in the past three years, through a series of measures such as building strategies, doing subtraction, building teams, practicing internal skills, and shaping culture, Ali's local life business has been basically sorted out, and has gradually embarked on the track of steady development. In this sense, Yu Yongfu, who has been appointed to "take on the brink of crisis", has successfully completed the mission delivered by Alibaba Group, and it is both unexpected and reasonable that he is about to step down from his local life management position at this time.
Next, it's time for the new management team to address growth.
The "Strategy Master" handed over the baton, and Ele.me started the second half
By 2024, the 48-year-old Yu Yongfu has been with Alibaba for 10 years.
In the past 10 years, as Alibaba's "Mr. Key", Yu Yongfu has managed a number of businesses in Alibaba Group, and the business span is very large, and he has been involved in almost all Alibaba's non-e-commerce businesses.
Born in 1976 in Inner Mongolia, Yu Yongfu joined UC in 2006 and later became Chairman and CEO of UC. After UC merged into Alibaba in 2014, Yu Yongfu served as the President of UC Mobile Business Group and President of AutoNavi Group, and set clear development goals for UC and AutoNavi.
Since 2015, Yu Yongfu has shown his true colors as a "master of strategy". He has successively shown his skills in leadership positions such as Alimama, Ali Entertainment, EWTP Investment, and AutoNavi.
In March 2015, Yu Yongfu concurrently served as the president of "Alimama", during which he made key adjustments to the overall business of Alimama, transforming Alimama from an e-commerce service platform to a marketing business platform, and realizing the rapid growth of the company's business.
In December 2015, Yu Yongfu broke the "convention" that employees must work for Alibaba for more than five years before they can become partners, and two years after joining the Alibaba Group, he joined the core collective of Alibaba's highest power and became a partner of the group. He is also the first new partner after Alibaba's listing.
In October 2016, Yu Yongfu became the chairman and CEO of Alibaba Culture and Entertainment Group, responsible for the overall development and operation of its film, sports, digital entertainment, networking, Internet map and other businesses, reporting directly to Daniel Zhang, then CEO of Alibaba Group. During his tenure, he has clearly sorted out the business and organization of Ali Entertainment, and the influence of Ali Entertainment in the industry has also begun to appear.
In November 2017, Yu Yongfu switched to EWTP investment related work and continued to serve as the chairman of AutoNavi.
From 2019 to 2021, Yu Yongfu took the initiative to cut the O2O business through strategic focus, focused on the map itself, and led AutoNavi to break through again, turning an application with less than 10 million daily active users (DAU) into a national-level application with more than 100 million DAU and more than 200 million at the peak, becoming a "well-deserved industry leader".
In July 2021, Yu Yongfu took office as the CEO and chairman of the company, leading Alibaba Local Life to achieve steady growth.
From Yu Yongfu's years in Alibaba Group, it can be seen that Yu Yongfu usually appears as a "fire captain" in a business and organization of Alibaba Group that has encountered bottlenecks and is waiting for a "major operation".
As Wu Yongming commented, Yu Yongfu 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. It has cultivated and trained two business teams with deep knowledge and strong combat effectiveness in the field of local life."
Therefore, Yu Yongfu's withdrawal at this time also marks the completion of the historical mission of Ali's local life organization reform. After the handover, Alibaba's local life business will also start the second half smoothly under the leadership of the new management team.
The young Zhuang faction is in charge, and the new changes of Ele.me are about to begin
After this adjustment, the two businesses of Alibaba Local Life Group, Ele.me and AutoNavi, will have a chairman and CEO respectively.
In particular, Ele.me will also usher in the "youngest management team in history".
It is understood that the chairman of Ele.me was succeeded by Wu Zeming, CTO of Local Life Group and partner of Alibaba. Wu Zeming, born in 1982, is a core member of the technical architecture of Alibaba's e-commerce system. As early as 2004, Wu Zeming joined ** and successively served as the president of the new retail technology business group, the chief technology officer of the local life business, the chief technology officer of Alibaba Group, and the vice president of the Ali Damo Academy. Prior to this appointment, Wu Zeming was the CTO of Alibaba Group, the CTO of Taotian Group and the CTO of Local Life Group, and was internally evaluated as "a technical executive who has grown up in a front-line technical position".
The new CEO of Ele.me, Han Liu, was born in 1988 and is one of the post-85 presidents of Alibaba. Among them, Hummingbird, which has more than 3 million riders, is one of Ele.me's core assets. During Han Liu's management, Hummingbird promoted the construction of the logistics supercomputing platform, and partnered with Wu Zeming to build a new Blue Knight development and security system, and promoted the construction of the Ele.me logistics supercomputing platform.
On the whole, Wu Zeming is a technical executive, and Han Liu has rich experience in business flow and logistics in far, medium and near-field e-commerce, and they are all handsome talents who have experienced actual combat tests. Moreover, the new management of Ele.me is younger and more energetic, and the combination of the two also leaves enough room for imagination for the future development of Ele.me.
The younger trend of Ele.me's management team is also another microcosm of the younger management of the entire Alibaba Group.
In fact, in order to better adapt to the new consumer trend and meet the changes in technology trends, various sectors within Alibaba are also making bold moves to promote the comprehensive succession of a young management team.
Over the past year, Alibaba's chairman Joe Tsai and group CEO Wu Yongming have successively mentioned rejuvenation in all-staff letters, saying that they will "fully use the young management team that has been trained at the grassroots level and is up-and-coming".
On December 20 last year, in the organizational adjustment of Taotian Group, the younger management team attracted attention. Six young managers, including Wu Jia, Chuduan, Jialuo, Yiman, Shaoyou, and Daofang, were appointed as leaders of several key businesses of Taotian Group and reported directly to Wu Yongming. Among them, Wu Jia, who is in charge of Taotian User Platform Division and Alimama Division, and Wang Tingxiang (Shaoyou), who leads the Apparel Development Department, are both "post-85s".
Of course, younger management is only one aspect. In essence, the biggest focus of Ali's management is as Wu Yongming said: "face up to the status quo and start a new business".
With the awareness of "facing up to the status quo and starting a new business", Alibaba Group is also creating more room for young managers with rich practical experience, excellent professional strength, and outstanding leadership skills.