Whoever does not kill me will make me strong!
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “He added salt” (ID: ihejiayan) Author He Jiayan.
The socio-economic impact of the new crown epidemic has gradually begun to show. Many people are in crisis and panic, and everyone is worried that they will not survive this cold spring.
In fact, 17 years ago, Liu Qiangdong of JD. For companies engaged in retail of home appliances, tourism services, and training schools, a severe epidemic like SARS is undoubtedly a disaster. At the time, JD.com, Ctrip, and New Oriental were indeed at their most dangerous time.
However, instead of sitting still, they clenched their teeth and took positive measures to deal with it. Eventually, they got through the difficulties. After SARS, they gained retaliatory growth and became giants in their respective industries.
Today, let’s take a look at the past of these three companies, and we hope to inspire you to cope with the new crown virus epidemic.
Liu Qiangdong and Jingdong
17 years ago, JD.com had no relationship with e-commerce. At that time, JD.com, whose full name was “Jingdong Multimedia”, was a company that mainly sold CD discs and recorders. This small company, founded in 1998, started from a small square meter at Zhongguancun Haisha Market. It took more than 4 years to become the country ’s largest magneto-optical seller, once occupying 60% market share of the country’s magneto-optical products.
In 2003, JD Multimedia has opened 12 stores. Ambitious Liu Qiangdong had already planned for the beginning of the year and will open 18 stores this year.
However, the sudden SARS made Liu Qiangdong’s expansion dream come to nothing.
On March 6, 2003, Beijing notified the first case of SARS. In a hurry, the whole Beijing was rumbling, and all malls could be visited. JD.com, which had a fast-growing business, had already stockpiled a lot of goods, all of which were backlogged in the warehouse, and none of them were sold. As the epidemic is getting worse and worse, business is completely frozen, and people are still at risk of infection at the counter.Liu Qiangdong closed all 12 stores, and most of them went home temporarily. He went to the Ximen Supermarket of the People’s Congress himself and bought a pile of ham sausage, instant noodles, mineral water, and six employees staying at the Yinfeng Building office.
At that time, Jingdong Multimedia had more than 20 million in books, but in the 21 days after the outbreak of SARS in Beijing, it lost more than 8 million. In other words, this company can only sustain for three months and will go bankrupt. It was rumored at the time that SARS would take at least six months to pass. At this loss rate, JD.com is bound to die. Liu Qiangdong worried about six meals a day for six employees.
One day at noon, they drank some wine and sighed there one by one. One of the managers said, why don’t we sell things online? Liu Qiangdong heard it and felt very good. He immediately opened the broadband and started to surf the Internet every day to see if he could sell some products through the Internet.
At first, they did n’t know where to sell, they advertised in the comment section under the news of Sohu and Sina. It turned out that there were no customers for a few days.
At the time, the CD circles in Beijing liked to visit a bbs named CDbest. Liu Qiangdong also posted on it. A moderator told me that this company is the only company I know that does not sell fake CDs. the company. The moderator is the founder of the forum and has a very influential role in the forum. Because of his sentence, JD.com has 21 customers at once-this is the first e-commerce customer in JD.com history.
This batch of business shows Liu Qiangdong a new business model. He drove out a red flag car to deliver goods during the day, soaked on the Internet at night, kept posting and replying, sometimes to 5am.
At this time, Liu Qiangdong swept away the previous confusion and became extremely excited. The employees felt that he was a different person.
Later, Liu Qiangdong survived the SARS by selling goods online.
After SARS, his offline mall ushered in another booming business. However, after testing the water for that period of time, Liu Qiangdong judged that China would usher in a big explosion of e-commerce. .
The first version of the website is a free e-commerce program used online, named “Jingdong Multimedia Network”, and launched on January 1, 2004.
The website has been hacked within 3 days after opening it. When users open the website, they can only see one sentence: “JD.com is a fool.” Liu Qiangdong rushed to the computer room to deal with it, and finally managed to do it well. After a while, he was hacked, saying: “JD.com is still a fool.”
No way, Liu Qiangdong had to pay a higher salary than himself, and hired a technician to maintain the website.
Everyone knows what happened next. At the end of this year, Liu Qiangdong made a public comment, closed 90% of its offline business, made a website with all his heart, and developed JD.com as the second largest e-commerce company in China that resists Ali.
At present, Jingdong’s market value is US $ 56.2 billion, or approximately RMB390 billion.
After many years, Liu Qiangdong said that it was SARS that made me and JD.com.
Liang Jianzhang and Ctrip
If it is said that selling electrical appliances can also resist the impact of SARS through online sales, then the tourism industry has no way to escape, and the only thing that can be done is hard resistance.
