On the occasion of Jack Ma's return to China, Alibaba unveiled its strategy: divide the cake into 6 parts, to better materialize the value of the group (and also reduce its hold, to regain the favor of the leaders). As a reminder, the group was born 24 years ago, employs no less than 240,000 people, and is active in a swarm of sectors, from groceries to cloud computing.

So now there will be the Chinese marketplace, international e-commerce, cloud, local services, logistics and entertainment. The original group will retain ownership of the Chinese e-commerce unit, which generates the most profit.

A largely "weakened" conglomerate, this should reassure Beijing bureaucrats. Entities that will independently increase their value should also appeal to investors, as competition increases in all of the company's businesses. In fact, as soon as the schism was announced, Alibaba's share price jumped 14%.

Each unit will have a separate CEO and board of directors, and a large part of them should aim for a listing. This should finally give a little respite to Jack Ma who crystallized, along with other Chinese groups leaders, the anger of the party.

Alibaba also announced it will reduce its investments in other international companies and continue its share buyback, and will then choose whether or not to retain stakes in the new companies resulting from the split.