Mainland e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding has implemented a sweeping restructuring of Taobao, its online retail services unit, in a bid to stay ahead of the competition and better engage more customers.
The new operating structure, which took effect yesterday, split Taobao into three wholly owned subsidiaries focused on specific e-commerce market segments.
Taobao Mall runs the online shopping portal where international brands and major retailers sell directly to consumers, while Taobao Marketplace is responsible for social networking website Taojianghu, small consumer-to-consumer transactions and the Juhuasuan group -buying portal.
The eTao shopping search engine, which Taobao launched in October to help users scour the internet at large for products and services, now also covers the Taoke online advertising platform.
'We believe that reorganising Taobao into smaller companies will create more value for the whole industry, and therefore more value to our company and shareholders,' chairman and chief executive Jack Ma Yun said in an internal e-mail to Alibaba Group employees.
The group's other subsidiaries are Hong Kong-listed flagship Alibaba.com, third-party online payment service Alipay, data centre operator Alibaba Cloud Computing and China Yahoo.