Alibaba Group is cutting over a third of staff in its in-house deals team, four people with knowledge of the matter said, after Beijing’s sweeping regulatory crackdown sharply slowed the Chinese e-commerce behemoth’s deal-making pace.
Alibaba plans to reduce its strategic investment team of more than 110 people, mainly based in mainland China, to about 70, said two of the people, adding the company has already informed a bulk of staffers of their redundancy.
The job cuts mainly involve mid-level and senior people in the mainland, said the two people, declining to be named as they were not authorised to speak to the media. The company’s deals team also has staff in Hong Kong, they added.
Alibaba and its main rival Tencent planned to cut tens of thousands of jobs combined this year in one of their biggest layoff rounds as the crackdown and China’s Covid-19 curbs stifled growth, Reuters reported
in March.
TikTok owner ByteDance also shrank its investment team and was dissolving a sub-group focused on financial returns in response to the regulatory crackdowns in China, sources familiar with the matter said in January.
Chinese regulators launched an unprecedented campaign in late 2020 to rein in the country’s technology giants after years of laissez-faire approach that drove growth and deal-making at breakneck speed.
On Sunday, China’s market regulator imposed the latest fines on Alibaba and Tencent as well as a range of other firms for failing to comply with anti-monopoly rules on the disclosure of transactions.
The regulatory crackdown has sharply slowed sales growth for most of the internet companies, smashed their share prices, and made new capital raising and business expansion much tougher.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 15th, 2022.
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