Alibaba modernizes e-commerce businesses, naming its new CFO

Alibaba said it would restructure its global and national e-commerce businesses. It started reorganization by replacing its CFO. 

These changes came as the company beat the competition and a regulatory crackdown.

The company plans to form two new units as a part of attempts to become more active and stimulate growth. Those two units are China digital commerce and international digital commerce.

Overview 

The international digital commerce unit will include its Southeast Asian e-commerce business Alibaba.com and Lazada. In fact, it will focus on trading to overseas business clients. AliExpress, which sells to retail customers, particularly in South America and Europe.

The head of the unit will be Jiang Fan, in charge of its leading Chinese retail marketplaces. This change is a part of Alibaba’s plan to make globalization a primary focus area with cloud computing as well as domestic consumer spending.

Danny Law, the Hong Kong-based Guotai Junan analyst, said that globalization could help Alibaba get new global traffic volume. Moreover, it could explore new growth potential while China started increasing surveillance.

The Chinese digital commerce unit will include two leading marketplaces of Alibaba, Taobao, with all kinds of merchants, and Tmall for verified brands. Trudy Dai will lead this unit as he has previously managed many Alibaba platforms.

Xiaoyan Wang, 86research.com analyst, said that the new structure put Dai in charge of all retail marketplaces in China, including Taobao Deals, its community e-commerce service – Taocaicai,  and retail management platform – Lingshoutong.

Alibaba also declared that its deputy CFO Toby Xu would replace Maggie Wu from the beginning of April.

U.S.-listed shares of Chinese companies dropped as Didi Global Inc left the New York Stock Exchange.

Beaten by weaker economic growth and intense competition from plenty of rivals, Alibaba cut its estimate for annual revenue growth last month.