Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced a business reorganization that integrate its location-based business- local lifestyle service, online travel platform Fliggy, maps and navigation service AutoNavi, into a new department.

Detail: Yu yongfu, Alibaba’s partner and CEO of Autonavi, will head the new service department that oversee businesses of Alibaba’s local lifestyle service ,Autonavi and Fliggy.

Li Yonghe, president of Alibaba intra city retail, will lead the Alibaba’s local service.

Li replaces Wang Lei who had oversaw Alibaba’s local service for 4 years.

Li Yonghe, Liu Zhenfei,(the president of AutoNavi )and Zhuang Zhuoran,(president of Fliggy) will report to Yu Yongfu.

Yu Yongfu, who is 45, joined Alibaba in 2014 after the e-commerce giant acquired the mobile internet and software service provider UCWeb, which has rebranded as Alibaba’s browser for smart phones.

In October, 2016, Yu became chairman and chief executive of Alibaba Digital Media and Entertainment Group that oversee Alibaba’s entertainment business such as online ticketing platform Tao Piao Piao.

Yu held senior management positions across various fields, including Alimama-Alibaba’s digital marketing platform based on big data, AutoNavi, eWTP and digital media and entertainment group.

Context: Alibaba made constant efforts to strengthen its location based services (LBS) particularly local lifestyle business , aiming to challenge the market dominance of Meituan Dianping founded by Billionaire Wang Xing.

In March, 2020, Alibaba said it will open up its mobile payment platform Alipay to 40 million service providers enabling these third-party vendors to offer service such as food delivery and hotel booking, retail, healthcare on the platform.

Alipay said it planned to help 40 million third party vendors to digitize their service over the next three years by allowing them to open mini programs on Alipay, which will help the vendors to approach Alipay’s one billion user base in China.

“The idea behind the decision making for Alipay is to build a one-stop digital lifestyle platform, which will not only creates huge value for our users, but it will also play an important role in accelerating the digital transformation of the service industry and unleashing more growth opportunities,” Ant Financial’s Chief Executive Officer Simon Hu said.