Ben quickly opened the situation.
Another point is that its business has been changing with market demand. Currently, in addition to software such as WPS and antivirus in the public impression, it also has advertising agencies, helps domestic products to land in Japan and other corporate businesses, as well as live broadcast, games, etc C business. Jinshan Japan’s changes can also reflect changes in the business of Chinese companies going overseas.
This round of Japan’s voyage to the sea ends by Baidu.
By the end of 2006, Baidu announced high-profile internationalization and put its first stop in Japan.
This decision was put forward at the Baidu Conference in 2006, which immediately led to doubts that Baidu “has no foundation and is not solid.” However, Li Yanhong was full of confidence in his trip to Japan. It was reported that Baidu alone spent 100 million yuan to buy a server during the preparation period.
On January 23, 2008, Baidu Japan Co., Ltd. was formally established, and the waves were small. Later, Baidu’s documents submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission disclosed that in the three years from 2008 to 2010, Baidu’s overseas business (mainly referring to Japan) had a net loss of 196 million yuan, 224 million yuan, and 260 million yuan. By April 2015, Baidu Japan announced that it would shut down its search service. Baidu Japan officially ended in failure.
People familiar with Baidu Japan have unfortunately told Tiger Sniff Pro that when Baidu entered Japan, it was a golden opportunity.
At that time, Yahoo Japan’s capital changed, and the US headquarters no longer provided it with search services. Yahoo Japan needed to find a new search engine to replace it. “There aren’t many Yahoo options on the market, and Google was used without choice.”
There are three reasons for the miss. First, Baidu Japan’s own decision-making power is not high, and the size decision needs to be determined by the Beijing headquarters.
Second, product localization is not good enough. There are problems with both language, algorithm, and web page structure.
Third, the promotion was not localized enough. At that time, Baidu Japan hired Inoue Shunichi, the head of Yahoo Japan’s search, as the president, but Inoue had a technical background and had little experience in the market and BD.
“The product is not ready, and the front-end market gameplay has not been played. Therefore, even if Yahoo gave the opportunity to Baidu at that time, Baidu may not be able to catch it,” the source said.
After Baidu, Chinese Internet companies were quiet in Japan for a time.
In 2012, Chinese mobile games began to go to Japan, but it was not a success. ClickHoldings CEO Hanazawa Ryunosuke was the first entrepreneur to bring Chinese games to Japan. In 2012 he introduced “Three Kingdoms of Hulai” and “World War II” to the Japanese market.
In an interview with Tiger Sniff Pro, he admits that the symbolic significance of these two games is greater than the economic benefits. “These two games ended in failure in the strict sense, but it is an iconic event, which means Chinese mobile games have begun to enter the Japanese market. “
At this time, tool products including Meitu also entered the Japanese market to test the water, but did not become a big hit.
Until 2017, the Japanese version of TikTok and Netease games broke this silence. TikTok has more than 10 million monthly jobs in Japan. The entrepreneur in Japan told Tiger Sniff that it is not easy to reach 10 million monthly jobs in Japan. You can count ten fingers, such as Line, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube The Wilderness Actions under NetEase Games dominated the Japanese App Store’s best-selling list continuously, and their gold-absorbing ability was comparable to that of Japan’s leading products.
The rapid popularity of them across Japan has led domestic practitioners to rethink Japan, a special overseas market.
Second, difficult to defend the Japanese market
The scale of Japanese Internet companies is generally not large. Of the dozen or so companies I visited, the Japanese version of the Little Red Book C Channel, founded by former president of LINE Morikawa, has more than 100 people, and has more than 100 people in Japan. TikTok Japan, which has achieved great success in Japan, also has more than 100 people.
“In Japan, an Internet company can have more than 100 people, even a large company.” More than one Japanese Internet source told me that in Japan, most Internet companies are small businesses with 20-30 people. .
American technology media TechCrunch has created a unicorn database ( Internet startups valued at more than $ 1 billion ), In February 2018, there were 279 companies in this database. Nearly 50% were distributed in the United States and 25% were distributed in China. Although Japan is the third largest economy in the world, only one is on the list. Today ( As of September this year ), the number of unicorns in this library has increased to 496, but there is still only one company in Japan.
