The sudden new coronary pneumonia epidemic has had a huge impact on many industries, and the early shutdown has had a huge impact on manufacturing and service industries. At present, with the orderly advancement of resumption of production and production, the manufacturing industry is gradually recovering, but it is also facing pressure to reduce orders due to the development of the international epidemic situation. The service industry has undergone tremendous changes and has moved online, such as retail, fresh e-commerce, catering, fitness, distance education and remote office. Just like the SARS in 2003, the e-commerce industry is booming, people are also thinking: Will the epidemic become the outlet for the new online economy to take off?

The author is cautiously optimistic about this. In my opinion, the most direct impact of the epidemic on the new online economy is to greatly reduce the cost of acquiring customers. However, this is only a short-term dividend. After the tide, how many customers can stay is the key to winning or losing. From this point of view, the author believes that as the infrastructure of the new online economy, cloud service is undoubtedly the biggest winner, and remote office will also be the last one to laugh. The prospects for fresh e-commerce and distance education are less certain. The gaming market will be a temporary bonus, and the market will gradually decline after the epidemic. And industries such as retail, catering and fitness will undergo channel changes.


The biggest winner

During the epidemic, due to the inconvenience of people going out, many demands turned to online, which brought the demand for cloud services The surge, and this trend will continue after the outbreak. Therefore, cloud service will be the biggest winner of this outbreak.


Remote work has a long history of discussion. For example, Ctrip’s founder Liang Jianzhang has experimented with several economists in Ctrip’s call center. The results show that home office not only increases the working hours of employees (by reducing rest time and sickness), but also improves work efficiency. (Call out per unit time). However, companies often worry that employees will be too loose without supervision, and the lack of employee communication will lead to a lack of corporate culture. Therefore, home office is often more common in high-tech companies, but traditional companies rarely use it. However, the continuation of the epidemic has caused many companies to try to arrange employees to work at home during this time and become early adopters of home office services.

Judging from the practice during this period, many companies find that home office is a good choice, at least the meeting time is reduced. Moreover, the teleconferencing service provider worked very hard during this time to quickly improve the product experience, making teleworking an epidemicEffective options during love. The author believes that after the epidemic, remote office will also be largely incorporated into the existing company operating system.


Unpredictable fresh e-commerce and distance education

For the fast-growing fresh e-commerce and distance education during the epidemic, the author holds Be cautious.


Fresh food e-commerce used to be extremely popular in China, but these years have been difficult. In addition to the problem of supply, the core problem is still cold chain logistics. Fresh food e-commerce delivery to the door is convenient for customers. If the quality is stable and the price is competitive, customers will naturally choose. But quality and price are also the biggest challenges for fresh e-commerce, and they are directly related to cold chain logistics.

First of all, fresh foods are all non-standard products, which have high requirements for delivery quality. In the hot weather, the same fresh vegetables in the morning may spend more time on the road. On rainy and snowy days, if the product is poorly packaged and gets wet, the quality will be discounted. Therefore, solving these problems to ensure delivery quality depends entirely on cold chain logistics.

Unfortunately, the cost of domestic cold chain logistics is high, which contains many factors, and there are scale problems, resulting in high cold chain costs that cannot be diluted; There are problems with urban planning that prevent large cold-chain vehicles from reaching customers’ homes; there are traffic regulations that make it difficult for large vehicles to enter the city; and there are a series of problems, such as rising labor costs, which are not repeated here. There are similar reasons for the high cost of the “last mile”. The high cost of the cold chain also directly leads to bargaining pressure on fresh e-commerce. The price is high and few people buy. The price is low and the profit margin is not large. Therefore, domestic fresh e-commerce companies have been operating at a loss for a long time.

During the epidemic, many fresh e-commerce sales increased sharply, but a large part of the increase was due to the lack of offline channels. Once offline channels resume supply, many price-sensitive customers will return to offline. However, some mid- to high-end fresh food e-commerce, such as Hema Fresh, will have some customers remaining.

