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In 2022, the red envelope war of the Spring Festival Gala ended. JD gave out red envelopes and gifts worth 1.5 billion yuan. Finally, the total number of interactions was fixed at 69.1 billion.
Seven years ago, wechat won the turnaround in the field of online payment by “sending red envelopes”. Since then, Kwai Fu exclusive partners have been a marketing mark for Internet companies. Taobao, Baidu, tiktok, jitter, Jingdong and so on have been in the market.
From the perspective of public image, compared with ALI meituan, who was issued an antitrust ticket, and Didi, who was frustrated in listing in the United States, JD, which is transforming a new entity enterprise and focuses on supply chain empowerment, seems to have got a “safety card”.
In order to “send” the red envelope of the Spring Festival Gala, JD has made many preparations internally. The red envelope project of Jingdong Spring Festival Gala is in the overall charge of Xu Lei, President of Jingdong group, led by Xin Lijun, CEO of Jingdong retail, and supported by Jingdong Logistics, Jingdong technology and other sub groups.
Chang Liang, senior director of JD cloud infrastructure research and development department, once told the interface news that during the Spring Festival Gala, the items related to the red envelope link of the Spring Festival Gala are at level s, and the other items are classified as ABC according to their importance. Even the items classified as level s in the past 618 will be degraded according to the situation.
Jingdong attaches so much importance to the red envelope of the Spring Festival gala for practical reasons.
According to the financial report data, although the traffic of Jingdong main station entered a growth period after the market was forced to sink, the growth rate of annual active users slowed down. In the third quarter of last year, JD had 552 million active users, a net increase of 110 million over the same period in 2020, but its year-on-year growth rate fell to 25% from 29% in the first quarter of 2021.
Its seven fresh food business is still focused on the first and second tier cities in Beijing Tianjin Hebei and Dawan district; Jingxi Pinpin withdrew from Fujian, Gansu, Guizhou, Jilin, Ningxia and Qinghai last year, and it is difficult to undertake the task of developing a sinking market under the contraction situation; The cycle of offline channels such as Jingdong electric appliance city flagship store and wanzhentong Township store is too long, and the cost is unknown.
For JD, the Spring Festival Gala may be another opportunity to open up the situation after community group buying. We should know that the Spring Festival Gala still has a strong influence in the sinking market and has a wide audience, which helps Internet companies improve their user structure and can be used as a fast track to open the sinking market.
Now that the Spring Festival is over, has JD’s red envelope marketing achieved twice the result with half the effort?
Only from the number of interactions, it seems that the Spring Festival Gala of the year of the tiger undertaken by JD is not as “lively” as last year. According to the 2021 Spring Festival evening data released last year, the total number of red envelopes during the Spring Festival Gala was 70 billion 300 million, higher than that of the tiktok year 69 billion 100 million times.
In addition to the Jingdong main station, the Jingdong app matrix is also “digesting” the huge traffic of the Spring Festival gala as much as possible. During the Spring Festival, the “shake the tiger in Beijing” activity is launched simultaneously. According to the data released by jd.com, the event issued more than 158 million coupons and attracted more than 32.27 million people.
However, Jingdong and tiktok APP attributes are not the same. Compared with the short video platform, e-commerce applications pay more attention to the transformation from interactive number to order behavior.
According to the Spring Festival consumption trend released by JD big data, as of February 5, the turnover during the Spring Festival in 2022 increased by more than 50% year-on-year (year-on-year in the lunar calendar from the 30th of the year to the fifth day of the first month). According to the statistics of the online connection clearing platform, the online connection platform handled a total of 4.20 trillion yuan of inter agency online payment transactions five days before the Spring Festival holiday, with a year-on-year growth rate of 11.58%.
This means that the growth rate of Jingdong’s transaction volume during the Spring Festival has been higher than the average growth rate of online payment at the social level.
At the user level, affected by the interactive activities of the Spring Festival Gala, the activity of JD young users has also increased. Data show that during the Spring Festival Gala, the interaction volume of young people under the age of 35 accounted for more than 56%, exceeding the annual average. Jingdong supermarket has searched more than 110 million times for annual gift boxes, of which 71% of users are post-80s and post-90s.
It is worth mentioning that under the promotion of the red envelope of the Spring Festival Gala and the new year’s goods Festival, the sales of goods in non JD advantage categories such as services have increased, among which the orders of goods such as laundry services, health services (package), automobile services and pet services have increased by 6 to 10 times over the same period of the lunar calendar last year.
According to the data released by jd.com, through the flow pool of the Spring Festival Gala, jd.com has successfully improved the consumption intention of platform users to a certain extent. At the same time, it has promoted young users under the age of 35, but it does not rule out the short-term bonus during the Spring Festival Gala red envelope and the Spring Festival.
At the telephone conference in the third quarter of 2021, Xu Lei, President of JD group, mentioned that about 75% of JD’s new users come from the sinking market. At the same time, Xu Lei divides the new users into two groups: 45 years old and above and 18 to 25 years old. He pointed out that it takes some time for users aged 18 to 25 to improve their ARPU value (average income per user), which generally takes half a year or four to five times of consumption.
Therefore, in the long run, how to seize the short-term benefits, improve the experience of young consumers and achieve user precipitation in the sinking market is still an issue that JD needs to consider in the next step.
This article is from “interface news”, reporter: Yu Hao, 36 krypton, authorized release.