After the SARS epidemic was announced in 2003, travel alerts were issued everywhere. All medical advice requires everyone to stay at home as much as possible and not go out.
It is conceivable that companies that sell air tickets and hotels as their main business will have a plummeting business.
At that time, Ctrip’s monthly transaction volume had just exceeded the 100 million yuan mark in the previous year. The rapid growth of China’s tourism market gave Liang Jianzhang confidence and put forward the goal of listing. As a result, the advent of atypical pneumonia brought the tourism industry into the cold winter, and Ctrip’s income fell sharply as expected. At this time, not to mention the listing, even the ability to survive has become a problem.
No one knows how long SARS will spread before it can survive. Many companies in the same industry can only lay off employees. Ctrip’s people are also in despair.
At the time of the crisis, the founder Liang Jianzhang became the Dinghai Shenzhen. He firmly believes that the Chinese government can control the epidemic and that after SARS, the tourism market will usher in retaliatory growth. Liang Jianzhang did not lay off staff as much as his peers, but retained almost all employees, especially a call center with more than a thousand people. In order to control labor costs, Liang Jianzhang stipulated that all managers only work half-day shifts and get 60% of their salary. At the same time, taking advantage of the sluggish business time, Ctrip held a lot of internal training and business process optimization to improve the capabilities of employees.
He wrote to all employees, telling everyone, “After SARS, Ctrip will be better.” This sentence became the most important slogan inside Ctrip during that time.
Sure enough, by June, the SARS epidemic has passedIn the future, people who had been at home for three months went out of their homes to travel, and the Chinese tourism market ushered in a big explosion. The layoff companies were caught by surprise and missed this wave of business development. Ctrip, a strong army and a strong breeder, has ushered in a bumper harvest.
This surge of leaps and bounds has directly made Ctrip the darling of the capital market. On December 9, 2003, Ctrip successfully logged in to NASDAQ in the United States, setting a record of the highest increase in the first day of the Nasdaq IPO in 3 years, and becoming the first Chinese company to list in the United States since the burst of the Internet bubble. / p>
At this moment, it was only half a year since Ctrip was caught in the SARS crisis.
At present, Ctrip’s market value is US $ 19.5 billion, or approximately RMB135 billion.
Without the optimism, persistence, and suffering during the SARS period, how could Ctrip be as brilliant as it is today?
Yu Minhong and New Oriental
In 2003, Yu Minhong was already the most famous English teacher in the country. His New Oriental has become the most popular English training and study abroad consulting house in China.
In the past year and more, New Oriental has ushered in a period of rapid development after the copyright dispute of ETS (American Educational Testing Service Center) has been concluded, and the prospects are bright.
In early 2003, New Oriental also confidently formulated its expansion plan. Advance payments for classroom rent, promotional materials, and advertising costs have already been spent in the summer. In the month of 3 , although the epidemic situation has arrived in Beijing, the registration points of New Oriental are still crowded, and the staff is wearing masks, so busy.
By April, the epidemic was getting worse and worse, and the number of students enrolled suddenly plummeted. The cash flow of New Oriental suddenly appeared a huge gap of 20 million.
To make matters worse, by mid-April, the Beijing Municipal Government decided that all training schools would be closed. Suspension of class means refund of tuition fees paid by students. This is a huge disaster for New Oriental, whose cash flow is already stretched.
Students who withdraw from the tuition line up from the fourth floor to the first floor. According to bank regulations, the amount of cash that New Oriental can withdraw in a day is 500,000. If students are not refunded in a timely manner, not only will New Oriental ’s reputation be affected, it may also cause run-ups and even more serious emergencies.
The anxious Yu Minhong borrowed 20 million from friends, and went to the bank to ask grandpa to tell grandma to raise the ceiling of the daily withdrawal limit. mostAt that time, the cash returned to students in one day was as high as more than 4 million.
Students ‘tuition fees are refunded, but teachers’ salaries have to be paid. At the hardest time, New Oriental was almost a week away and had to run out of food. Yu Minhong also insisted on gritting his teeth and running around to solve the problem. Both his wife and children were in Canada. He was originally scheduled to go to a family reunion on April 21. In response to the crisis, his ticket was changed to 24th, 28th, and finally May 1.
Fortunately, Yu Minhong has enough friends and enough money. He borrowed another 7 million yuan and finally survived. Yu Hong, relieved, finally got on a plane to Canada on May 1. However, because he was from an epidemic area in Beijing, he was forcibly quarantined by the Canadian government for a week.
Yu Minhong was kept in the room bored, and he could only boost his morale to his colleagues by writing articles.
But after all, morale cannot be eaten as a meal, and the problem of funding must be resolved in the end. Even if Yu Minhong had more friends, borrowing from 20 million to 7 million, his face was also rapidly consumed and devalued. If SARS continues and New Oriental continues to have no income, it will only fail.
