Taobao online to be split up

Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba Group (owner of Alibaba.com, 1688.HK), said that his firm will divide its Taobao online store into three divisions, Bloomberg reported. Alibaba said that Taobao would be restructured in to Taobao Mall, for customers to shop from businesses, eTao, for shopping-related searches, and Taobao Marketplace, for customer-to-customer purchases. The company said that the reorganization would generate shareholder value, and was necessary to remain competitive in the “dramatically” changing e-commerce environment. Ma said that he aimed to make the new Taobao companies “nowhere but everywhere. They will be omnipresent.” However, analysts worried that the synergies of housing all the units under a single roof might be lost. “From a business point of view, this is quite strange and it’s not clear this is the best thing to do,” said Marvin Lo, an analyst at Daiwa Securities Capital Markets.