Alibaba Group yesterday announced its plan to reorganize the company into 7 business groups under a concept of CBBS which means “Consumer to Business to Business to Service partners”. The 7 business groups include Taobao.com(C2C), Tmall(B2C), Etao(shopping search engine), Juhuasuan (group-buying), Alibaba International Operation (global platform for small businesses), Alibaba Small Business Operation(e-commerce service for domestic SME) , and Aliyun(cloud computing).
Alibaba never stopped exploring a better structure for its diversified businesses. In 2008, the group came up with a strategy claiming “To promote an open, cooperative and thriving E-commerce ecosystem.” In June 2011, Alibaba spun off Tmall and Etao from Taobao, citing “Separation makes tightness.” And then the group-buying platform Juhuasuan went towards independent operation. June 20th 2012, the group finished privatizing its B2B operation.
The company suggested that in the past 13 years, it had gone through the phase of B2B, C2C, B2C and open platform. For the next stop the Hangzhou-based family will be focusing on building up an ecommerce ecosystem.
Here is the internal mail on the restructure from Jack Ma, the CEO:
Alibaba fellows:
Our B2B company has been delisted for over a month, the whole process went smoothly for all the efforts and trust from you. We all know that delisting is never the destination. Under the terrible economic environment, what we really want is to help SMEs weather the storm ahead, and to let more and more consumers enjoy the benefits of the Internet era.
Therefore, we should stick to our goal of building up just “One Company”, combining our SME clients and the Taobao e-commerce market. We should make the platform more open, collaborative and beneficial. We need to further improve the ecosystem consisting of various target markets of Alibaba with reasonable mechanism in an aim to better serve our enterprise users and individual consumers.
Given this, we decided that we are to reorganize into seven business groups (or Seven Swords of Alibaba). They are Taobao, Etao, Tmall, Ju, Alibaba International Operation(ICBU), Alibaba Small Business Operation(CBU) and Aliyun. And respectively the presidents are Jiang Peng, Wu Yongming, Zhang Yong, Zhang Yu, Wu Minzhi, Ye Peng and Wang Jian.
Jack Ma
Alibaba Group
July 23th 2012
I’d be lost in business without alibaba!!