Count on Japanese mass Internet products: LINE, Facebook, Twitter, instgram, Youtube, Amazon, Rakuten, Yahoo … Except for Lotte, which is a native Japanese company, others are foreign products.
Japan has indeed missed the golden 10 years of the development of the Internet, especially the mobile Internet.
This has to do with the closure of Japanese business society.
The Japanese market is an acquaintance society based on trust, and once trust is established, the other party will not easily change partners. This creates a situation: It ’s hard for people outside to enter, and people who go in are easy to eat . The relatively closed business environment in Japan has been described as “Galapagos Syndrome”.
Weng Yongbiao has been a representative of local Chinese entrepreneurs in Japan for 30 years. He has previously worked for ITOCHU, Japan, and also co-founded Kingsoft Japan with Kingsoft. In 2015, he started his third venture as a cross-border e-commerce princess.
He described the characteristics of Japanese business society to Tiger Sniff Pro: “ Japan is a village society and pays great attention to the relationship between credit and acquaintances. Generally, the first step to start cooperation with a Japanese company is difficult Yes, because they wo n’t cooperate with someone they have n’t heard of or understood.
Weng Yongbiao, CEO of Princess Pea, shot by Tiger Sniff Pro
This symptom is even worse on the Internet.
The speed of forgetting in the Internet world is so fast. Few people still remember that Japan was the leading country in mobile Internet 10 years ago, and there is no one.
As early as 2001, 3G became popular in Japan, allowing Japanese mobile phones to access the Internet, send emails, listen to music, make friends, watch TV, mobile payments, and use the subway …
Unlike China and the United States, Japan first developed the mobile Internet and then developed the Internet. Also different from China and the United States, Japan ’s mobile Internet is dominated by operators. Based on user needs, they customize hardware to cooperating mobile phone manufacturers and software to cooperating IT companies. The latter two do not have a high voice and are in a passive position.
It is good to do this. For example, the mobile phone customized by the operator will be preset with a mobile payment module and a two-dimensional code recognition software will be pre-installed. Therefore, these applications were quickly promoted in Japan and greatly promoted Japan. The prosperity of the mobile Internet business model.
But the disadvantages are also obvious. Products that do not cooperate with operators cannot be promoted , and even more deadly, this operator-led model is completely non-reproducible and difficult. Expansion in countries other than Japan has made Japan’s mobile Internet world an isolated existence.
So we see that few Chinese Internet companies opened up in Japan before 2010.
This closure has historical reasons ( It can be traced back to the Meiji period, World War I and World War II. It is too long to trace back, and interested readers can check it out ), various companies in the Japanese consortium have cross-shareholdings, joint investment, business cooperation, and exchange of senior executives. For example, KDDI, one of Japan’s three major operators, and the mobile phone manufacturer Kyocera are the same shareholders. Toshiba, Behind seemingly unrelated companies such as NEC, Toyota, Panasonic, Nippon Steel, and Sony are large consortia like Mitsui.
Many people attribute the closure of the Japanese business community to the conservative nature of professional managers.
“Big companies are unwilling to take risks. All big companies use professional managers. The core of professional managers’ work is not to make mistakes. What does it mean not to make mistakes? That’s meDon’t take risks in order to challenge a performance. If you want to take risks, I would rather not have this performance. This is the logic of big Japanese companies. “Weng Yongbiao said.
He Qiantai, founder of Japanese Internet of Things startup LinkJapan, who also often deals with big companies, also expressed a similar view to Tiger Snake: “Although many managers say they want to be open, it is difficult for anyone to go Take this risk. If I do nothing, I may retire with a large amount of money in a few years. If I do, but I fail, then I may become a sinner of this company forever. “
Three, how to break the situation in a closed acquaintance society
If Japan ’s mobile Internet can continue to operate in this state, it is understandable. However, the advent of the iPhone opened a gap in this closed system.
In terms of products and technology, Chinese Internet companies have huge opportunities in Japan, but their unfamiliarity with the society of Japanese acquaintances has caused Chinese Internet companies to miss the most critical first few years, until 2016. To the way.
