BEIJING - Taobao's VP and GM of B2C business Ruo Huang has announced his resignation, citing managerial differences with the company as his reason for departure.
According to Chinese reports, Huang is an industry veteran of 20 years and has stepped down because of clashing opinions between himself and Taobao over long-term positioning and operating strategies.
His departure comes at a time when competition is intensifying between the e-commerce site and Youa.com, Baidu’s newly launched online shopping mall that will take on Taobao, China’s clear market leader.
Just last week, Baidu further raised the stakes by appointing Yinan Li as its chief technology officer following a two-year search to fill the vacated post. However, a shake-up may still occur at Baidu amid rumours of chief scientific officer William Chang’s plans to resign because of his discontent with the job. Chang has denied the speculation.
Also last week, Alibaba Group moved to stymie the influence of Youa.com by investing Rmb 5 billion (US$732 million) into Taobao.com over the next five years. The announcement comes a month after Alibaba took a stand against Baidu by blocking the search engine from crawling its sites, including Taobao.com and Alimama.com.
Taobao claims more than 80 million registered users and one million sellers as of September, compared with Youa, which launched with 10,000 registered merchants at the end of September.
Friday, October 17, 2008
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