Alibaba’s Executive Chairman Jack Ma announced that the e-commerce giant has decided to establish a so-called Five New Executive Committee in an internal letter to his employees on Tuesday morning.
The new committee is responsible for the implementation of the company’s Five New strategy which he coined in October 2016.
According to the letter, Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang will be the president of the committee, integrating all Alibaba companies including Alibaba Group, financial sector Ant Financial, and logistics division Cainiao to boost the Five New strategy. The committee will have short, middle and long term goals which Ma did not elaborate in the letter.
Besides the Five New strategy, Zhang brought up the concept of new Netrepreneurship (Internet + entrepreneurship) on Tuesday morning at the Alibaba Global Netrepreneur Conference held in Hangzhou. He urged all e-businessmen to take advantage of the Five New industry models – new retail, new finance, new manufacturing, new technology and new energy – to reshuffle their businesses and become new “netpreneurs”.
Later that day, Ma echoed Zhang’s words on the concept of “netpreneurs” and further explained that he foresaw all entrepreneurs throughout the world using the Internet to do business in the future, and that the business-to-consumer (B2C) model will shift towards the customer-to-business (C2B) model for manufacturers. This means that there will be more demand for customized products.
In October 2016, Ma proposed the Five New strategy as he believes that it will deeply influence China and the rest of the world in the next 30 years.
In the Five New strategy, new retail means the combination of online and offline sales with smart logistics; new finance means real inclusive finance based on a credit system built on big data; new manufacturing refers to smart, personalized and customized consumer-to-business (C2B) manufacturing instead of the traditional business-to-consumer (B2C) manufacturing; new technology to be invented based on the Internet and big data; and data to replace oil, coal, and electricity to become new energy.
To date, Alibaba’s e-commerce arms Tmall and Taobao have 500 million monthly active mobile users. Tmall claimed that its sales were over RMB 120.7 billion (USD 17.7 billion) on Singles’ Day last November.
(Top photo from Alibaba)