Jingdong, who tries to find the main rhythm of the investment, does not only have to extend the tentacles, but also grow more tentacles.
With the Alibaba Investor Conference, Jingdong Strategic Investment Department shared the investment ideas for the first time.
This interview was by Jason Hu, who was recently appointed by Jingdong Group as the head of strategic investment. Hu Ningfeng is the former managing director of the private equity firm CDH Investment. According to Reuters, Hu Ningfeng joined Jingdong as the vice president of Jingdong Group in July this year, and directed the chief strategy officer of Jingdong Group. Jianwen reported that it was responsible for the strategic investment transaction of Jingdong Group around September.
This shows that Hu Ningfeng joined Jingdong Group for two months and was only one month as the head of Jingdong Strategic Investment. Hu Ningfeng said frankly at the communication meeting that he had just started to re-establish Jingdong’s historical investment project. He would not answer any questions that are too specific. Jingdong Group executives have only started a strategic meeting, and many future group strategies will come from the strategic investment department. Advance.
Under such a time node, what signals does Jingdong want to pass through this communication meeting?
Jingdong battlefield emergency “remediation”
Compared with Tencent and Ali, Jingdong is a slower step in strategic investment.
Source: Enterprise check, statistical charting, data is for reference only
According to the investment dynamics of the company, from October 2012 to now, JD has made 77 investments at home and abroad (including additional investment in the same project), of which about 30 strategic investments. Comparing the strategic investment dynamics of Jingdong with Ali and Tencent, it was found that Jingdong was in a relatively backward position, regardless of the start-up year of the first battle investment or the number of investments.
Ali and JD.com are both e-commerce stocks, all of which landed on the American Stock Exchange in 2014. Jingdong is not as good as Ali in the number of wars, but overall, the growth path of the two shows a similar trend: starting from 2016, reaching a high point in 2018.
What does external strategic investment mean for the company? First of all, strategic investors need to pay more, not only to invest money, but also to invest in the source; secondly, strategic investors are closely related to the business of the invested party, and can establish upstream and downstream links and promote strategy. Collaboration. CorrectInvestors, strategic investment projects need to have a strong voice, maintain long-term holdings, use investment to shake the business and get higher in the capital market Premium.
Compared with Ali, JD.com has integrated a complete ecological chain including technology, management, market, and human resources, and then empowered it. Jingdong, which has been an integrated e-commerce platform and has been self-contained, is now trying to build a new structure and become an integrated open platform, borrowing Hu Ningfeng’s statement that “this is a re-engineering of Jingdong”. Jingdong started late in the systematic layout of warfare, but with the gradual clarification of the group’s goal, it has been able to create an extension line from the business side with a clear distinction. The way to reach the market further.
In fact, Jingdong is more eager to form a strong and stable alliance like Tencent and Arina camp . One reason for companies to focus on strategic investment is that once the investee chooses to accept the investment, it is basically the same as completing the team, and it needs to maintain a certain boundary with the strategic investors. Judging from the past year, Jingdong has successively brought Wanda Commercial, Temple Library, Xinchao Media, etc. into the Jingdong camp, while continuing to strengthen the alliance with Vipshop, Dada-Jingdong, and recycling. .
Jingdong is now more anxious about the progress of the war. According to Hu Ningfeng, Jingdong Group is currently conducting a round of strategic adjustments. The systematic layout of Jingdong Strategic Investment Department coincided with the strategic adjustment of the group, and the department did indeed reach such a point. Jingdong will invest more frequently in investment in the future, and the investment will be bigger. Industrial belts, supply chains, logistics, and services are still the investment priorities of the next stage.
The battle in the sinking market is the end of the battle
Jingdong’s past investment projects are scattered, mainly in retail, logistics, finance, corporate services, intelligent hardware and other fields. Today, Jingdong is trying to find a main rhythm to continue its continuous and generous investment.
Since 2019, Jingdong has invested in Wuxing Electric, Dixintong, Life Care and Trendy Media. Although it is distributed in many fields such as home appliance retail, mobile communication, home life service, offline advertising, etc. The offline market in the outer low-line cities.
Five Star Electric focuses on the township market, and its “Wanzhentong” platform covers Jiangsu 60More than 100% of the towns and villages, Jingdong and Suning compete for the top-selling home appliance market; Dixintong as an offline mobile communication chain retailer, mainly in the form of small stores, focusing on low-line market development; life worry is positioned in three In the fourth- and fifth-tier cities, the offline affordable home chain stores provide exclusive products to Jingdong to satisfy the sinking users. As for the trendy media, it is the main medium used by JD.
It is not difficult to see from this that Jingdong’s main rhythm in 2019 is sinking.
Not only strategic investment, Jingdong has also entered into cooperation with Vibrato, Fasthand and Sina Weibo to access the Jingdong entrance on the above platform to reach users of different regions and different ages. A more important signal is that Jingdong has just undergone a round of upgrades to the bidding business, and it has been renamed “Jingxi” and launched in major application markets. In the future, it will replace the first-level entrance of Jingdong Mall on WeChat.
For a long time, Jingdong’s share price has been “top” by the growth rate, and the high-speed story has been used to impress the secondary market. However, in the last four quarters, Jingdong’s revenue growth rate has slipped by 30%; the annual active user growth rate has slowed down. In 2018, the Q3 growth rate was negative for the first time, and there was no growth to Q4. Jingdong urgently needs to inject new impetus into its performance growth.
The good news is that in the latest financial report, Jingdong’s performance began to warm up. Although the revenue growth rate is only 22.9%, but the chain ratio is higher than Q1’s 20.9%; the annual live users are higher than the first quarter’s 310.5 million, adding 10.8 million active users. The reason is that Jingdong’s sinking strategy has achieved initial results. The data shows that the amount of orders placed in the Jingdong low-tier market during the financial reporting period has doubled year-on-year.
A lot of efforts in the low-end market, as well as the continuous strategic follow-up of Ali, have stimulated Jingdong to enter the field to make up the course, and must not miss the battle. However, it is undeniable that Jingdong Gaoke single gene has no obvious advantage in sinking, and the place where the tentacles cannot reach the strategic investment alone will still face the problem of insufficient business imagination. This Hu Ningfeng said that it is impossible for Jingdong to do all the business by itself, and not to do it all by itself. At this time, investment is a safer way.
In addition, Jingdong Strategic Investment Department’s dominance is still insufficient. Jingdong’s investment projects are more initiated by business units, especially for sinking initiatives, while the investment department itself is slightly lagging behind,Span> Lack of capture of new trends. Therefore, Hu Ningfeng hopes that future investment by Ms. business unit and war investment department can reach half and half.
In this way, the challenge of the Jingdong Warfare Department is to make more forward-looking judgments, not only to extend the tentacles, but also to grow more tentacles.