lets go! Toward the Great Fairway!

Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat public account “Everyone is a product manager” (ID: woshipm) , author: Fan Meng weeks.

The opportunities to go to sea are great: Whether it is to accumulate meaningful overseas work experience, enrich your life experience, or to harvest rich economic returns.

But back to the personal level: how can we prepare to join this ongoing “big sailing era”?

“Please fill in the volunteer information.” Huawei’s HR handed me a form after I successfully passed a written test and three rounds of interviews.

I glanced at it and saw that there are two options in the market deployment column: one is the European and American markets, and the other is the emerging markets in Africa and South America.

“Does the choice of these two markets have any impact on getting a Huawei offer?” I asked.

“Yes, if you choose Africa or South America, the chances of being accepted are higher,” Huawei HR said.

This is a period of 2009 when my university graduated to apply for Huawei.

At the time of the financial crisis, it was extremely difficult to find a job. However, at the time, I hesitated a bit and chose to accept the European and American markets if I was an expatriate. In the end I did not get the offer from Huawei.

Fate opened a door again when I thought that I would miss the sea again for this life.

In 13 years, I joined a bank card organization.

Three months after I joined the company, my then supervisor asked me to talk: Since we are an international business and you are a product manager, the headquarters hopes to send you to the local market to support our local business development.

So, I was sent to Africa.

Since fate (QUE QIAN) can’t be avoided, this time I accept it frankly, and since then, my “nautical age” has begun.

First, why do we go to sea?

In recent years, both traditional companies and Internet technology companies have been accelerating the scale and speed of going abroad, and have been setting up overseas markets.

Why “Going to the Sea” has become the xiangxiang of the moment?

From my perspective, there are several reasons:

1. Domestic growth dividend disappears

According to China Internet Development Report (2019), by the end of 2018, the number of Internet users in China has reached 829 million. Among them, the number of mobile Internet users reached 817 million, and the proportion of using mobile phones to access the Internet increased from 97.5% at the end of 2017 to 2018.Bottom 98.6%.

The mobile Internet has dominated the trend, and the scale of netizens has also approached saturation. At the same time, domestic first-tier Internet companies, BAT and TMD have initially completed the layout of entertainment, e-commerce, finance, content and other fields and have moved to the upstream industry chain. The supply side extends.

In recent years, they have also sunk in third- and fourth-tier cities to seize the last possible market growth opportunities.

The country is facing a fight against the Red Sea. Going overseas has indeed opened up a new world for domestic Internet companies.

2. Technology and talent overflow in the Internet industry

With the development of the domestic Internet industry for more than 20 years, while the business scale and field have been continuously expanded and extended, it has also cultivated a group of outstanding Internet talents; from technology, products and operations to marketing and growth, the domestic Internet The talent gradient and scale are both growing geometrically.

A casual Internet company with tens of thousands of employees and nearly half of the technical personnel is unthinkable abroad.

In many overseas emerging markets, everyone can see where the local development opportunities are, but the most lacking is talent, especially technical talent.

Therefore, with the growth of domestic talents and the fierce competition for domestic jobs, there will inevitably be a spillover of talents.

This is like China in the late 80’s and early 90’s, those who came out of the system to “go to the sea” dare to face risks and unknowns and grab the first bucket of gold in life.

Even now, people who are “going abroad” are actually facing higher uncertainty. People who are accustomed in China will face the problems of language, cross-cultural communication and mutual trust once they leave the country.

3. The rise of emerging markets brings new growth dividends

Early last year, the 10 ASEAN countries announced their GDP growth rates in 2018.

Compared with the annual growth of 1% -3% in European and American countries, and even negative growth, the growth of Southeast Asian countries, especially Vietnam and Cambodia, has been particularly bright. It even surpassed China, maintaining an average annual growth rate of 7% -8%.

Behind the economic growth, on the one hand, there is a huge market demographic dividend. With the increase of income, local residents have no longer met basic food, clothing, and housing needs, and will then express their needs for higher spiritual demands and social services. ;

On the other hand, with the continuous improvement of local infrastructure, such as the overseas travel of domestic Huawei, ZTE, and various mobile phone manufacturers, the development of 4G networks and the popularization of smartphones have laid the foundation for the development of the mobile Internet industry. .

Yahoo, an investor in Alibaba, and Softbank’s Sun Zhengyi have a very famous “time machine theory”: to take full advantage of the imbalance in development between different countries and industries.

AllThe term “time machine” refers to the fact that the developed and developing markets have different stages of industry development.