Under Amazon’s “store closure tide”, another cross-border e-commerce has been refinanced.
Recently, sea home brand newme announced the completion of millions of dollars of angel + round financing, which is exclusively invested by Huaying capital. This round of financing will be used for the R & D and construction of private brands and the expansion of incremental channels.
This is newme’s third financing in less than a year. The first two are the seed round of millions of RMB invested by yunmu capital and Zhishi capital in January 2021, and the angel round of millions of dollars invested by the only capital and followed by Qingying venture capital in November 2021.
The goal is to become a “home version of sheen”. Does newme have a chance to replicate the success of sheen?

Rooted in tiktok live broadcast, Gmv exceeds one million dollars a year

Founded in November 2020, newme is a DTC overseas home brand. It takes the home demand groups in European and American markets as the target users and sells domestic “new, strange and special” home products to overseas markets by small package air transportation.
Newme mainly relies on tiktok channel to carry goods through tiktok’s short video advertising, combined with its own live broadcasting team and third-party agent broadcasting, and use tiktok stores and independent stations to undertake traffic to realize transformation and commodity sales.
Co founder Gu Jun introduced to China investment network that since the official sale in March 2021, newme has invested more than one million dollars in tiktok short video advertising, with a peak daily advertising revenue of more than 1000 orders and more than 10000 SKUs. More than 500 live broadcasts have been set up, and the live broadcast conversion rate of 1-2% has been realized. Based on the number of viewers per live broadcast of 3000-6000, an average of 50 or 60 orders have been converted per live broadcast. Since the second half of 2021, the monthly Gmv has doubled, with a peak of nearly US $1 million.
Newme also continues to make efforts at the supply chain end, and further defines new products through self-research, outsourcing and other ways. The main products include lamps, kitchen appliances, bathroom appliances and electric tools, and the customer unit price is maintained between $30-100.
Founder Gu Jun is a continuous entrepreneur in the e-commerce industry. He once worked in jd.com, lefeng.com and vipshop.
In 2015, Gu Jun founded a social e-commerce for imported beauty products, planted Japanese and Korean beauty products with the help of social platforms, and then imported and sold the products to China. The company has completed three rounds of financing and obtained the investment of Gu Jun’s former boss Li Jing, Jingwei China, Xianfeng Changqing and Bertelsmann respectively, with a total financing of nearly ten million US dollars.
With the rise of major social e-commerce companies such as pinduoduo, xiaohongshu and Yunji wechat stores, the market share of small and medium-sized companies was squeezed, and Gu Jun began to look for the next overseas opportunity.
Around 2018, Gu Jun took a fancy to the overseas B2B e-commerce market. He once started a local social e-commerce in India, similar to the Indian version of “Yunji micro store”, but soon the company encountered an epidemic and trade conflict between China and India, and Gu Jun had to “turn around”.
With his first two entrepreneurial experiences, Gu Jun quickly identified a new battlefield. In 2020, Gu Jun, who was in the United States, had an insight into the opportunity of the American market - during the epidemic, there was no offline retail in the United States, but online retail was hot. So Gu Jun quickly founded today’s newme.
Similar to Gu Jun, another co-founder Tan Jianrong is also a continuous entrepreneur. Tan Jianrong once lived in France for seven years and worked for Microsoft for two years. He founded 3C consumer electronics brand emie and received investment from many institutions such as Bertelsmann, blue lake capital and Jinglin capital, with a total financing of more than 100 million yuan.
At present, newme has more than 20 employees, most of whom have overseas study and work background, have good English language ability, and are familiar with overseas culture and living environment.

Strive for “product going to sea” to “brand going to sea”

At present, most of newme products are OEM or purchased by a third party. Next, we will focus more than 50% on the R & D and construction of our own brands, establish differentiated competitive barriers, and strive to achieve a Gmv proportion of 30% - 40%.
This shift stems from the sales experience of an Emoji luminous mask. During the epidemic, newme showed a luminous Emoji mask in the tiktok live studio, selling 10000 pieces in just four days. But this product was not created by newme. It was sold by Amazon five years ago. At that time, the product had a general response. The live broadcast of newme made this mask popular and also gave those Amazon stores a “free ride”, receiving 30000 mask orders in a week.
This makes Gu Jun realize that only by building his own brand and increasing the scarcity of products, can we continuously improve the repurchase rate of consumers in newme, break through the bottleneck of “product going to sea” and realize “brand going to sea”.
In Gu Jun’s view, cross-border e-commerce will mostly experience business evolution from OEM to white brand and then to private brand. Newme plans to start from the front of the supply chain, redefine products and upgrade design to build its own brand through accurate user portraits.
Gu Jun admitted that one of newme’s learning objectives is the cross-border e-commerce platform sheen. Sheen has strong content production capacity and strong supply chain management ability, through the content high-frequency update of front-end traffic and the quick response of small orders in the back-end supply chain. As early as 2015-2018, sheen began to use technology to transform the supply chain and enable the factory Kanban and production management system to reduce inventory and improve the efficiency of the supply chain.
However, it is not easy to replicate the success of sheen. Damonstudio, a cross-border e-commerce independent station benchmarked to sheen under byte, recently announced the closure of website operations. Some cross-border e-commerce racetrack investors believe that there is a big gap between damonstudio and sheen in terms of new user recognition, business maturity and supply chain management, which is more like byte’s water test in cross-border e-commerce business. However, this will not stop byte people from looking for the next sheen, and cross-border e-commerce is also becoming a new battlefield for Internet manufacturers. As of January 2022, cross-border e-commerce financing has exceeded 100 million, including Sequoia and other head institutions.
In particular, after Amazon’s “store closure tide” not long ago, cross-border e-commerce independent stations quickly became popular, and coincidentally chose the live delivery mode of light capital to market in tiktok. Gu Jun also pointed out that with the popularity of overseas live broadcasting and goods carrying industry, overseas offline retail industry has also started online live broadcasting at the same time. Taking advantage of tiktok, newme will also face off with large supermarkets such as target and Costco.
Ji Wei, founding managing partner of Huaying capital, said that driven by the epidemic and other factors in recent years, overseas e-commerce has developed rapidly. The e-commerce of the traffic platform represented by tiktok will bring huge market space in the future. Newme is one of the first authorized sellers in China, which can realize closed-loop trading in tiktok station and has unique top allocation rights in its e-commerce system. Newme team has been deeply engaged in traffic e-commerce for many years. Both founders have more than ten years of Internet and retail entrepreneurship experience, have a deep understanding of supply chain and brand, and have strong traffic operation ability.
This article is from WeChat official account, ID:DsstCapital, and is published by Zhang Junwen, 36 krypton authorized by Dongsishitiao.

