Alibaba’s DingTalk Reportedly Reduces Staff

It has been reported recently that Alibaba‘s intelligent mobile office platform DingTalk has adjusted its organization and personnel, with a layoff proportion of 30%. A source told Sina Tech that DingTalk had conducted so-called organizational optimizations, but the staff cutbacks were not close to the figures reported online.

The source said the action was not a substantial layoff, but a routine fiscal year performance appraisal replacement and business adjustment, and the overall adjustment ratio was less than 10% of staff.

According to insiders, the proportion of merit pay replacement previously was between 4% and 10%, while that of this year is about 6%. There are also some natural departures this year. On the whole, the overall proportion is similar to that of previous years.

As a result of strategic adjustment, some modules with reduced business weight were abandoned recently. The teams involved are those that have previously invested heavily in independently-developed SaaS and hardware.

In March this year, DingTalk held a press conference saying that its only focus was PaaS (platform-as-a-service), working on underlying capacity building. DingTalk aims to construct itself only as a basic capability platform, maintain its positioning as a collaborative office and application development platform, and further strategically invest in basic products such as documents, audio and video, projects and conferences.

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“In the strategic adjustment, some unimportant businesses are reducing staff on the whole,” said the insider. In contrast, some important departments were hardly impacted at all, and some may even be recruiting many new staff members. For example, for audio and video, DingTalk has acquired a technical team of more than 100 staff.