Is the current degree of competition among the business units in Alibaba Group appropriate? Do you think that Jack Ma should encourage more cooperation? If so, how?

                  Among the Alibaba group, there are 6 subsidiaries; Alibaba.com, Taobao.com, Alipay.com, Alisoft.com, Yahoo! China and alimama.com. With their decentralized approach, they harshly compete each other within the group. This policy made them to grow more. But with the harsh competition among the china market, this seems not the best strategy. There are three reasons that cooperation is better.

First, they don`t fully exploit their potential. By cooperating, they can make the synergy. For example, using Alibaba.com`s data, Alisoft.com can segment the market and can target the specific company. Second, they can use the ‘learning curve’. Alibaba group, which stared from the B2B company, has a long history and has an accumulated data to use. And by that valuable experience, they can efficiently manage not just each companies but overall companies. Third, they can monopolize the Chinese online market. Monopolistic status, which is the optimal way for the company to make a profit, can be achieved through cooperate each other.

                  They way Alibaba group`s cooperation has two things. First, reorganize the organizational structure. In recent status, the organization is divided into functional heads and each subsidiary. But, this structure should be reformed by functional heads first, and other subsidiaries should locate in lower level in the functional heads. And this reformation can make each subsidiaries to follow a group`s aligned goal. Second, subsidiaries`s IPO should be done with let the Alibaba group as a holding company. Share price reflects the present and future firm`s expectation. And it is needless to say that cooperation is better. So, the shareholders will demand the cooperation and the each subsidiary`s CEO should follow the shareholder`s demand. At first glance, it seems irrelevant. But by reorganizing the basic company`s basic assumption, they should follow the way to cooperate each other because stockholders want to do.