BEIJING, March 29 (TMTPOST)— One of China’s leading e-commerce software as service (SaaS) platforms confirmed a massive layoff. China Youzan Limited laid off more than 20% of its workforce, the Hong Kong-listed company told the official newspaper China Securities Journal on Tuesday, as a response to the recent rumor about the company’s major downsizing.
Source: Visual China
Youzan’s next business strategy has two focuses: to scale up the common value and to develop the industry verticals, which means to maintain its leadership in social e-commerce and deepen the digitalization in the new retail sector that combines online and offline retail, the CEO Bai Ya said in an internal email the same day.
Last week, Youzan was said to cut all the unprofitable businesses, including the whole staff at the education unit for industry research, 79% of workers at middle-end technical support. The cuts were not as big as the rumor said and “either the product maintenance, the customer service or the sales team run as usual,” Huang Xiaoming, the Chief Operating Officer of Youzan’s education unit, responded to Chinese digital media outlet Jiemian on Monday. Hunag didn’t disclose the size of job cuts or how many people would remain for the business that Youzan forayed into in November, 2018. He said in last December that his company would focus on quality education, especially aesthetic and physical education.
Earlier this month, two Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com were reported to start major layoffs. Reuters’ sources revealed that Alibaba could cut about 39,000 jobs, more than 15% of staff this year. The sources also said Tencent planned to cut 10%-15% of workers at its unit overseeing search and video streaming this year. JD was said to lay off people in multiple business units such as retail, logistics, fintech, the social commerce platform Jingxi, and most of them were reduced 10% to 30% of workforce. The latest layoff round is just normal optimization, and the main business maintains health development, insiders of JD told the official financial newspaper the Securities Times recently.
