Alibaba Revamps E-Commerce Businesses As Competition Intensifies

Alibaba Group is placing all of its e-commerce businesses, both domestic and international, under one umbrella overseen by a single executive, according to a person close to the company, as the Chinese tech giant seeks to keep up with fast-moving competitors.

The newly formed Alibaba E-Commerce Group, comprising domestic marketplaces Taobao and Tmall, as well as overseas shopping sites such as AliExpress, Lazada, Trendyol, will be led by Jiang Fan, a 11-year company veteran who currently heads its international e-commerce business, the person added.

This is the first time that the Chinese tech giant is putting all of its e-commerce units under a single executive. In recent years, Alibaba’s dominance in the domestic market has been chipped away by smaller rival PDD Holdings, while newcomers such as Temu—also owned by PDD—and online-fashion retailer Shein, have grown to be formidable competitors against Alibaba in the U.S., Europe and Southeast Asia.

The new group, which also includes Alibaba.com, a business-to-business marketplace where merchants source products for their digital storefronts, and Idle Fish, a platform for consumers to buy and sell used goods, will help Alibaba combine resources and expertise in supply chain and fulfillment across different business units, the person said.

The move mirrors a similar structure that PDD already has in place, with the same group of senior executives supervising both the domestic e-commerce platform Pinduoduo and the wildly popular overseas version, Temu.

Alibaba, which dominated China’s e-commerce sector for well over a decade, has gone through a period of tumult. After paying a hefty $2.8 billion fine for antitrust violations during the Chinese government’s regulatory crackdown on the tech sector in 2021, the company in early 2023 announced that it would overhaul its corporate structure and break itself up into six business units that could be spun off and seek public listings. But Alibaba later scrapped or put on hold its plans to separately list its cloud computing, logistics and grocery units.

In December last year, PDD’s market capitalization briefly overtook that of Alibaba’s, despite the fact that PDD’s revenue was only a fifth of Alibaba’s at the time. (In the quarter through June, PDD’s revenue was more than a third of Alibaba’s.) The development prompted a rare response from founder Jack Ma, who has largely disappeared from the spotlight. On Alibaba’s internal employee forum, Ma congratulated PDD on its “decision-making, execution and efforts,” and proclaimed “Alibaba will change.”

Jiang, the incoming CEO of the new Alibaba E-Commerce Group, will report to Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu. The move also relieves Wu of the duty of being acting CEO of Alibaba’s domestic e-commerce operations, a position he has held since last December after the previous head of that business stepped down.

Jiang, a former entrepreneur who joined Alibaba in 2013 when his mobile app analytics startup was acquired by the tech giant, is no stranger to Alibaba’s core domestic e-commerce business. Once a rising star and a potential successor to former CEO Daniel Zhang, Jiang ran the business for several years until a widely publicized extramarital affair set back his career in 2020.

The affair, involving Jiang and the founder of an Alibaba-backed influencer agency, was brought to public attention after Jiang’s wife took to social media to voice her discontent. The incident quickly turned into a public crisis for Alibaba, which launched an investigation into Jiang. Although the investigation found no evidence that the affair led to any illegal or inappropriate business dealings, Jiang was demoted. Jiang was transferred to oversee the international commerce group in 2022.

While Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall operations in China have struggled with sluggish growth, the international operations that Jiang oversees have grown much faster. In the quarter through September, revenue from Jiang’s International Digital Commerce Group rose 29%, while the Taobao and Tmall Group’s revenue increased only 1%.