Fortunately, until June, the epidemic was finally lifted, the school resumed classes, and students flocked again. That same month, Yu Minhong returned the money.
Yu Wei of SARS has continued into the long run. Due to the company’s failure to meet its scheduled performance goals in 2003, a fierce conflict arose within the board of directors of New Oriental. Hu Min, then president of the group, was violently attacked, resigned in anger, and later created the “New Channel”.
But after all, New Oriental has survived and has grown rapidly. Three years after his death, New Oriental was also listed in the United States, becoming the first share of Chinese private education.
Many years later, Yu Minhong talked about this experience in “Lu Yu has an appointment.” He said: I just solve the problem when I encounter it. Every river bridges and every mountain opens. This is what I do as a New Oriental attitude.
At present, the market value of New Oriental is US $ 19.6 billion, or approximately RMB136 billion.
City will become a city, it will be more difficult to flourish
How similar is the current new crown epidemic to SARS 17 years ago. Many people are experiencing and are going to experience, and they must have a lot in common with what Liu Qiangdong, Liang Jianzhang and Yu Minhong have experienced.
Some people say that 2020 will be the beginning of hell. Yes, the current situation is indeed difficult. butEven if we face great difficulties, we should not panic. We should learn from Liu Qiangdong, Liang Jianzhang, and Yu Minhong, those optimistic and strong spirits, and the attitudes of Fenghe Bridge and Fengshan Road.
People who really do things have never had time to panic. What they think is always how to solve the problem.
We often say that it is hard to resurrect a state. Whether it’s true for companies and families. Please be patient, be stronger, work harder, and let us all live together and live through this period together. After going through all the hardships, we believe that a better future will be waiting for us.
Because: Anyone who kills me will make me strong!
If it is said that selling electrical appliances can also resist the impact of SARS through online sales, then the tourism industry has no way to escape, and the only thing that can be done is hard resistance.
After the SARS epidemic was announced in 2003, travel alerts were issued everywhere. All medical advice requires everyone to stay at home as much as possible and not go out.
It is conceivable that companies that sell air tickets and hotels as their main business will have a plummeting business.
At that time, Ctrip’s monthly transaction volume had just exceeded the 100 million yuan mark in the previous year. The rapid growth of China’s tourism market gave Liang Jianzhang confidence and put forward the goal of listing. As a result, the advent of atypical pneumonia brought the tourism industry into the cold winter, and Ctrip’s income fell sharply as expected. At this time, not to mention the listing, even the ability to survive has become a problem.
No one knows how long SARS will spread before it can survive. Many companies in the same industry can only lay off employees. Ctrip’s people are also in despair.
At the time of the crisis, the founder Liang Jianzhang became the Dinghai Shenzhen. He firmly believes that the Chinese government can control the epidemic and that after SARS, the tourism market will usher in retaliatory growth. Liang Jianzhang did not lay off staff as much as his peers, but retained almost all employees, especially a call center with more than a thousand people. In order to control labor costs, Liang Jianzhang stipulated that all managers only work half-day shifts and get 60% of their salary. At the same time, taking advantage of the sluggish business time, Ctrip held a lot of internal training and business process optimization to improve the capabilities of employees.
He wrote to all employees, telling everyone, “After SARS, Ctrip will be better.” This sentence became the most important slogan inside Ctrip during that time.
Sure enough, by June, the SARS epidemic has passedIn the future, people who had been at home for three months went out of their homes to travel, and the Chinese tourism market ushered in a big explosion. The layoff companies were caught by surprise and missed this wave of business development. Ctrip, a strong army and a strong breeder, has ushered in a bumper harvest.
This surge of leaps and bounds has directly made Ctrip the darling of the capital market. On December 9, 2003, Ctrip successfully logged in to NASDAQ in the United States, setting a record of the highest increase in the first day of the Nasdaq IPO in 3 years, and becoming the first Chinese company to list in the United States since the burst of the Internet bubble. / p>
At this moment, it was only half a year since Ctrip was caught in the SARS crisis.
At present, Ctrip’s market value is US $ 19.5 billion, or approximately RMB135 billion.
Without the optimism, persistence, and suffering during the SARS period, how could Ctrip be as brilliant as it is today?
Yu Minhong and New Oriental
In 2003, Yu Minhong was already the most famous English teacher in the country. His New Oriental has become the most popular English training and study abroad consulting house in China.
In the past year and more, New Oriental has ushered in a period of rapid development after the copyright dispute of ETS (American Educational Testing Service Center) has been concluded, and the prospects are bright.