In the era of fragmented attention economy, more and more people are used to browsing the grass planting notes written by others on the Internet before placing an order, so as to understand the useful information about the use feeling, quality parameters, functional characteristics, price range, precautions and so on.
For individual consumers, this can not only avoid detours, but also compare goods in terms of price, and the form of grass planting has developed from the initial good thing sharing and use experience to various forms such as live delivery, online popular exploration stores and professional evaluation.

Planting grass has become one of the important ways of marketing

Now the content operation has become a common practice, and the grass planting economy has long been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. Crow Rui released the Research Report on the grass planting power of three platforms in 2020. Its content shows that nearly 80% of respondents said they had been planted by KOL, and nearly 70% of users believe that the grass planting content has a great impact on their final purchase behavior. At the end of last year, The survey results of the joint questionnaire network of the social survey center of China Youth Daily also show that more than 80% of the respondents will go online to search for relevant grass planting recommendations before shopping.
Cui Qian is a post-90s white-collar worker. Before buying large or expensive goods, she is used to searching online grass sharing, product recommendation, evaluation and comparison to see how others use their experience, and then choose products in combination with her own economic strength. If she can’t make up her mind at the moment, she will find some professional analysis of experts for reference.
Cui Qian is usually busy with her work, and her personal energy is really limited. In addition, there are many kinds of goods, and she doesn’t have time to choose from them one by one. Therefore, it can save a lot of time to buy goods directly by browsing the content of planting grass. Of course, in order to avoid stepping on the pit, Cui Qian suggests that it’s best to look at the consumption evaluation of different websites or creators, In particular, focus on negative comments.
In recent years, many social platforms, Internet e-commerce and content operation enterprises have focused on the track of grass growing economy and made efforts to layout one after another. Zhihu started the recruitment plan of MCN creators in 2019. Since its listing at the beginning of last year, Zhihu began to accelerate the pace of commercial construction and operation promotion of platform content, and first released the “cheese platform”, The function of the platform is to build a bridge for content cooperation and traffic transformation for creators and brand customers.
At the end of last year, Zhihu held the first ecological Partner Conference and released a number of plans. The purpose is to gradually attract the enthusiastic participation of various types of content creators by further strengthening commercial operation on the basis of previous professional operation, so as to establish a new way of content marketing and flow realization.
Specifically, Zhihu will focus on beauty, skin care, digital and other fields, and provide corresponding content marketing solutions or marketing tools for customers in different industries and brands by gathering corresponding content creation forces. For example, Zhihu’s good thing recommendation function can support the jump to e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, jd.com, pinduoduo and so on, To achieve accurate docking with brands or businesses, commercial content marketing has become one of the main positions of knowing revenue, accounting for about one-third of its total revenue.
B tiktok and shaking platform have similar functions, which can link the creators and brand customers to realize the content operation and commercial promotion. At present, many head enterprises or platforms have already been quite popular in content sharing and flow planting, but these enterprises are still facing different degrees of difficulty in sharing grass and straw contents and drainage and business transformation. Kwai tiktok and Taobao do or think the same without prior consulation2. Since last year, the content and operation platform of live broadcasting providers and other vendors have been speeding up the pace of deepening and improving the layout of the platform.
After the popularity and content cultural creation atmosphere are cultivated, all platforms are also trying to create an ecological and trading chain suitable for the development of brands and businesses. The ultimate goal is to build an ecological closed loop from content sharing to commercial operation. At the same time, we can also predict that the competition of all platforms in this field will only become increasingly fierce in the future.

