Alibaba Chairman Joseph Tsai: Granting More Autonomy to Enhance Decision-Making Efficiency

Recently, Alibaba Group Chairman Joseph Tsai had a conversation with Kam Shing Kwang, Chairman of J.P. Morgan North Asia and Vice Chairman of Investment Banking in Greater China.

In the conversation, Tsai stated that about a year ago, Alibaba decided to undergo a major reorganization, mainly hoping to ensure faster and more efficient decision-making, and therefore granted more autonomy to business team leaders.

“After all, it’s impractical for a group CEO to make hundreds of decisions every day. Therefore, we have decentralized power, allowing business departments and young talents to have more decision-making power to alleviate the CEO’s work pressure. Then, we made a series of personnel adjustments, and my current position is the result of these adjustments,” said Tsai.

He also stated that it is gratifying to work with a CEO much younger than him, Eddie Wu. Wu has a very high prestige within the company because he was one of the founding members. “We both once struggled in that apartment in 1999, and he was involved in the development of major platforms such as Taobao, Alipay, and their monetization technologies. Eddie Wu has outstanding leadership skills and is fully capable of serving as the company’s CEO,” Tsai said.

Under this new structure, their goal is to be more focused. “If you look at Alibaba today, the internal message we convey to employees is that we will focus on two core businesses: e-commerce and cloud computing. Of course, we also have many businesses that support these core businesses and are strategically significant to the company.”

Specifically, Alibaba entered the food delivery business through the Ele.me platform. Although food delivery may not be Alibaba‘s core business, Ele.me is of great strategic value to Alibaba because the instant delivery infrastructure it has established can be used not only for meals but also for delivering medicines, flowers, fruits, and other perishable items.

“This infrastructure is strategic for us, so it is an indispensable part of our business. In this process, we have clarified what are the core businesses, what are the strategic support businesses, and what are non-core businesses or financial investments. We will gradually adjust and optimize these businesses according to the situation,” Tsai said.

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