This article comes fromWeChat public account: Chaos University (ID: hundun-university), author: Qiu Su Chuan (University of innovation experience the chaos), editor: Chaos Business University research team, drawing questions from the visual China
There are many people who are unbearable to share links on Pinduoduo, and some people are disgusted with the high imitation of Pinduoduo. In this era of social closure and giants overwhelming, Pinduoduo seems to always be good at doing the opposite, advancing with the doubts and ridicule along the way.
However, the market has not fully understood the logic of the rise of Pinduoduo. Most people attribute the rise of Pinduoduo to “cheap” and “consumption degradation”. Others believe that Pinduoduo’s “low prices” mainly come from platform subsidies and counterfeiting.
The five-year rise of Pinduoduo may be one of the most worthy of in-depth research business cases in the Chinese Internet industry in recent years. It is true that this analysis is very difficult. We will only do a small attempt here and welcome more people with insights to join us in the discussion.
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Pingduoduo is a company that everyone is very familiar with and also very controversial.
Its dispute mainly comes from two points:
1. Does Pinduoduo’s success come from its opportunism or from its innovative practice?
2. Is Huang Zheng an innovator or an entrepreneur who cannot replicate his path to success with opportunities and resources?
With this question, we try to review Pinduoduo’s entire innovation path and what enlightenment it can bring to us today.
Pingduoduo has not been established for a long time. We can divide it into three stages.
1. Direction exploration
In 2007, Huang Zheng quit his high-paying job at Google and returned to China to start his own business. However, it was not until 2015 that the hard work he founded broke out in one fell swoop. At that time, the e-commerce industry had risen for many years, and giants such as Taobao, Tmall, and JD.com had firmly occupied the market, but Pinduoduo had squeezed into this almost saturated market with its special business model. How did Huang Zheng do it?
2. Pinduoduo is listed
In 2016, Pinhaohuo and Pinduoduo formally merged, and they were listed on the Nasdaq in July 2018, with a market value of US$24 billion. It took less than two years for Pinduoduo to go from a startup to the NASDAQ listing. What is the logic behind Pinduoduo Miracle?
3. Pinduoduo transformation
After listing, Pinduoduo has faced tremendous pressure from all parties. One of the most controversial issues is the issue of fakes. Looking back, Pinduoduo is advancing all the way amidst doubts and ridicule. From now to the future, how will Pinduoduo’s transformation path be unfolded?
Next, we will focus on the above three issues and start from four stages to bring you a re-examination of Pinduoduo’s growth model.
1. Find the direction: break the constraints of the existing market space (direction innovation).
2. Edge cut: the low-end market matches the low-end supply chain (market innovation).
3. Connection Reengineering: From goods-centered to human-centered (model innovation).
4. Inclusive value: Pursue high quality and low price at the same time(innovation of value creation).
Finding direction in a saturated market
In 2007, after Huang Zheng left the Google headquarters, he was not in a hurry to start a business.
The first thing he did was to go to the counter of the 3C Commodity Market Station to perceive the consumer market and customers in face-to-face communication with customers.
Half a year later, Huang Zheng benchmarked JD.com and established a 3C e-commerce company Oku. Judging from the limited information available, this company has been in operation for a total of 3 years. Although it has a revenue of several hundred million a year, the market price of mobile phones is already very transparent, so almost no money has been made. The gap is widening.
At an event attended by Liu Qiangdong and Huang Zheng, Huang Zheng mentioned his transformation ideas-with my age, qualifications and team, I would never beat Liu Qiangdong.
This sentence sounds like a confession at first, but the latter sentence is quite intriguing.
Huang Zheng said that he and I (Liu Qiangdong) are two generations. “Two generations” is not a ridicule, but it means that different generations naturally have different ideas and ways of playing. I will not compete on the same plane as the previous generation. I will look for a new dimension of competition.
Because Huang Zheng believes that Oku will easily fall into a meaningless war of attrition with Jingdong in the future, when Lanting Group issued a takeover offer to Huang Zheng in 2011, Huang Zheng sold Oku to a good price. Lanting gathered momentum and only retained the technical team.
After selling Oku, Huang Zheng also founded an e-commerce agency operating company “Leqi”, and a game company “Xunmeng”. But the idea of entering the e-commerce market has never disappeared.
The question is, is there still room for China’s e-commerce market to step in?
In 2011, JD.com and Ali have actually accounted for most of the e-commerce market.
By 2016, the market share of the two giants further expanded.
At that time, many people in the industry tended to think that the competition in the e-commerce track