02 video and live broadcast drainage are the general trend of content grass planting in the future

Compared with graphics, video grass planting forms undoubtedly have richer visual expression and impact. Therefore, the protagonist of content grass planting is also changing from graphics to video. Many content platforms are also actively encouraging and supporting the creation of MCN. Publishers can get more traffic support in this regard. At the same time, from the current traffic transformation situation, Live e-commerce may become the next breakthrough in the transformation of content platform to commercialization.
According to the data of Dongxing securities, the market scale of domestic live broadcasting e-commerce reached 2 trillion yuan last year. Compared with other content operation and traffic conversion methods, live broadcasting e-commerce has the advantages of strong intuition and interaction. Moreover, an excellent KOL is easier to win the trust of users. Live broadcasting can more conveniently help operators establish a value closed loop integrating content grass planting and commercial operation, So as to achieve the goal of rapid and efficient transformation relying on high-quality user groups.
AI Kwai consulting tiktok reported that the total merchandise transaction volume of Taobao live broadcast sector in 2020 (GMV) was about 400000000000 yuan, and the shaking sound was about 500000000000 Yuan, and the fast business electricity business sector was close to 400 billion yuan, which way ahead of the live broadcast business of other platforms.
Tiktok tiktok tiktok tiktok has increased the content of grass and passenger group transformation to a more important strategic level. Before a while, the jitter used to test grass planting function in its APP, and its jitter box also gradually exerting force in this field. At present, the voice has basically established a closed loop transaction from direct broadcast to electricity conversion, which of course makes other competitors feel pressure.
Kwai Kwai and the US group reached a strategic cooperation in drainage transformation last December. Users can place orders on the fast track group’s small programs when they are willing to brush short videos and have the intention to purchase. After the order is successful, the creators of the content will receive corresponding profits. CoCo, Kwai TSE, purple garden, and Book Burning herbs also have the same benefits. 85 degrees C and other domestic well-known chain catering brands have become the first batch of merchants to settle in.
Besides the catering items, the US group will follow the following programs: hotel accommodation, tourist attractions, entertainment, hairdressing and other life service categories. With the help of the fast user’s daily user browsing volume, Kwai Kwai, the US group, the creative side, the brand side and the users have become a closed loop of consumption from content sharing to value realization.

03 in the era of flow being the king, we should grasp both the entrance and the exit

There is no doubt that in terms of the influence and penetration of the marketing system, the content operation platform is undoubtedly a relatively successful traffic conversion channel. Whether it is the traditional goods of large and small e-commerce or the new consumer brands rising with the tide of the country, such as Yuanqi forest, perfect diary, bubble Mart, huaxizi, etc., all rely on the mode of content grass planting to a great extent, It has won the attention of the market and consumer groups, thus laying a good foundation for further growth and development.
For major Internet e-commerce and content operation platforms, it is not difficult to establish a content creation and sharing mechanism including graphics, video, live broadcast, etc. the biggest difficulty lies in how to stabilize the traffic within the platform, rather than sharing the content on the platform as before, and finally users go to other e-commerce platforms, wechat The embarrassing situation of purchase and transaction of commercial and social media such as community.
Second, platform enterprises need to establish a perfect and attractive product or service system, which should include e-commerce supply service chain including commodity supply, merchant entry, payment and settlement, warehousing and logistics and other elements. Only in this way can we realize full flow transformation, Enterprises or e-commerce platforms can also obtain sufficient value returns from commercial operations in various ways.
From the current situation, the traffic conversion business still has a lot of room for improvement in the future development of major Internet e-commerce and content operation platforms. Among them, deep cultivation of content operation and encouraging creators and brands to continuously supply high-quality original content are the basis for commodity sharing and traffic conversion. Efficient and convenient marketing and commercial cash realization methods are the key to improve the purchase conversion rate and repurchase rate of user groups. These two aspects are complementary and mutually reinforcing, In the future, it will become the primary goal of major Internet e-commerce and content operation platforms.
For example, in recent years, content operation and traffic transformation have also become an important development direction of Taobao platform. Taobao has built a marketing matrix including Taobao live broadcast, Taobao headlines, Youku, good goods, etc. through internal introduction, outreach and maneuvering. Taobao shopping launched the year before last also integrates the content creation functions of individuals, businesses and brands. It can combine the content with graphics, video Live broadcast and other forms are presented to users from multiple angles.
Although there is still a certain gap between Taobao and expectations in terms of content diversity, professionalism and user stickiness, based on the huge user flow and transaction volume of Taobao system matrix and its convenient closed-loop advantages from content operation to transaction conversion, it is not difficult for us to predict that Taobao will have a promising future in this field.

04 conclusion

“Yu Jian column” believes that the traffic dividend in the Internet era is gradually fading, and the endless e-commerce platforms and commercial entrances make the Internet economy fragmented and decentralized. In the past, the way of accumulating popularity through content operation, developing brand advertising business and building business private traffic is gradually entering the bottleneck.
Both the content operation platform and Internet e-commerce are building a closed-loop system from content to transaction, and strive to form an efficient commercial transformation link including graphics, short video and live broadcast. When the platform operator establishes an efficient link from content creation to commercial operation, In the era of attention economy, enterprises can seize the first opportunity and take the lead in striving for user resources.
This article is from WeChat official account, ID:yujianzhuanlan, and is published by Yu Bin, 36 krypton.

