Mainland e-commerce giant Alibaba Group has split its recently privatised flagship company, Alibaba.com, into two separate firms in a restructure designed to boost its operating efficiency.
It is the latest organisational change by Hangzhou-based Alibaba since June last year, when it split online retail services unit Taobao into three wholly owned subsidiaries, each focused on specific e-commerce market segments.
Group spokeswoman Florence Shih said Alibaba.com, the world's biggest business-to-business e-commerce services provider, had been transformed into two new operations: Alibaba.com International Business and Alibaba.com Small Business.
Wu Minzhi was appointed president of the English-language international trading business, which had 27.34 million registered users as of March 31. Ye Peng is president of the Chinese-language, small business arm, which had 52.44 million users by the same date.
Both executives will report to Jack Ma Yun, the chairman and chief executive of parent Alibaba. Jonathan Lu Zhaoxi, who served as the chief executive of the previously Hong Kong-listed Alibaba.com, was promoted earlier this month to chief data officer of the parent company.
The former publicly traded subsidiary withdrew its Hong Kong listing on June 20 after parent Alibaba bought the 27 per cent minority shares in the firm that it did not own for a total cash consideration of HK$19.6 billion.