Looking at how Chinese Internet companies have frequently encountered obstacles and gradually opened up the bureau, let’s first see how LINE squeezed into the Japanese market through this mouth. This is a very representative example that is worth learning and learning from.
LINE is a social software launched by NHN Japan, a Japanese subsidiary of the Korean Internet group NHN, in June 2011 (WeChat launched in March 2011). It is currently the application with the largest number of users in Japan and is called the “Japanese version” WeChat. ”
Tiger sniff author Liu Yixiang wrote in How did LINE grow in its home country? “mentioned that the success of LINE is mainly due to the accurate timing, just in the rapid spread of Japanese smartphones.
Before the advent of LINE, Japan already had such big names as instant messaging software Skype and MSN messenger, but these old-fashioned losses were due to software that was originally aimed at personal computers and was not easy to use on smartphones. LINE is born for smartphones. Even if the user is not online and the friend initiates a conversation and message, it can also be sent to the user’s mobile phone through the push function of the smartphone.The letter is exactly the same.
On the other hand, in terms of publicity strategy, LINE has always packaged itself as a Japanese native software, emphasizing that the independence of Japanese companies has nothing to do with the Korean parent company. For example, the entry for LINE in Wikipedia also states “LINE is an application developed independently by NHN JAPAN, a Korean corporation and Japanese corporation. It is not” Made in Korea “, but” Made in Japan “, which is a fake replacement. .
The product meets the needs of users. The industry has almost no rivals. It seizes the key nodes of the mobile Internet. Japanese companies have absolute decision-making power and the Japanese are conservative in their propaganda.
After that, products that opened the market in Japan, such as TikTok, Didi, and Netease Games, can more or less see the shadow of LINE.
Internet companies returning to China.
In Japan, I called a taxi a few times with Didi, and every time I asked the driver’s master about Didi’s impression. Their answers are basically two: “the Chinese use more” and “it is invested by SoftBank.”
In July last year, Didi and SoftBank held a press conference in Tokyo, Japan, announcing the establishment of a Japanese joint venture “DiDi Mobility Japan” and officially entering the Japanese market.
Unlike China, most taxis in Japan belong to a taxi company, and the driver is an employee of the taxi company. In this context, Didi has focused its efforts on taxi companies, and winning a taxi company may win all its taxis.
The development of Didi in Japan is relatively smooth. It has expanded to 12 cities in less than one year and is expected to cover 20 regions by the end of this year. In the negotiation with taxi companies, Didi’s global taxi cooperation experience, technical capabilities, and a large number of potential roaming customers in China are the points that attract taxi companies, and SoftBank’s local network and sales capabilities have played an important role.
“To expand our business across Japan, we need to acquire more taxi companies in a short period of time. To a certain extent, the model of joint ventures has helped us accelerate this process.” Changlin Li said to Tiger Sniff Pro.
Dili Japan’s Vice President Lin Li, shot by Tiger Sniff Pro
Peas Princess, a cross-border e-commerce company, mainly integrates the Japanese supply chain, takes the agency rights of Japanese brands, and sells them on their own platforms on the one hand, and supplies them to domestic e-commerce and online bloggers on the other. On behalf of. The Japanese retail industry has a mature agency system, and brands rarely sell goods directly.
“Why do brands give you agency rights? Fighting is trust and connections.” Weng Yongbiao doesn’t shy away from the convenience brought by giant shareholders, “Our shareholders have a strong background, any one It is impossible for the company to have nothing to do with these two companies. Big companies look at us and think we are Itochu’s company, so he dare to cooperate with us. “
In 2017, Princess Pea received a round C financing from ITOCHU and KDDI. The former is a top ten comprehensive company in Japan, with business spanning finance, retail, logistics, real estate, petrochemicals, minerals, machinery, etc., and the latter is Japan’s second largest telecommunications operator.
TikTok’s fire in Japan mainly depends on three points: One is to take the lead and launch when there are no similar products on the market.
The second is gameplay and team localization. In order to cater to the Japanese people’s “respect for commonality”, TikTok will release some games suitable for group challenges. Tiger Sniff learned that when it first entered Japan in 2017, TikTok brought a group of people from the country to attack the city, but after accumulating a certain number of users, the team basically replaced the Japanese with locals.