36 krypton learned that the digital brand marketing management group “ceshang SDG” has completed the a + round of financing and obtained 100 million yuan (⺠); Bocom overseas Chinese digital economy foundation ⾦ lead investment, electroacoustic shares, shareholders sig Haina Asia venture capital foundation ⾦ and Tiantu investment follow investment. This round of investment will mainly focus on the R & D investment in the brand marketing expansion and red (traffic management center of seshan group.
Cezanne, who was born in 2016, has a precise sense of brand marketing trends. Taking advantage of the “red book”, “shake” and other platforms, Cezanne provides 0-1, 1-100 quality and efficiency services for the brand with the help of the “red book” flow economy. In 19 years, the company expanded its business territory and upgraded to a digital brand marketing management group. The business module is divided into brand traffic service and “main brand management” (its cosmetics brand out-of-office and knitting brand ⽺ weave).
By virtue of the red persimmon management platform developed by the company, seshan has become the behind the scenes operation of more than 500 well-known brands and enterprises in successfully emerging from the circle and incubating explosive products on community platforms such as red book and shake. Customers are involved in luxury products, FMCG, beauty makeup, 3C and other industry tracks, across domestic and foreign giant groups such as P & G, fuerjia, fuerping, LVMH, Lifeng and so on.
Popular backstage of Naoshi platform
“Minimum base investment” and “leveraging the most benefit transformation” are not only the results of the feedback of service experience and marketing data, but also the advantages of ceshang’s accurate consumer insight. “The products of the brand determine the revenue curve, while the digital operation of the core dominates the profit efficiency”. This is the cognition of CEO Jennifer of Cezanne and the scale of Cezanne brand incubation.
At the end of 2019, the brand out-of-office (hereinafter referred to as ooo) became the first brand in China. Based on the understanding of the data of the households and the bottom of the beauty track, it developed the light and shadow CP of the repair category. In the two years after the impact of the epidemic, with the continuous growth of the accurate flow model, the marketing volume of the brand exceeded 100 million yuan in the first year, with an increase of 800% in the same year, and the revenue (efficiency) reached 5 million +, It has achieved ⾼ efficiency ⾼ revenue in the fierce Red Sea track of beauty makeup, ranking the top three among many domestic cosmetics on platforms such as Shuo ⾳ and tmall.
⾃ brand out-of-office
At the end of 2021, ooo began to try to develop offline makeup scene service business, and has completed the opening of ⾸ offline stores. Shops do not provide retail services, but also provide corresponding beauty services and teaching for consumers, and should expand to the whole country. In the future, ooo will become a national professional makeup brand with more complete experience from the private domain created by brands and consumers.
Own brand ooo
In 2022, in addition to continuing to cultivate out-of-office, the incubation of two new brands 0-1 in Cezanne’s multi category brand matrix has been put on the process, and the “woven road”, a knitted clothing brand that has successfully broken the ice, has accelerated the start of “standard product” in the blue ocean of customer unit price. The scale of investment ⾍ 12.23 million yuan, only completed.
It is understood that in 2022, Cezanne has completed the acquisition of the popular Y2K fashion brand tingcccai and will launch the exquisite men’s personal care brand Yanlu ⼰. Cezanne will complete the integrated management of these brands through the middle stage of brand operation technology developed by Cezanne, including media delivery, sales channels and supply chain management, so as to enable Cezanne to have a brand and continuously deepen the market from the three aspects of flow, resources and management.

Investors said

Bocom overseas Chinese digital economy foundation is jointly established by bocom capital and overseas Chinese Bank of Singapore, Guo Yanni, the partner in charge: “when the brand in the market is still in the effect of involution, Cezanne’s blade has begun to analyze ‘efficiency’. Their comprehensive marketing and data precipitation can improve the efficiency and success rate of the brand, reflecting the Zhuoyue capital efficiency far exceeding that of changduo new consumer brands. This is also the bottom and trust of future capital investment and new consumer brands.”
Dalton, founder of electroacoustic Co., Ltd. “Cezanne represents a” super product marketing chain “for the incubation and rise of new consumer brands. In the future, such institutions will be the strong engine to maintain the brand market, double the marketing efficiency of new products breaking the ice and increasing the brand, and shorten the long-distance run of brand value promotion.”

At the beginning of 2022, the new energy vehicle making force continues to make rapid progress, and the traditional automobile brands are still exploring in the transformation. However, market sales seem to prove that the market seems to have little time left for traditional brand exploration.
On February 14, Great Wall Motors (2333. HK) released the sales announcement in January. The data showed that the sales volume in January 2022 totaled 111800 vehicles, a year-on-year decrease of 19.59%. The next day, Great Wall Motor’s share price jumped 4.75% to HK $18.44, the lowest since May 2021.
Generally speaking, compared with the decline in sales at the end of the year, the decline in sales of automobile brands at the beginning of the year deserves more attention from the market, because some 4S stores often calculate the orders before the end of last year after the year, so as not to make the sales at the beginning of the year too ugly. On the other hand, January was the peak season of automobile sales in previous years. After all, many consumers took advantage of the new year to go home, I will rush to buy the car years ago, and the sales volume of all brands will not be poor.
From this perspective, the decline in sales of Great Wall Motors in January may be more worthy of market attention.

