Wei doing it himself at Alibaba?

There have been a number of items around the Internet over the past few days, as yet unconfirmed, suggesting that David Wei, former head of British DIY retail chain B&Q's China Division is to join Alibaba.com as head of its B2B division. Reuters reports the news here.

In all the excitement over Yahoo! China and taobao.com's successful run against eBay, the B2B core of Alibaba does appear from the outside to have been treading water over the past 12 months. A senior executive of Wei's stature would presumably be tasked with driving it forward again.