Another is to have money, which can spend a lot of money to advertise online and offline. TikTok advertised in the Tokyo Metro shop last year, JR Yamanote Line carriages, billboards along the road, and station walls. TikTok advertisements are everywhere. It is understood that the Beijing team fully respects and trusts the Japanese team, and advertising will pass quickly even if it exceeds the budget.
TikTok-sponsored milk tea theme park, shot by Tiger Sniff Pro
About how TikTok, Didi, and Netease games are made in Japan, our Detailed in the second and Fourth , Do not do too much interpretation here.
Fourth, rethinking the Japanese market: is it necessary to do it? What is the difficulty? What are the advantages?
“I think if a Chinese company has the ability to make its products in other countries, then why come to Japan?” An Internet company manager in Japan for nearly 20 years sent me this A rhetorical question.
This does require serious thinking. In the description above, you have sensed that Japan is not an easy market to enter.
It is relatively closed and self-contained. If you want to enter, you need a strong acquaintance relationship and endorsement of the giant, and it will take more capital investment to open this market. Hanazawa Ryunosuke told me that now in Japan, the cost of acquiring a new user for a three-country game has been as high as $ 80-100.
With a small population, Japan has a total population of 120 million, and 59% of the population aged 15 to 64, or about 75 million people.
“In fact, the older people who don’t use smart phones will have 40 million real Internet users in Japan.” Dai Dai, a CEO who has been in Japan for almost 20 yearsYing said, “Why the Japanese internet is underdeveloped. It ’s very simple. If you make it, there will be so many user groups. Chinese companies will serve at least 1.3 billion people, American companies will serve at least 2 billion people, and Japanese companies will It can only serve 40 million people. Is it necessary for me to invest so much? “
Weng Yongbiao said, “The Internet is essentially a traffic business, and it needs sufficient traffic. This may also be the reason that the United States and China will have more unicorn companies. But Japan does not have this foundation.”
China and the United States are both large populations, and their languages are unified. This is a direct advantage of the development of the Internet.
So to many people, Japan “is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and the output is not necessarily large, which is not a good choice.”
But Japan has a developed economy, high per capita income, and Japanese people have very good payment habits. And this is the place that attracts Chinese Internet companies.
The Wilderness Campaign under NetEase has contributed over 90% of its overseas revenue to Japanese players. In 2018, the per capita consumption of mobile game users in Japan reached $ 171, which is more than five times the per capita consumption of Chinese game users.
TikTok internally divides each country into three levels of SAB according to the ARPU value (average revenue per user) of each country. Among them, Japan is listed in the S level with the United States and the United Kingdom, and South Korea, India and Germany Western European countries such as France are rated A, while the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and South America are listed as B, followed by North Africa and Southeast Asia.
For companies that want to tell the story of globalization, Japan is even more important, and it has a benchmarking significance. “Japan is a high point of culture, and users have strict requirements on products. If a product is acceptable to Japanese users, basically users in Southeast Asia and other Asian countries can accept it. This is important for global companies. , Must be won. “Feng Da said.
So if you want to enter the Japanese market, what are the difficulties encountered by Chinese companies?
Combining our visit with more than ten companies, the summary is localization.
This is an issue that is simple to say but very complicated to operate. Localization is divided into team localization, management localization, and product localization.
Whether it is Jinshan who entered the earliest, or music elements, Didi, and Douyin who entered Japan later, the proportion of their local Japanese employees is more than 80%. These employees are mainly concentrated in marketing and promotion departments, And Chinese employees are basically technical staff.
But it is not easy to recruit good young people from Japan. Japan has a small labor force and an extremely high employment rate, with only 100 applicants per 150 positions. The vast majority of talented Japanese young people are more willing to work in large enterprises such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi or state agencies.
Even if someone is willing to go to an Internet company, they are more inclined to big Internet companies such as Facebook and Google than startups.
“First of all, there is no high income. In China or the United States, the Internet industry, especially programmers, is a high-income class, and it is a very cool job. But in Japan, it is not much higher than other industries. Young people’s willingness to work is not very strong. “He Qiantai said.
The Japanese corporate culture is very different from the Chinese corporate culture, which requires Chinese managers to learn and adapt.