The share price retreated sharply, and the sales growth of new energy vehicles was out of line

Judging from the trend of the capital market, the Great Wall stock price has entered a new round of decline. Since October last year, the Great Wall stock price has almost halved after falling from its high point. As of February 18, the share price of Great Wall Motors fell to 38. 25 yuan.
On the one hand, the capital market has entered the downward channel. On the other hand, from the storm of tank 300 delivery to the “core change door” of Euler good cat, and then to the recent shutdown of black cat and white cat, it seems that the transformation of the Great Wall is still a long way off.
2021 will be a year of ups and downs for the Great Wall. On the one hand, its 300 tanks, which mainly focus on small cross-country vehicles, have sold 84588 units, accounting for almost half of the domestic cross-country vehicles. On the other hand, as the production capacity of new vehicles is seriously lower than the market expectation, of course, the lack of core is one of the important factors. As time goes by, the market enthusiasm dissipates, and the growth expectation in the future is declining.
Reflected in the capital market, under the haze of the epidemic, the share price of Great Wall Motors rose nearly tenfold from the peak in 2020 to 2021. By the end of 2021, the popularity of individual models was no longer, the capital market returned to rationality, and the high point of Great Wall stock price fell sharply.
There are generally two reasons for the decline of the high point of auto enterprises. One is the sharp decline in sales volume, and investors are bearish on the future growth of brand models. On the other hand, the overall market expectation decreases. For example, after the rise of Tesla, the market will inevitably make new adjustments to the valuation of traditional auto brands, because in the stock growth, the growth of new energy brands may correspond to the decline of traditional brands.
Overall, the withdrawal of the market value of the Great Wall shows that the expectations of the capital market are declining, and the shutdown of some of its new energy models may once again be bad for the growth momentum of the Great Wall in the new energy market.
On February 15, two new black cat and white cat models of Great Wall Motor’s brand Euler stopped accepting orders. Officials said that the two models were forced to stop production because of the shortage of chips, the supply of spare parts and the decline of new energy subsidies. Tianyancha app information shows that Euler brand was founded in 2001 and has experienced five rounds of financing.
In June last year, Great Wall Motors released its 2025 strategic target, which mentioned that the target sales volume was 4 million units, of which 80% were new energy vehicles, and the expected revenue was 600 billion.
From the sales ranking of new energy cars in January this year, the Great Wall’s brand Euler has only one Euler good cat in the top 10. In January, the sales volume of black cats reached 8612, while the sales volume of Euler black cats was only 3891. The sales volume of BYD Han, the third highest in the sales volume list, reached 12781, and the sales volume of Wuling macro mini, the first, was 26682.
With the rapid development of new forces, transformation is the top priority of traditional automobile brands. However, from the perspective of sales volume, the electric transformation of great wall seems to be out of step with the pace of the industry. The reason may be that the multi brand strategy of Great Wall Motors is not going smoothly under the burden of fuel vehicle brands.

Great wall motor starts the “Shu Road”: the road of transformation under the multi brand strategy

On the road of transformation, the Great Wall chose a “Shu Road”.
On the one hand, the wings of its new energy brand are not yet full, and the cash flow business that the group can rely on is still the fuel vehicle business. On the other hand, the market space of Harvard H6, the main sales force in the fuel vehicle market, is being squeezed by Geely, Chang’an and other competitors.
For example, in the traditional advantage SUV market of great wall, the models such as Xingyue l released by Geely in the past two years and cs75 under Chang’an have stronger product power. On the one hand, Haval’s response is to fight a price war with its competitors through the subdivision of H6 models. On the other hand, the VV series products under Wei brand have not opened a big gap in sales.
On the whole, facing the pressure of competitors step by step, Great Wall’s strategy seems to be to maintain the growth of fuel vehicle market through multi brand diversified expansion strategy.
An important reason supporting this decision is that the market demand has changed. On the one hand, with the automobile consumption track becoming a big red ocean track, but some segments of the track are still blue ocean market, such as the hard core cross-country track with a price range of 150000-250000 yuan. In fact, the success of the tank 300 is the success of the excavation subdivision.
In short, the change of consumers’ preferences promotes the further differentiation of market demand, resulting in the birth of a new blue ocean.
The popularity of tank 300 shows that there is no problem in the overall direction from large-scale accumulation to deep cultivation in market segments, which may also be the reason for the soaring share price of Great Wall in 2021. The retreat of the Great Wall stock price at the end of the year may be due to the potential problems found in the market.
There is no problem with the direction of market segmentation. The problem is that the brand front is too long.
From the perspective of brand positioning, Euler is more likely to be positioned as a fashion brand for young women, tanks are positioned as hardline cross-country, and Great Wall guns are positioned in the pickup truck market, focusing on villages and fourth and fifth tier cities.
If the brand front is too long, it will easily lead to the dispersion of resources. No matter in which market segment, once the market segment is verified, there will be competitors. Even if the segment track where Euler and tank are located is still the blue ocean market in the short term, the competitors will follow up quickly.
For example, in the field of hardline off-road, Chery’s brand jietu announced to officially enter this segment.
The launch of tank 300 is an important symbol of Great Wall Motor’s deep cultivation of market segments and high-end transformation. The popularity of the market highlights the problem of capacity climbing of tank 300. On the one hand, the production capacity is seriously disconnected from the short-term demand of the market and does not use the accumulation of brand reputation. On the other hand, when there are more and more players in the market segment, more and more resources will be required to be invested under competitive pressure. On the contrary, it will fall into long-term consumption, which will affect the profits of the group.
For example, Harvard H6 sales declined in 2017, followed by the launch of the red and blue standard Haval H6 coupe and the new Haval H6, and the number of models increased to 55. Under the market competition, 2018q3 Haval officially announced that Haval’s best-selling models were fully preferential, resulting in a sharp decline in profits in the quarter.
In the long run, a negative result of the multi brand front is that the resources of the group’s electric transformation may be further dispersed.
In fact, looking back at the development process of auto giants such as Ford and Volkswagen, it is not difficult to find that they have also experienced rapid brand expansion. Later, facts have proved that too many fronts are not conducive to the growth of the overall business. In the follow-up development, the waste of resources is increasing due to too many brands, and consumers’ brand cognition is further dispersed.
As a result, Volkswagen and Ford began to shrink their product lines again to further improve product efficiency. Later, Volkswagen launched the MQB platform and moved towards the route of intensive growth.
In fact, the Great Wall brand models have an obvious feature, that is, the popularity of new cars is very high, but there are not many hard power products that can really stand the test of time.
For great wall, H6 model is one of the few models that have been tested for a long time, which gives great wall the opportunity to launch brand-new Wei brand, tank, Euler and other follow-up brands and deeply cultivate the market segments. How much trial and error space the traditional fuel vehicle market can bring to the transformation of new energy may be a question that needs to be considered.

