What are the good opportunities to catch up with the road of rising?
文 | 刘一鸣
By benefiting from the expected market earnings report, the stock price has risen sharply and the market value has reached 40.7 billion US dollars. By the end of August, Baidu has become the fifth largest Internet company in China.
The biggest attraction of the Internet industry is uncertainty – nothing is impossible. If the clock is set back to 2016, then the mainstream view still believes that there is no big opportunity in the e-commerce sector, and investment institutions are paying attention to vertical e-commerce, expecting them to survive in the gap between Ali and JD.
In 2016, most venture capital funds were disgusted when they got a lot of BP. The FA that was responsible for a lot of pushes had no results. VCs didn’t think there was any chance for platform e-commerce. This may be the legendary “empiricalism killing people”.
According to a former Jingdong Investment Department, Chang Bin, the director of the investment department, also saw the project, and the conclusion was very unacceptable. In 2016, a lot of B-round financing was not going well, but some investment funds that were not experienced in the Internet field got an opportunity.
2016 is also the year of the main upgrade of Ali and JD. Prior to this, Ali had tried the village for a while, Jingdong also did a period of rural e-commerce, but they did not work much, and instead seized the remaining dividends of the first and second tier cities. At this time, the fight more and more quietly cut into the market space released by the giants, and attracted a large number of users under the traffic increase of Tencent.
Where does WeChat traffic go?
After 2015, the mainstream view of Tencent is that it has social traffic, but it lacks the transactional traffic required by e-commerce, so Tencent has been very difficult to do e-commerce.
But the WeChat traffic is real, and based on the characteristics of the mobile Internet, these traffic is relatively closed. In September 2016, four professors from the University of Washington, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Fudan University, through a combination of machine learning and econometrics, proved that WeChat traffic mainly spilled over to two APPs – Tencent News and Taobao.
In this How Mega Is the Mega? In the papers of Measuring the Spillover Effects of WeChat by Machine Learning and Econometrics, four professors used the FCI-PAG method to determine the causal structure used by the application from the sample data and quantitatively estimated the spillover effect.
In contrast to the general perception of the industry at the time, WeChat’s spillover effect on other APPs is very limited: in the top 100 apps, only Tencent News and Taobao’s traffic acquisition is proved to be causally affected by WeChat.ring.
Image Source: How Mega Is the Mega? Measuring the Spillover Effects of WeChat by Machine Learning and Econometrics
Even if the scope of the study is extended to the top 300 APPs, only the two applications directly get the spillover effect, and the rest of the APP is not affected by the causality of WeChat.
Image Source: How Mega Is the Mega? Measuring the Spillover Effects of WeChat by Machine Learning and Econometrics
This result is a powerful proof of the e-commerce value of WeChat traffic. Tencent will definitely find a way to do e-commerce, but it is only a problem in the body or in vitro. In fact, since Tencent transferred the pat network to Jingdong in 2014, Tencent has realized that it is very difficult to do e-commerce in the body. It is ready to support other companies in vitro through investment or acquisition, and embarked on “building traffic highways”. “The mode.”
In addition, from the results of WeChat traffic spillovers, Tencent has the power to stop these traffic spillovers to Taobao. Once Tencent is in its own ecosystem, it can find one or more companies to undertake these traffic and “block” Taobao. It’s just a matter of time.
In September 2016, WeChat’s traffic also overflowed a lot to Taobao, and Tencent is also stepping up its own e-commerce system. In February 2017, Tencent invested a lot of C rounds. Ten months later, Tencent invested in Vipshop, and together with Jingdong, Tencent basically laid a piece in each user group.
2017In -2018, it was also a two-year multi-growth of GMV surges, with a compound annual growth rate of 234%, far exceeding the industry average. In May 2018, WeChat began to “block” Taobao passwords, which means that Taobao merchants cannot share goods on WeChat. This is an inevitable business choice.
Jingdong’s mistake and Tencent’s new favorite
Before the fight, Tencent has been “favorite” is Jingdong. Starting from the acquisition of JD by Tencent in 2014, JD.com has obtained the exclusive e-commerce portal of WeChat for a period of five years. In the Jingdong Financial Reporting Conference in February this year, CFO Huang Xuande said that WeChat is still a very important channel for JD. More than a quarter of new users are from WeChat.
However, in the nearly five years, Jingdong has only used the WeChat portal as an entrance. For a long time, the portal in the WeChat app is a web version of Jingdong Mall.
The recent 2019 Q2 earnings conference call, Liu Qiangdong really paid attention to this entrance. Before the 11th of this year, Jingdong will upgrade the first-level entrance on WeChat to create a dedicated WeChat ecosystem, especially for women and low. New models for line city users, such as low-stakes to attract more businesses and richer merchandise. It has been more than five years since Jingdong got this entrance, and it has been a long time since its establishment.
