Jack Ma urges Alibaba’s top executives to ‘go back to Taobao’ to fend off rivals in tough e-commerce market
- Ma, 58, cited the cases of Nokia, once a leading mobile phone brand, and photographic film pioneer Kodak, to show how industry leaders can quickly fall
- The Alibaba founder said the company should focus on user experiences on the internet, rather than operate as a retailer chasing sales performance
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group Holding, held an informal meeting with e-commerce executives in late May, advising them to refocus on Taobao and consumers to survive brutal competition and weather China’s economic slowdown, Chinese media LatePost reported, citing unidentified sources.
In the meeting with key executives from Alibaba’s Taobao & Tmall Group, including Trudy Dai, the chief executive of the unit, Ma, who has resigned from all corporate roles but remains the spiritual leader of the business empire he created from scratch, said Alibaba cannot take its dominant position in China’s e-commerce market for granted and must stay alert to business failure risks.
Ma, 58, cited the cases of Nokia, the mobile phone brand that dominated the global market for years, and Kodak, the film giant that was displaced by digital photography, to show how industry leaders could fall at an alarming speed. Ma said Alibaba has to “go back to Taobao, go back to users, and go back to the internet”, according to the report published on Monday.
Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, did not reply to a request for comment.
“Going back to Taobao” means the platform will pivot from traffic flows to supporting marketing budgets for small and medium merchants from established brands on Tmall. Taobao, launched in 2003, was Alibaba’s first consumer e-commerce platform. It achieved huge success in wooing small merchants online to defeat then rivals such as US giant eBay while Tmall, formally known as Taobao Mall, was spun out in 2008 to fit Chinese consumer’s demand for brands.