The slowing economy in China seems leaving its impacts on e-commerce industry as well. After a few other leading internet based companies, it’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) that has decided to take a backseat. According to reports, Alibaba has decided to stop its recruitment process for the rest of the year.
Road Ahead:
The information was unveiled by none other than Jack Ma, Founder and Executive Chairman, Alibaba. In a recent statement, Ma addressed to all the employees of Alibaba saying that the company had grown too quickly; hence, the headcount wouldn’t go up even by one person throughout 2015. The complete transcript of his address to company’s employees can be found on Alibaba’s messaging app Laiwang.
Even though Alibaba won’t hire any new employee, but it will replace the employees as and when needed. According to Ma, Alibaba will not recruit any new employee, however, whenever any employee will leave the company, it will bring a new employee on board. Ma’s announcement has come at a time when there are not more than seven days left before Alibaba is scheduled to report its March quarter earnings.
Alibaba executes more e-commerce transactions than eBay and Amazon do if they are put together. In January month, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) announced a slowing revenue growth. While talking about employee recruitment in January, it announced that it had 34,081 employees latest by December 31, 2014, up 63% from the previous year. Ma said that until gross merchandise volume would remain under 10 trillion yuan limit, number of employees should be below 50,000, and the current headcount of 34,081 was good enough for this year.
Alibaba’s gross merchandise volume in the quarter ended December 31, 2014 was 787 billion yuan, up 49% from the year before. It surpassed 2.3 trillion yuan for the entire year. Ma indicated that Alibaba would consolidate its business in seven segments i.e. e-commerce, Cainiao logistics, Ant Financial, big data and cloud computing, cross-border trade, advertising and other internet services.