“Jingdong’s import conversion rate on WeChat is not as high as expected, the internal calculation of the cost and the exchange of GMV, the price is expensive. But the capital market is very sensitive to whether Jingdong has a WeChat level entrance. If this agreement is not renewed, there will be a big problem.” A person close to the Jingdong Strategic Investment Department said, “This is related to Jingdong’s bottom-level cognition. JD.com is a retail gene company. The original perception of the WeChat Jiugongge entrance is Operating the shelf, not the operational relationship chain, so just put a web version at the beginning, this is the difference between the underlying logic.”
In fact, this is the meaning of strategic investment. When a company’s genes are not here, but this direction will create a subversive threat, it should be improved through strategic investment. Unfortunately, Jingdong did not arrange this as early as possible, otherwise it will have a huge pull on Jingdong’s 2018 trough in the second half of the year. Lit effect.
For Tencent, this means a huge loss of traffic. If no company in your system can take over this part, it will either flow to Taobao or be wasted.
Another level of reason is Jingdong’s strategic choice, which cannot give all lifelines to Tencent. Before the online payment was not popular, Jingdong took the lead in investing huge sums of money to make the courier a POS machine. Jingdong was also the easiest e-commerce company to pay for the card at the time. But online payment is growing faster thanImagine that Jingdong is in a dilemma at this time. On the one hand, it has invested a lot of money in POS machines. It cannot be said that it will be abolished. On the other hand, it is very expensive to make online payments. First, it needs to spend huge sums of money to buy payment licenses.
This led to Jingdong’s own payment has not been done, Liu Qiangdong regrets this very much. Nowadays, the payment is basically dependent on Tencent. If the traffic depends on Tencent, then basically Jingdong is working for Tencent. However, Jingdong is indeed very short of traffic, so Jingdong started the “Beijing X Plan” from 2015, and cooperated with various major traffic companies, including today’s headlines, Baidu, Qihoo 360 and so on.
Aside from this level of issue, Jingdong is not warm at the entrance of WeChat. Tencent is also aware that it can’t just cooperate with JD. It needs a company that can “operate the relationship chain”.
The emergence of a lot of spells just fills this gap. Founder Huang Wei has worked as a game company. What’s more, a lot of “spelling group” is the e-commerce product that Tencent needs. Jia Luo, general manager of Ali Daju’s business division, summed up the purchase of this matter very well. The concept of “spelling” actually existed ten years ago, but the real fight group refers to ten people, not a group. To return a bill. A lot of spelling is more of a kind of sharing. Ten people are the price. One thousand people are still the price. It is the concept of pulling sharing. This requires the social relationship chain as the soil.
Jingdong finally reacted this year, but also focused on the market. Previously, Jingdong Mall CEO Xu Lei said, “WeChat market is a very fast-growing market. As one of the most important carriers, it is also taking on the exploration in the WeChat market. Jingdong will build more suitable for the purchase and The supply chain capability of the WeChat market.” For Jingdong, the purchase is indeed an increase, but it still needs to be observed, because the success factor is not the strength of Jingdong.
Huang Wei once said in an interview with Caijing magazine: “After much work, Jingdong, Vipshop, and Mushroom Street have experimented with similar models. For them, the group is just a creation of GMV increments. The tools; and the fight is a lot of people’s logic, we understand people through the group, through the people’s recommendations, later will transition to machine recommendations. You can imagine that the flow of information under today’s headlines is replaced by a stream of goods. In the early days, everyone was low-priced and squad, but our starting points are different and the direction is different. When we grow up, it will be different.”
The number of seats in the e-commerce industry has changed from the original two poles to three poles. The number of people who have invested more than 700 billion RMB GMV, 360 million monthly active users, and 38 billion US dollars has become a factor that no one can ignore. opponent. In Q2 this year, the entire electricity business surpassed the expected results, Ali’s revenues exceeded expectations, e-commerce business momentum was strong, new business efficiency led to a rebound in profit margins; Jingdong active subscribers growth rebounded, single-quarter profit Xingao; a lot of GMV, revenue, and active users all continued high growth, and the improvement in sales expense ratio led to higher-than-expected profits. According to the monitoring data of the National Securities Research and Innovation Center, as of March 2019, the average MAU has reached 260 million, surpassing Jingdong’s 230 million.
With the success of the sinking market through the sinking market, Ali and JD.com also turned around and began to storm the sinking market; Tencent and Ali also gradually laid out various retail formats, forming a tit-for-tat trend, from traffic, data and foundation. Attack and defense at the facility level. In the new e-commerce campaign, it is full of new variables.
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