Alibaba’s organizational reshuffle in pursuit of “synergie” between TMall and Taobao

Alibaba on Wednesday publicized its organizational rearrangement, in which Taobao President Jiang Fan was granted oversight over Tmall operations while switching Tmall President Jet Jing’s position to Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang’s special assistant. The reshuffle is aiming to strengthen current customer services and to create more “synergies” between Tmall and Taobao as well as simultaneously leave them both developing independently. It was believed by Alibaba that though these two are serving different needs of consumers, they are targeting “the same group of customers”. Some specialist sees the reshuffle as working towards matching the competitiveness to its rival, namely Tencent, which sent a strong signal out last September about taking enterprise business seriously.