At present, there is still a dispute between the front storehouse and the mini store in the field of fresh e-commerce. Recently, some viewpoints are not optimistic about the pre-positioning model. Hema, Wal-Mart, Yonghui and others have increased their investment in mini stores. The front warehouse refers to the establishment of a warehouse according to the community selection, and the circle is less than 5 kilometers, covering the surrounding community.District, according to data analysis and its own supply chain resources, select the appropriate commodities, from the main warehouse distribution to the front warehouse, for small warehouse hoarding. At the same time, a logistics team was formed to distribute the goods from the front warehouse to the consumers after the consumers placed the order.

In my opinion, these disputes are just conceptual disputes. In fact, the essence of the problem is still in a more effective way to complete logistics in a given market situation. Delivery. When the unit price of the customer (the average amount of goods purchased by each customer in the supermarket) is small, and the number of products per order is not large, the front warehouse is a choice. In a short distance, the express can run a few orders at a time, improving delivery efficiency and reducing empty driving. However, during the epidemic period, the unit price of customers and the quantity of each product have greatly increased, which has caused the existing pre-position setting to fail to meet the requirements. However, like the Hema store generally covers about 3 kilometers, if the number of each order is too large, the rider makes one order at a time, and the empty driving distance is too long, so it is necessary to put the warehouse in front. Of course, if you open another store and add some offline experience, it will definitely be better, but the question of whether it is cost-effective is worth considering. However, if the number of customers (the average number of goods purchased by each customer in a mall or supermarket) declines after the outbreak, these mini stores may be too costly. Coupled with the entry of competitors, it will only make the profit outlook worse. Therefore, the author is not very optimistic about this.

Distance education is also the cause of the surge in demand, but the author believes that this may not be a good thing. If a product is ready and there is a lack of a breakthrough point, then the advent of the event will prompt this market, such as e-commerce before SARS in 2003. However, if the product is still immature, the safer approach is to develop it step by step, gradually improve the quality of the product while attracting mature customers, and finally occupy the entire market. However, if the unfortunate breakpoint arrives unexpectedly in advance, it will cause the defects of the product to be amplified, causing customers who are not psychologically prepared to reject this product even more. Unfortunately, the author feels that this may have happened in this distance education.

Compared with offline, under the existing technology, the defects of distance education can be seen everywhere, classroom interaction, eye contact, and Q & A connection and many more. Due to the general trend, many educational institutions are considering or trying online education. However, once forced to do so by the epidemic, it was found that there were many problems, and the service provider could not upgrade the technology in the short term. Therefore, the author believes that after the epidemic, the market will have a process of reflection and adjustment on online education.


Short-term dividends and channel changes

During the epidemic, Game companies received a big “short-term bonus”, which is not surprising. But the author believes that this market will naturally return to normal after the outbreak. Teen addiction to games has always been a criticized social topic. The author has always suggested that game companies like Tencent should disclose the proportion of their income by age to dispel social concerns.

The epidemic has also brought about channel changes in other industries. Retail, catering, and fitness industries suffered a major impact in the epidemic and developed Online, that is, the generation of composite channels. But in different industries, and even between companies in the same industry, the actual impact of channel changes will be different.

The reform route of the retail industry is relatively simple. In the epidemic, online live broadcasting was mainly developed, and the fitness industry also “jumped” to online and developed online Live broadcast and courses. The author judges that after the epidemic, the online channels of these two industries will be retained, but the purpose is different. For retail, live broadcast e-commerce will become part of a composite channel and a means of profitability. For the fitness industry, offline is still the main place, and online channels are mainly used as a way to maintain customers.

Relatively speaking, the catering industry is more complicated. In the epidemic, all restaurants have take-out channels, even high-end restaurants that did not do take-out before. After the epidemic, high-end restaurants will focus on dinning, and the purpose of take-out is customer maintenance. The mid-range restaurants will create takeaway channels as “cash cows” and improve product quality through product development. Low-end restaurants will gradually rely on online after the epidemic. Of course, one problem in the future is that once the platform is monopolized, the commission cost may become a big burden. The recent accusations of Meituan ’s use of the platform ’s position to extract excessive commissions and to force one-to-one choices also seem to indicate this.

(Author Chen Xinlei is a professor of marketing at the Shanghai Institute of Advanced Finance, Shanghai Jiao Tong University)