Classical Ali returns to the era of Jack Ma?

Author 丨 Snow Leopard Financial Society Han Xing

Some Alibaba employees joked: The more frequently Jack Ma appears, the better Ali’s life will be.

In the past year, Jack Ma, as the soul figure of Ali, has frequently appeared and spoken out after many years of retreating behind the scenes: first, he replied on the intranet that employees Ali will change and Ali will change, and then released a thousand words on the occasion of the first anniversary of Ali’s organizational change. The letter cheered up employees and appeared in Ali Park many times.

At the same time, 18 Arhats Cai Chongxin and Wu Yongming returned to the front line of company management, and Jiang Fan led the e-commerce business group. Selling non-core assets and focusing on core businesses, Ali is trying to return to the omnipotent Taobao in the golden age of e-commerce.

Ali more than ten years ago had two obvious characteristics. First, Taobao Tmall is in its heyday, and Alibaba’s e-commerce business accounts for nearly 70% of the market share, so Alibaba pays more attention to itself than its competitors; second, it is also the eve of Alibaba’s large-scale expansion into new businesses and new industries, so the business is more focused.

Year-to-date, the market value of Alibaba’s Hong Kong stocks has risen by more than 60%, rising by nearly 15% within one day after the release of its 2024 Q4 earnings report. Analysts who have long been following Alibaba believe that the main reason for this increase is not only a good financial report, but more importantly, a nearly perfect financial report phone conference.

During the earnings call, Ali management spent the first two-thirds of the time talking about AI and cloud. After the meeting, a group of analysts called out that Ali should be revalued. Some optimists even believed that Ali’s valuation should be on par with Tencent in the medium term and against Microsoft in the long term.

Ali’s layout in AI is certainly worthy of recognition, which is the company’s investment in the future. But behind this capital carnival, Ali plays the role of AI and cloud pioneers on one hand, rushing to the forefront of technology, and returns to classicism on the other.

Almighty again”

In May 2023, shortly after Ali initiated major organizational changes, Jack Ma proposed at an internal communication meeting of Taotian Group that he would return to Taobao, users, and the Internet in the future.

At the earnings call conference in February last year, Wu Yongming re-clarified that Taotian Group adheres to the omnipotent positioning of Taobao. Under the consumption grading system, it can provide different consumer groups with a shopping experience of good goods, good prices, and good services, allowing Taobao to return to growth.

The open-screen slogan on Taobao’s mobile terminal has changed several times. There are some things I like, and there are also some things I can do anytime and anywhere I want. Before returning to the all-powerful Taobao, I use it too easy to shop.

In 2005, Taobao first launched the all-powerful Taobao as its core brand slogan, which will be extended to 2016

From the changes in slogan, we can see the different positioning of Taobao at different stages. For the e-commerce industry, the richness of commodity supply is a natural competitive advantage, so early Taobao used the word omnipotent to emphasize the richness of commodities and the prosperity of the merchant ecosystem.

As the competitive environment changes, Taobao has begun to constantly label itself with new labels.

At that time, slogan was so easy to shop around. Behind this, Taobao didn’t want users to leave immediately after buying it, but stayed longer even if they didn’t buy anything. This means that platforms need to exchange richer content for more traffic in addition to products.

In the past year, the growth of the e-commerce industry has peaked, and various platforms have fallen into unprecedented turmoil, including prices, services, and content, but the actual effect is very limited.

Returning to the all-powerful Taobao is a move to break the inner circle. This means that Taobao has begun to turn its attention away from focusing on competitors to its own advantages and ecology.

The reason why Taobao is omnipotent depends on the large number of brands and small and medium-sized businesses on the platform. According to late LatePost, in early February this year, Jiang Fan, the new CEO of Alibaba’s e-commerce business group, made it clear at a small-scale executive meeting that the first major thing for Taobao Tmall in 2025 is to support high-quality brands and merchants. Growth.

On the PC side, Taobao has also started retro. In May last year, Taobao upgraded its web version after seven years and moved the live broadcast to the web page. Users can watch the live broadcast and place orders on Taobao.

Taobao has also restarted the forum Taigu, which has been offline for more than 10 years. The top post is an old article written by Jack Ma 20 years ago. ‘I firmly believe that the biggest beneficiaries of an upright, great and outstanding e-commerce website should be the users,’ the article wrote. rdquo;

An Taotian employee previously told Snow Leopard Financial Society that restoring the web version and scouring the Jianghu was not a temporary idea, but a lot of manpower and material resources were invested.

Amazon founder Bezos once mentioned a phenomenon. When a company has no rivals in the industry, it will pay more attention to its own users. When the competitive environment becomes fierce, many companies talk about paying attention to users., actually focus more on what their competitors are doing rather than what users need.

Choice and focus

The entire Alibaba Group’s business, organization, personnel, culture, etc. are all moving closer to classicism.

About two years ago, Ali launched the largest 1+6+N change in the company’s history. This change has been repeated several times, from flexible organization to individual operations, and finally to focusing on the two core businesses of e-commerce and cloud.

Focus is a concentrated expression of Ali’s return to classicism.

Ten years ago, Ali’s business was relatively simple: e-commerce, Alipay, Cainiao and other infrastructure constructions around e-commerce, as well as cloud computing chasing cutting-edge technology.

But at the same time, 2015 is also the starting point for Ali’s expansion.

In May of that year, Ali officially released office software nail, and then acquired Youku Tudou at the end of the year to enter the entertainment industry. In the following years, Alibaba acquired Enmo and advanced into local life on a large scale; founded Hema, controlled Gaoxin Retail, acquired Yintai, and entered new retail with a high-profile profile.

At the 2016 Yunqi Conference, Jack Ma said that the era of pure e-commerce will soon end. In the next ten or twenty years, there will be no e-commerce, only new retail, online and offline and modern logistics. Only when combined together can we truly create new retail.

Over the past ten years, Alibaba’s business has become increasingly complex, involving all aspects of people’s work, life, consumption, and entertainment, and has grown into a China Internet giant with a market value of more than 100 billion US dollars.

However, with the changes in the consumer environment and competitive landscape, Ali began to sell offline retail business and refocused on e-commerce and cloud computing.

The retro nature of personnel changes is a clearer signal of return.

In November last year, Ali released an internal email announcing the integration of domestic and overseas e-commerce businesses and the establishment of an e-commerce business group. Jiang Fan will serve as CEO and report directly to Wu Yongming.

Jiang Fan has served on Taobao Tmall for more than 7 years. He has led the transformation of Taobao’s mobile terminal and directly managed Taobao for 4 years. Before Jiang Fan’s return, Cai Chongxin and Wu Yongming, who were Ali ‘s Eighteen Arhats, successively returned to the group as chairman and CEO.

For today’s Ali, AI and cloud computing have undoubtedly brought huge growth opportunities, but it is equally important to keep the fundamentals.

With one hand pioneering and the other hand retro, can Ali re-shine its brand ten years ago?” nbsp;