How to look at Weimeng’s “China version of Salesforce” vision depends on how you think about the Chinese SaaS market and Weimeng’s development strategy.
The main theme of the Internet industry in 2019 is B.
On January 15th, the smart business service provider Weimeng was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and became the “first stock of the new economy SaaS”; on November 18th, the WPS parent company Jinshan Office landed on the science and technology board, which opened up 208%. … The capital event that runs through the years is the epitome of the Internet going from C to B. Chinese Internet giants are all going to the B-side, seeking to increase in the enterprise-level service market, and the core of the B-side market is SaaS: Enterprises no longer buy software, but rent and deploy on the Internet on time and on demand. Service, which is the trend of enterprise informationization, digitization and intelligence.
However, the Chinese enterprise services market is still in its infancy.
China’s SaaS market has at least 30 times growth space
Fuji Jixun, a partner of GGV Jiyuan Capital Management, pointed out at an event in November: “The Chinese SaaS market today is less than 20 billion, but it is still very small. If you calculate the average annual SaaS expenditure of each company, the United States 30 times that of China, which also means that if the future SaaS spending in China reaches the level of the United States, there is still 30 times the market space. “
GGV is an early fund that focused on the field of corporate services, and has bet heavily. It has accumulated a total investment of nearly $ 1 billion. Foreign SuccessFactors, Zendesk, Square, and Slack and other companies have completed IPO listings. , Geek +, BOSS direct employment, expansion of Bo intelligent, Tongdun, find oil network, sound network and other star companies.
It is precisely because the enterprise-level service market is still very small. When Sun Taoyong, the founder and CEO of Weimeng, mentioned many times, Weimeng ’s vision has always been to become China ’s largest enterprise-level service provider and become the “China version “Salesforce,” to many people, this vision is a bit out of reach.
We have been commented on by Weibo in an article: Weimen wants to be the “Chinese version of Salesforce”. Weimeng continuously improves the capabilities of SaaS and PaaS, and realizes its vision by integrating the traffic platform resources such as Tencent, Toutiao, and Zhihu. However, from the perspective of profit and other indicators, Weimeng is still relatively far away from becoming a “China Salesforce”.the distance.
Yes, Weimeng is far from Salesforce. When Salesforce went public in 2004 as the “SaaS First Share” in the United States, although it had won the stock code CRM, its market capitalization was only $ 1.1 billion. At the time, many people analyzed that the largest market for Salesforce was $ 10 billion, which was its growth limit. On December 4, 2019, Salesforce released its fiscal third quarter fiscal year 2020 financial report showing that in the three months ended October 31, its revenue increased 33% to $ 4.513 billion, and its latest market value was $ 138.498 billion, far Exceeded people’s expectations. We don’t need to despise the short-sightedness of the people of the past. The average person’s thinking is subject to the limitations of the current environment, and only a few people can see the future.
And it is very important that Salesforce turned from profit to loss in the third quarter and lost $ 109 million. As of the release of the financial report, the company’s stock price rose 18% in 2019, behind the 41% increase in the overall software market. Globally, the B-end market is very popular with capital.
Limited by the low level of enterprise informatization and the weak willingness of business owners to invest in digitalization, the development of China’s enterprise-level service market, especially the SaaS market, has just begun. Although this market also has vertical SaaS for Kingdee Cloud Home, Sales Easy, Mingdao, eCheng Technology, and Schoolbao Online in many different industries, it is still very small as a whole. As of now, only a few such as Weimeng have successfully listed on the market. Player. With the industrial Internet, the industrialization of AI, the intelligentization of enterprises, the call of enterprises to go to the cloud, and the help of giants, China’s SaaS market has entered a stage of rapid development. According to data from the China Academy of Information and Communication Technology, the size of China’s SaaS market reached 23.21 billion in 2018 Yuan, a year-on-year increase of 37.6%. According to the IDC report, the size of China’s SaaS market is expected to exceed 32.3 billion yuan in 2021, and the compound annual growth rate in 2018-2021 is expected to exceed 30%.
Creating Salesforce in China, Weimeng Accelerates Capital Layout
The rapid growth of China’s SaaS market, how to maximize the growth dividend? Different players have different choices. The Internet giants are pursuing everything, while launching a broad investment layout, while building a basic platform. Traditional software giants, such as Kingdee, seek to transform the game by incubating the Cloud House. The practice of Weimeng, withSalesforce is exactly the same: On the one hand, he is cultivating on the track he is best at, and on the other hand, he is investing in upstream and downstream.
On December 2nd, Weimeng announced that it would establish Nanjing Huaying Weimeng Fund in conjunction with Huaying Capital, Nanjing Industrial Development Fund, Nanjing Jianye Technology Innovation Fund, and Kaisheng Mother Fund, with an initial scale of 2 100 million yuan, mainly for investment in high-potential enterprise-level service SaaS and start-ups in the upstream and downstream industry chains. Huaying Capital has participated in the A and B rounds of financing of Weimeng. The two have jointly invested in vertical field projects such as “TG Shangyou”, a takeaway agency service provider, and the two parties have been working closely together.
This is not the first time that Weimeng has made an industrial fund. In November, Weimeng and Shanghai Shuangchuang established a Weimeng Industry Fund with a scale of 1 billion yuan, focusing on outstanding companies in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data analysis, and enterprise-level SaaS services. Up to now, the two funds have covered incubation, angel, growth stage, mature stage project investment and industrial mergers and acquisitions.
At present, the Internet is undergoing a collective wave from C to B. Whether giants, unicorns or startups are emerging on the B side, the industrial Internet and AI industrialization mean that there will be more excellent investments on the B side. Subject. Subject to the general environment, enterprise-level SaaS financing is much calmer than the 2018 frenzy. For Weimeng, at this time, the contrarian layout fund has the meaning of cleaning the battlefield. Regardless of business layout or strategic investment, the winter is often the best time to harvest, because opponents may be trimming, hesitating, and watching.
For Weimeng, the layout of multiple funds is more a strategic consideration than a financial investment. The SaaS industry chain is very long, and all industries have strong vertical attributes. Coupled with the “slow” nature of the enterprise-level service market, Weimeng cannot do everything in person. Weimeng is the largest WeChat mini-program service provider, the largest third-party WeChat service provider for small and medium-sized enterprises, and the largest Tencent social network service platform for small and medium-sized enterprise precision marketing service providers. Weimeng focuses on the areas where it is best at: WeChat ecology (mini-program, public account, WeChat marketing), new retail, etc. For the rest of the link, investment layout is adopted. As a Tencent-based company, the idea of Weimeng is similar to Tencent’s idea of opening an ecosystem.
Salesforce has grown from a company with many artificially broken tens of billions of dollars to today’s 130 billion dollars.