If your business in developed markets is already very mature, waiting for the opportunity to enter developing emerging markets is like sitting on a time machine, taking advantage of this wrong And other advantages to win growth opportunities and huge financial returns for themselves.

It is precisely based on these unique market environments and development opportunities that naturally attracted the attention of domestic front-line Internet companies and investment institutions.

Let’s take another perspective: how do these emerging market entrepreneurs think?

Because I have been traveling overseas for a long time, I have a lot of local friends asking me to consult about China ’s Internet development experience.

I asked them strangely, “Why do you study China instead of Silicon Valley?”.

The friend replied:

Silicon Valley’s innovation is built on a very developed capital market and underlying science and technology such as the United States. This market opportunity and innovation model is difficult to replicate in emerging countries; while China ’s The development of the Internet has developed from a poor one to another in recent years. The innovation is more a business model and application layer innovation, and it is relatively more reproducible.

This shows that Chinese companies going abroad are also two-way cooperation with emerging markets.

Second, the history of Internet companies going to sea: shipbuilding and going to sea vs. shipbuilding

Looking at the history of Chinese companies going abroad, the Internet going overseas should be the third wave of Chinese companies going abroad, and it is likely to be the largest and largest wave to date.

The first wave took place in the 1990s. With the country’s “Going Global Strategy”, a wave of state-owned and private enterprises, such as Haier, Hisense, Huawei, and ZTE, began to venture overseas.

The second wave occurred around 2000. The sign of the incident was that China joined the WTO. China officially upgraded its “going global strategy” to a national strategy. More and more companies began to develop local businesses and conduct business mergers and acquisitions overseas . For example, Lenovo’s acquisition of the IBM PC business occurred during this period.

The third wave took place after the financial crisis in 2008. What ’s different is that we found more Internet companies in this wave.

For example, Cheetah Mobile, which was established in 2010, has aimed at overseas markets since its establishment in order to avoid fierce competition in the domestic antivirus market.

1. Shipbuilding and going to sea

In 2012, Cheetah launched Master Mobile Cleanup Software for overseas.

As of 2017, Cheetah Mobile ’s overseas users reached 450 million and overseas revenue reached 840 million yuan, which basically accounted for about 70% of total revenue; relying on tools to go to seaCheetah’s revenue has increased 20-fold in five years, and 78.8% of the world ’s more than 600 million monthly active users come from non-Chinese overseas regions.

This model is called “shipbuilding and going to sea.” That is: polish the product at home and export it overseas.

In the early stage, this model was mainly suitable for some tool or game products going to sea. It was relatively light and did not require “one country, one policy” and reliance on local operation teams, so it was easy to have scale effects.

In addition to the masters of cheetah cleanup, successful companies going overseas also have UC browser, which was later acquired by Ali, and Lenovo’s investment in mobile application software, eggplant fast transfer, etc.

However, not all internet companies are as lucky as these companies.

Although Baidu first pioneered the internationalization process and entered the Japanese search engine market as early as 2006, but because Baidu has no first-mover advantage, it is also inferior to Google and Yahoo in terms of technology and product experience. Baidu ’s market in Japan The share is extremely low (Yahoo ranks first in search share, with 56%, and Google ranks second with only 38%, and the two occupy a total share of 94%). Therefore, after 7 years of operation, Baidu shut down. The loss to the sea ended.

Whether it is tools, games, social or video products, these applications are “low-hanging fruits.”

In essence, their business model is clearer: mostly through advertising or in-app item purchases; and in terms of play, because it is not very dependent on the local operation team, it is easier to achieve reproducibility, with Scale effect.

2. Shipbuilding at sea

With the saturation and competition of these applications in the market, the tide of mobile globalization has begun to evolve towards e-commerce, payment, and O2O services.

The mode of going to sea is different:

Domestic Internet giants and investment institutions have begun to use capital leverage more to invest in excellent local teams and startups, to achieve business disruption, and to help them directly overcome the “from 0 to 1” stage; then combine them Empowered overseas local teams with operational experience and technical capabilities accumulated in the country.

This model is called “Shipbuilding”.

Compared to the previous model, our products are not manufactured in China, but directly rely on local construction, and then drive domestic enterprises’ talents and technology output.

These cases are endless in recent years.

For example:

In 2016, Alibaba invested US $ 1 billion to win 51% of Lazada’s shares, and a total investment of US $ 4 billion; subsequently, Ali launched the Voyager (meaning “nautical”) project to carry out a system-wide transformation of Lazada, while sending Peng Lei took over as CEO to conduct a talent and technology exchange of Lazada.

