Opinion | 'Tis the season to reorganize

Bottom line: The wave of reorganisations sweeping major Chinese web firms is likely to result in a period of management turmoil, resulting in less innovation on the Internet.

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Tencent Holdings Limited Chairman & CEO Pony Ma at a results announcement in Hong Kong on March 16, 2011. Photo: SCMP

Published: 12:12pm, 30 Jan 2013Updated: 12:13pm, 30 Jan 2013

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but a lot of Chinese Internet firms suddenly seem to be engaged in a series of major reorganisations. I came to this conclusion after reading this morning that Suning.com (Shenzhen: 002024), one of China's top e-commerce firms, has just undergone a major structural reorganisation as part of what the company says is a regular exercise. News of this latest reorganisation comes the same week that headlines have been buzzing with news of another major reorganisation at Tencent (0700.HK), China's leading Internet company.

But wait a minute, you're probably saying to yourself, didn't we also just see news of a major overhaul at e-commerce leader Alibaba, which recently reorganised itself into 25 major business units? Alibaba was hardly a leader in this sudden strange race to reorganise, with leading web portal Sina (Nasdaq: SINA) and top Internet search engine Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) also both recently undergoing their own major internal overhauls.

I've been covering China's tech industry for most of the last decade, and I have to admit that I've never seen anything like this sudden frenzied wave of reorganisations before. Perhaps it's related to the Chinese zodiac, as it may be more auspicious to do this kind of overhaul in the Year of the Dragon, which is rapidly drawing to a close as we prepare to welcome the Year of the Snake on February 10.

But my guess is that the reasons behind this current wave of reorganisations are probably more practical, with 2 major factors at play. Perhaps most importantly, many of these companies that are now reorganising are now far bigger than they were 5 or 6 years ago. Their rapid growth has been driven largely by China's "me too" phenomenon, which sees companies often rush into other areas outside their core businesses as they look for growth.

Thus companies like Tencent, which began life as social networking specialists, now have myriad divisions ranging from its original social networking services, to online games, online video and e-commerce. As Tencent and others have added all these new businesses, they haven't really made any major adjustments to their management structures, meaning reporting lines are often blurred and one manager may be responsible for several unrelated product areas.

That's the first and perhaps most important reason for this sudden wave of reorganisations. The second reason appears to be the sudden recognition by everyone that the mobile Internet is the wave of the future, which increasingly does appears to be the case. Accordingly, a key element in many of these reorganisations seems to include giving mobile Internet divisions within each company the room they need to develop and become major contributors to future business.