In early 2003, New Oriental also confidently formulated its expansion plan. Advance payments for classroom rent, promotional materials, and advertising costs have already been spent in the summer. In the month of 3 , although the epidemic situation has arrived in Beijing, the registration points of New Oriental are still crowded, and the staff is wearing masks, so busy.
By April, the epidemic was getting worse and worse, and the number of students enrolled suddenly plummeted. The cash flow of New Oriental suddenly appeared a huge gap of 20 million.
To make matters worse, by mid-April, the Beijing Municipal Government decided that all training schools would be closed. Suspension of class means refund of tuition fees paid by students. This is a huge disaster for New Oriental, whose cash flow is already stretched.
Students who withdraw from the tuition line up from the fourth floor to the first floor. According to bank regulations, the amount of cash that New Oriental can withdraw in a day is 500,000. If students are not refunded in a timely manner, not only will New Oriental ’s reputation be affected, it may also cause run-ups and even more serious emergencies.
The anxious Yu Minhong borrowed 20 million from friends, and went to the bank to ask grandpa to tell grandma to raise the ceiling of the daily withdrawal limit. mostAt that time, the cash returned to students in one day was as high as more than 4 million.
Students ‘tuition fees are refunded, but teachers’ salaries have to be paid. At the hardest time, New Oriental was almost a week away and had to run out of food. Yu Minhong also insisted on gritting his teeth and running around to solve the problem. Both his wife and children were in Canada. He was originally scheduled to go to a family reunion on April 21. In response to the crisis, his ticket was changed to 24th, 28th, and finally May 1.
Fortunately, Yu Minhong has enough friends and enough money. He borrowed another 7 million yuan and finally survived. Yu Hong, relieved, finally got on a plane to Canada on May 1. However, because he was from an epidemic area in Beijing, he was forcibly quarantined by the Canadian government for a week.
Yu Minhong was kept in the room bored, and he could only boost his morale to his colleagues by writing articles.
But after all, morale cannot be eaten as a meal, and the problem of funding must be resolved in the end. Even if Yu Minhong had more friends, borrowing from 20 million to 7 million, his face was also rapidly consumed and devalued. If SARS continues and New Oriental continues to have no income, it will only fail.
Fortunately, until June, the epidemic was finally lifted, the school resumed classes, and students flocked again. That same month, Yu Minhong returned the money.
Yu Wei of SARS has continued into the long run. Due to the company’s failure to meet its scheduled performance goals in 2003, a fierce conflict arose within the board of directors of New Oriental. Hu Min, then president of the group, was violently attacked, resigned in anger, and later created the “New Channel”.
But after all, New Oriental has survived and has grown rapidly. Three years after his death, New Oriental was also listed in the United States, becoming the first share of Chinese private education.
Many years later, Yu Minhong talked about this experience in “Lu Yu has an appointment.” He said: I just solve the problem when I encounter it. Every river bridges and every mountain opens. This is what I do as a New Oriental attitude.
At present, the market value of New Oriental is US $ 19.6 billion, or approximately RMB136 billion.
City will become a city, it will be more difficult to flourish
How similar is the current new crown epidemic to SARS 17 years ago. Many people are experiencing and are going to experience, and they must have a lot in common with what Liu Qiangdong, Liang Jianzhang and Yu Minhong have experienced.
Some people say that 2020 will be the beginning of hell. Yes, the current situation is indeed difficult. butEven if we face great difficulties, we should not panic. We should learn from Liu Qiangdong, Liang Jianzhang, and Yu Minhong, those optimistic and strong spirits, and the attitudes of Fenghe Bridge and Fengshan Road.
People who really do things have never had time to panic. What they think is always how to solve the problem.
We often say that it is hard to resurrect a state. Whether it’s true for companies and families. Please be patient, be stronger, work harder, and let us all live together and live through this period together. After going through all the hardships, we believe that a better future will be waiting for us.
Because: Anyone who kills me will make me strong!
How similar is the current new crown epidemic to SARS 17 years ago. Many people are experiencing and are going to experience, and they must have a lot in common with what Liu Qiangdong, Liang Jianzhang and Yu Minhong have experienced.
Some people say that 2020 will be the beginning of hell. Yes, the current situation is indeed difficult. butEven if we face great difficulties, we should not panic. We should learn from Liu Qiangdong, Liang Jianzhang, and Yu Minhong, those optimistic and strong spirits, and the attitudes of Fenghe Bridge and Fengshan Road.
People who really do things have never had time to panic. What they think is always how to solve the problem.
We often say that it is hard to resurrect a state. Whether it’s true for companies and families. Please be patient, be stronger, work harder, and let us all live together and live through this period together. After going through all the hardships, we believe that a better future will be waiting for us.
Because: Anyone who kills me will make me strong!