Great Wall transformation dilemma: it is difficult to fully scale the market segments

A practical problem is that with the continuous growth of the new energy vehicle market, the transformation time of traditional brands is shortening.
Under the double score policy, the performance of new energy vehicles will directly affect the growth of the overall business of the brand group. On the other hand, with the introduction of fuel vehicle sales schedules all over the world, traditional brands urgently need new energy to open up new large-scale growth.
The Great Wall still seems to have a long way to go in terms of energy transformation.
In addition to the expected future growth, the quality problem of Euler brand models is also the threshold that Great Wall Motors must cross in its transformation.
According to the statistics of vehicle quality network, from December to February 19, 2021, the quality complaints about Euler’s good cat ranked first. In addition to the publicity problems, there are also some problems such as body accessories and electrical appliances. In addition, there are a series of problems such as video and audio faults, on-board interconnection faults and so on.
From the distribution of product problems, the complaints about Euler on the vehicle quality online also seem to reflect the maladjustment of Great Wall Motors on the road of transforming new energy. If this does not adapt to the long-term, it may affect the long-term growth of Euler brand.
User reputation is the first vitality. Product quality problems can have a far-reaching impact on the accumulation of brand reputation and long-term sales growth.
For example, the reputation of German brands has declined in the past two years, while the reputation and sales volume of Japanese brands are increasing. To a certain extent, this is the long-term impact caused by product quality differences. As far as the Great Wall is concerned, this point deserves vigilance.
The most important thing in the transformation of traditional automobile brands to new energy is scale.
Why can Tesla succeed? Not because of how amazing Tesla Model s is. Instead, model 3 completed the rapid scale of the new energy market in a short time through price reduction.
Some domestic manufacturers are aware of this. For example, SAIC launched Wuling Hongguang Mini. On the one hand, the substantial growth of sales volume has brought a lot of points to fuel vehicles. On the other hand, in this process, they unknowingly completed the brand transformation, laying the groundwork for Wuling brand to launch electric products in the future.
A reality that great wall has to face is that the Euler brand with gender preference may be difficult to lay the foundation for long-term market growth through effective scale.
From the perspective of market strategy, for automobile brands, the women’s market is a blue ocean market after hardline off-road, but one thing that can not be ignored is that the main force of the current automobile consumption market is, on the one hand, the family as the unit, on the other hand, the market consumer group is still the male group.
Great Wall’s biggest weakness in positioning the Euler brand may be that the overly obvious gender label naturally rejects the mainstream car owners.
In other words, even if the good cat and other models under the Euler brand can sell more than 10000 vehicles per model, its brand influence and reputation may be far less capable of driving sales than the new energy brands of other fuel vehicle manufacturers. From this perspective, entering the new energy market with Euler as the main position may pave the way for the long-term growth of the brand in the future.

Write at the end:

The transformation of traditional automobile manufacturers into new energy requires not only changing products, but also changing thinking.
The strategy of multi brand expansion of Great Wall Motor’s segment market can indeed meet the consumers of the segment market and enjoy the blue ocean dividend of the segment market in the early stage. However, in order to tap these segments for a long time, it needs a higher product power moat, and the sustainability of the product life cycle may be limited, resulting in a waste of resources.
In the long run, this is not conducive to the transformation and development of the whole Great Wall group. Next, how to capture the eyes of capital and realize the scale of new energy business more efficiently may still be a problem that needs in-depth reflection for the Great Wall.
This article is from WeChat public No. ID:IPOxscj, the author of the 36 official account of the company.

No one can’t live without an iron boss or a flowing executive.
Even the brothers who started a business after drinking millet porridge with Lei Jun are leaving one after another. The nearest one is Li Weixing, employee of Xiaomi No. 12.
Before leaving office, he served as vice chairman and Secretary General of Xiaomi Technical Committee and was one of the earliest founding team members of Xiaomi. Even, he once showed his love in an interview with the media, “I just married Xiaomi.”
Before Li Weixing, Lei Jun just sent off Chang Cheng, vice president of the company and general manager of Xiaomi mobile phone products department at the end of January 2022. Chang Cheng comes from Lenovo and is one of the members of Lei Jun’s “Avenger alliance”.
Before Chang Cheng, Lei Jun bid farewell to Zhou Shouzi, President of Xiaomi International Department, who made great contributions to Xiaomi’s investment and listing. After leaving Xiaomi, Zhou Shouzi switched to Zhang Yiming’s command, first as CFO and then as CEO of tiktok.
Seeing off the brothers one after another was Liu qiangdong.
A few months ago, Zhou Bowen, chairman of Jingdong Technical Committee and President of Jingdong Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Xu Ling, head of the group’s Strategy Department known as the “father of IOUS” of Jingdong, and Xiao Jun, vice president of Jingdong group and President of X business unit, left successively.
For Liu qiangdong, this may have been commonplace. There have been too many executives coming in and out of Jingdong in recent years. Jingdong has transported many management talents for the retail and fresh food industries. A few years ago, Lei Jun also said, “no veterans, no inheritance. No recruits, no future.”
Of course, the resignation of senior executives is an ordinary thing, but it is not necessarily simple behind the ordinary. Generally speaking, they either leave for personal or family reasons, or have a better place to go, or they are forced to leave because they can’t satisfy their boss. But this is also a window to observe a company, so that we can see its development status, strategic changes, future direction, etc.
People are the opposite of the company.