Feng Da made a metaphor for the management culture of Chinese and Japanese Internet companies: “ The Chinese Internet pays attention to wolf nature, it must be fast and motivated, but Japanese culture makes Japanese people basically rabbits. There is a wolf in it, that wolf will be killed .
The Japanese have received collectivist education since childhood, advocating commonality rather than individuality, and emphasizing the observance of rules rather than being too radical.
“ Chinese companies are coming in, they are very capable, and they can brutally kill one piece. But if most of the employees in your team are Japanese, he will not agree with you, his values and If you are not the same, your team will be difficult to build. The wolf play of Chinese companies is effective in the beginning, but it is difficult to develop it for a long time. Feng Da said.
It’s harder to build trust among local Japanese users. For TO B companies, the best way is to find major shareholders, such as Didi and SoftBank to set up a joint venture. Princess Pea’s expansion of the brand side is backed by Itochu.
For TO C’s products, do localization of products and localization of advertising . Didi’s payment methods include local payment such as PAYPAY. Douyin will release some games that are suitable for group challenges. In terms of publicity, LINE did its best to downplay the background of the Korean parent company, emphasizing that it was a local software. Douyin did not actively promote from China, and the vice president and head of Japan Nishida Masaki served as the spokesperson in Japan.
The advantages of Chinese companies are also obvious-rich, strong R & D capabilities. “At that time, a game owner went to talk about advertising, and said directly, you told me how much I paid for this site for a year, it was all done that way.” Some people in the industry told Tiger Sniff.
Chinese Internet companies in Japan have basically put R & D at home. The wolf nature of Chinese Internet companies is fully demonstrated. Compared with Japanese companies, the R & D cycle and product iteration cycle have great advantages.
Five, what other opportunities do Chinese startups have?
Sun Zhengyi has a well-known “time machine” theory, which roughly means to conduct business in a country line with a relatively developed industry, waiting to enter a country with a less developed industry when the time is ripe, just like sitting in a time machine to return to a Developed years ago.
In the past, this theory was mostly used in the “learning and learning” of the United States from the Chinese Internet, bringing the American fire model to China and making similar products.
Now that this theory is applied to the Internet industry in China and Japan, it is actually the same.
Take vibrato and Netease games as examples. An important reason why Douyin can be a big fire in Japan is that there are no similar products on the Japanese market, and China ’s success has proved the popularity of short videos. NetEase, with its strong R & D capabilities and speed, made “Wildlife Survival” the first online product in the Japanese market before similar products.
According to the usage habits that Japanese users do not easily change, once the user’s mind is seized, it is difficult for the user to be taken away.
What other models or products have opportunities?
In the interview, the Internet of Things was mentioned many times.
After 2000, Japanese companies such as Panasonic and Toshiba, which suffered a blow from the bubble economy and retreated in the terminal market, made a radical transformation. They divested terminal businesses such as home appliances and electronics, and transformed to upstream core technologies.
Especially at present, most of the actions of large enterprises on the Internet of Things are closed in their product systems, giving entrepreneurs opportunities.
He Qiantai’s Link is a local IoT startup company in Japan. He went to China to find partners to produce hardware, and to do system research and development maintenance and after-sales service in Japan.
Started to sell to C clients mainly on Amazon.Attack real estate companies and smart pension markets. The reason is: “If you are an e-commerce company, I have to compete directly with factories in Shenzhen, and Japan ’s operations and after-sales are very expensive, so our prices will be higher, and it is difficult to compete with them. And, E-commerce is basically an awkward transaction, and there is little after-sale after it is sold. Compared with the Shenzhen factory, my biggest advantage is that it can provide local services and subsequent maintenance of the system. “
This is back, How can it be easier to gain user trust, and local companies obviously have an advantage over Chinese companies that lack remote follow-up services on Amazon for remote sales.
Enterprise cloud services are also growing at a high speed in Japan. Tencent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud entered this year with great efforts. Some advertising agencies who cooperated with them did not disclose the specific amount, but just said, “The average enterprise cannot afford it at all.” < / p>
What else is there? Welcome to leave a message in the message area to share and discuss with me. This concludes the first part of the Japanese series. To see more content, welcome to join Tiger Sniff Pro.