2015 Didi responds to UbThe threat caused by er entering the Chinese market, 100 million US dollars invested in the American taxi application Lyft. Subsequently, it announced that it would connect with Kuai, Lyft, GrabTaxi and Ola to provide border travel services for user groups in Central America, Southeast Asia and India.

In 2016, Kunlun Wanwei, a domestic investment institution, invested US $ 192 million to acquire a 33.33% stake in Opera, a mobile browser. Subsequently, Opera’s mobile payment company Opay completed financing of US $ 50 million and US $ 120 million, entered the Nigerian market, and launched taxi, takeaway and mobile payment services.

At the beginning of 2018, Meituan completed a 50 million USD investment in Go-Jek, an Indonesian taxi application. Subsequently, $ 40 million was invested in Indian online food delivery service Swiggy’s $ 100 million financing to accelerate internationalization.

Third, as an Internet person, how to meet the opportunity of going abroad?

So much has been said. In fact, one sentence summarizes: the opportunities for going abroad are great, whether it is to accumulate meaningful overseas work experience, enrich your life experience, or to harvest rich economic returns.

But back to the personal level, how can we prepare to join this ongoing “Great Sailing Era”?

From my experience, there are the following points for your reference:

1. Language barriers

Due to the problems of the domestic education system, most of them do not pay much attention to the improvement of spoken English. In addition, it may be that the English lessons have been returned to the teacher for so many years after graduation; but the language barrier is indeed the first one encountered by many people overseas problem.

Without speaking in the business world, I have encountered many people on flights to overseas. Many people do n’t even know how to fill in the entry card. I admire their courage and sincerely admire them. Pinch to sweat.

But second, this phenomenon is quite common, and you do n’t need to worry about it.

I meet a lot of people who go abroad. Even in the Internet industry, when communicating with foreign customers, they are half spoken and half gestured, and they can achieve their goals.

However, it takes time to improve your speaking ability if you can prepare—listening to American dramas or attending classes and communicating with foreign teachers are all short-term ways to quickly improve your English.

In addition, there are some non-English-speaking countries. Even if you can use English to communicate, it is recommended that you consciously learn some local languages-otherwise how can you say you are international?

Once, I was asked by a local customer. He said, Michael, you have been here with us for so long, and I will greet you in Chinese and ask you, “Did you eat?” How many words do I speak in our local language?

I was extremely embarrassed at the time, and when I went back, I immediately bought this textbook, which made up for some common local terms.

CurrentThinking about it, speaking some local languages ​​is also a process of integrating local teams and building trust.

2. Local consumption and payment habits

Because I have done product operation in the process of going abroad, I am deeply touched by this point; a deep understanding of the local consumer market will also become a competitive advantage in our overseas workplace.

When designing products, we need to better understand the environment and infrastructure of the local market, especially local consumption and payment habits, and the development status of mobile networks.

Otherwise, after the product is released to the market, it is found that these are not working, and there are problems, which will cause a great waste of resources and capital investment.

For example:

For the maturity of China’s O2O market, in fact, there is a very critical and indispensable factor, which is the popularity of bank accounts and the rapid development of mobile payments.

But compared with many overseas emerging markets, such as South Asia and some Southeast Asian countries, they will find that their financial infrastructure is very backward:

The penetration rate of bank accounts is less than 30%, and mobile payment is just emerging. Far from being as mature as China, credit payments are still stuck in credit card or pledged loans.

If your product is a taxi or takeaway business, how to make payment on the client side and settlement of funds on the merchant side is a very important link.

In the past few years, the small loan businesses that have gathered together have gone abroad, but in fact they have encountered similar problems.

I asked a friend: What is the biggest challenge for your products?

It’s not the background algorithm model and risk control, but how to make and receive money.

3. Local customs and cultures

Each country has its own local customs and culture, and we must respect and respect them. Especially like Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East, where there are many Muslim countries, we should be more familiar with local teachings and religious practices.

For example:

There is a very mature operational activity in the country, that is, “one yuan to win treasure”, which can be both new and active. But in some Muslim countries, this kind of non-skill gambling is defined as illegal-if you accidentally step on the red line, it will cause important impacts and losses on the company.

I have heard one case before:

A domestic equipment maker serving operators operates in a Muslim country, because the local has the habit of worshiping daily, so they have launched an innovative service: using local mobile base stations, the time of worship is coming Automatically send messages to the surrounding users to remind them to worship.

This was a good idea, but