No Alibaba heads likely to roll in Taobao fakes dispute
E-commerce giant not expected to make scapegoats of top executives as it mends fences with regulator over counterfeit claims on shopping site
The last time Alibaba founder Jack Ma Yun faced allegations of widespread fraud and other illegal activities inside the e-commerce powerhouse, two senior executives quit to pave the way for a much-needed house-cleaning.
Months earlier, some 100 sales representatives were dismissed by Alibaba for being involved in defrauding international buyers. It also terminated the subscription of about 1,200 online suppliers found to have committed fraud or identified as potential fraudsters.
Amid the controversy raised by the recent spat between Alibaba's popular online-shopping operation Taobao Marketplace and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), Ma is likely to step up efforts to mend fences with the regulator, Taobao's customers and the New York-listed company's investors.
So the question some people at Alibaba headquarters in Hangzhou might be asking is: whose heads will roll this time?
Analysts, however, predict that no senior executives at Alibaba will find themselves in the firing line.
"Replacing a chief executive is not a measure that Alibaba can use every time," Liu Xingliang, the chairman of internet data analyst firm Hongmai Software, said yesterday.
Liu said he expected the testy relationship between Alibaba and SAIC would be resolved soon as the company pushed "concrete measures to crack down on fake products on Taobao".
Ma announced on Thursday that Alibaba would form a 300-person team to fight counterfeiting on Taobao, the mainland's biggest online shopping platform. Ma also met with SAIC head Zhang Mao on Friday to stress the firm's cooperation with the regulator.
Internet analyst Xie Wen, the former president of Yahoo China, said Alibaba "won't punish anyone in the company because that would be admitting it had done something wrong".
"Alibaba is very firm in its belief, that's why it reacted the way it did against an SAIC official," Xie said.
Last Wednesday, the SAIC issued a white paper that accused Taobao of allowing a high proportion of counterfeit and substandard goods to be sold through its online shopping platform.
That marked an escalation of a war of words between the SAIC and Taobao, which had published an open letter on its official Weibo account last Tuesday accusing SAIC director Liu Hongliang of commissioning an unfair survey on the quality of goods sold on the platform and publicising the results without giving online merchants a chance to appeal.
"We support rigorous supervision of our company, but we also feel compelled to speak out when there are inaccurate and unfair attacks being levelled against us," Alibaba executive vice-chairman Joseph Tsai said on Thursday.
