Alibaba Announces Plan to Hire 15,000 People to Dismiss Layoff Rumor

BEIJING, May 25 (TiPost)— Alibaba Group Holding Limited announced a large-scale recruitment as a way to dismiss recent news about its major layoff.

Source: Visual China

Recently, news about layoffs across Alibaba’s businesses swept online, but the fact is that all of them are rumors, whatever they were talked or spread a lot, a post of the tech giant from its Twitter-like Weibo account made it clear. Alibaba will hire a total of 15,000 people this year for all the six business groups, including more than 3,000 university graduates from on-campus recruitment, according to the post on Thursday. The company said it has thousands of openings every day in its recruiting system, as a proof that it is still hiring.

“Talent flow is very common as every business has always been witnessing it. Alibaba also saw employees in and out of organizations all the way since this is a normal flow,” the post wrote. “Alibaba has never stopped self-innovation and upgrading, or stopped recruiting and cultivating outstanding talents, even new conditions, new opportunities and new developments emerge. This is (our) dynamic source for long-term development in the future. ”

The hiring statement came days after various news about Alibaba’s job cuts circulated on social media. The company was said to axe 25,000 staff in total, affecting jobs at the Taobao & Tmall Group, which include its core e-commerce retail businesses such as Taobao, Tmall, the logistic arm Cainiao, the Local Services Group, the Cloud Intelligence Group and the Digital Media and Entertainment Group.

The Cloud Intelligence Group, including cloud, AI, DingTalk and other businesses, was reportedly to reduce about 7% of staff, as part of preparation for a spinoff and the following initial public offering (IPO). The recent move is nothing but normal workforce optimization involving positions within the organization, an insider later responded. The people snubbed the report as a normal action since the company carries out the optimization of positions and personnel every year, and said the optimization this year will affect around 7% of workforce.

Alibaba announced in late March to split into six business groups, including Cloud Intelligence Group, Taobao Tmall Commerce Group, Local Services Group, Cainiao Smart Logistics, Global Digital Commerce Group, Digital Media and Entertainment Group. Five of these major business groups will have the flexibility to raise external capital and potentially to seek its own IPO, with the exception of Taobao & Tmall Group, which will remain wholly-owned by Alibaba Group. Alibaba Group’s chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang called the move “the most significant governance overhaul” since Alibaba’s inception and said each business group is fully responsible for its performance, with financial independence.

Alibaba’s board of directors approved last week a full spin-off of the Cloud Intelligence Group via a stock dividend distribution to shareholders, aiming to complete the breakup in the next 12 months and make the group an independent publicly listed firm.

Listing plans about two other business groups also got the nod from Alibaba’s board. Freshippo, a grocery stores operator under the China commerce segment, is approved to execute an IPO, and expected to be completed in the next 6 to 12 months. Cainiao Smart Logistics, a group provides supply chain, logistics and delivery services that Alibaba holds a 67% stakes in, is approved to explore an IPO with the target to complete the deal in the next 12 to 18 months.

Alibaba didn’t specify how many people each of business group boasts. The financial report released last Wednesday showed it had a total of 235,216 employees as of March 31, 4,524 people, or about 1.9% less than three months earlier.

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