01 Xiaomi transition

Xiaomi confirmed to the media that Li Weixing has indeed left and wants to return to his hometown in Guangzhou.
Li Weixing, who grew up in Guangzhou and studied computer science at Sun Yat sen University, first joined Microsoft in 2005 to be responsible for the research and development of windows phone camera software. In 2009, Lin bin, who was at Google, was ready to start a business with Lei Jun, so he introduced his little alumni Li Weixing to Lei Jun.
According to Li Weixing’s memory, Lei Jun talked with him for several hours, talked about some things he had done and was doing, talked about the current situation of the mobile phone industry, his views on smart phones, the goal of making Xiaomi mobile phones, etc. “It’s mutual understanding.”
Lei Jun also revealed that he met more than 100 people in three months at that time. The opening remarks are always about who I am, what I have done and who I want to find. Can you give me a chance to meet and talk.
To a certain extent, Li Weixing saw that Lei Jun still had a halo and decided to join in a few days later.
First from the left: Li Weixing, employee of Xiaomi No. 12
In the early days, Li Weixing was responsible for the development of MIUI in Xiaomi. Even, he didn’t have much expectations for Xiaomi and Lei Jun. According to the Mars laboratory, Li Weixing believed only one tenth of Lei Jun’s first big cake for Xiaomi. “At that time, the expectation was not so high, but it was very satisfied to achieve the effect of big cake.”.
After Xiaomi went public in 2018, Lei Jun made a large-scale organizational structure adjustment, and Li Weixing emerged as a young man.
Lei Jun set up four new Internet business departments, and Li Weixing became the general manager of Internet Department 1, reporting directly to Lei Jun. Internet department I is composed of some departments of MIUI and some departments of Xiaomi mutual Entertainment Department, which is responsible for MIUI core experience, technology middle stage, commercial product R & D and advertising sales, game distribution, business cooperation and MIUI international business.
Lei Jun explained, “we must hand over the front-line business position to young people, so that young talents can emerge and make achievements like in the early stage of entrepreneurship. We must constantly integrate fresh blood, so as to have a long-term mechanism for talent echelon handover.”
Only six months later, Li Weixing was transferred to the fourth Internet department as general manager. In 2020, Xiaomi Internet business department was integrated again, and Li Weixing was transferred to Xiaomi Technical Committee until he left.
In fact, after Xiaomi appeared on the market, Lei Jun realized that his past playing style was a bit like guerrillas or special teams, which created many miracles and trained a number of excellent cadres. However, we can’t rely on guerrilla warfare next. We should be able to fight mobile warfare, stalemate warfare and even large regiments.
Therefore, in addition to Li Weixing, the young people who grew up inside Xiaomi, they need to introduce a large number of talents from the outside.
With the idea of being high-end and competing with apple, Lei Jun introduced a number of executives who had worked in other mobile phone brands around 2020, such as Chang Cheng from Lenovo, Lu Weibing from Jinli, Miao Lei from Nubia, Wang Xiaoyan from chili, Yang zhe from Huawei, Zeng Xuezhong from ZTE, etc.
The outside world ridiculed that these “losers” formed the “Avenger alliance” in Xiaomi under the influence of Lei Jun.
Interestingly, Chang Cheng has the name of “magneto king” in the Jianghu. Before joining Xiaomi, he served as vice president of Lenovo Group and head of mobile phone business in China. He even often compared Lenovo’s mobile phone with Xiaomi’s mobile phone and said “fight against disobedience” on his microblog.
But no one expected that on the last day of 2019, Chang Cheng guanxuan left Lenovo and went to Xiaomi the next day to shake hands with Lei Jun’s “enemy” and become a “brother”. He served as vice president of Xiaomi group and was responsible for mobile phone product planning.
Chang Cheng’s “backwater” even triggered Lenovo’s non competition agreement. Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo Group, once said that for enterprises, the entry and exit of talents are very normal, and I hope these entry and exit are in line with the rules. “Whether it is import or export, we should respect the market competition rules and do not involve legal issues.”
In October 2020, Beijing Haidian District Labor and personnel dispute arbitration commission ruled that Chang Cheng would continue to perform the obligation of non competition, pay liquidated damages of RMB 525282100 for violation of non competition, and return the non competition compensation previously paid by Lenovo.
Since then, the parties have not spoken on this. Chang Cheng’s journey to Xiaomi doesn’t seem to be smooth.
Xiaomi 10 Youth Edition is the first product Chang Cheng is responsible for after joining Xiaomi. Before the product release, the publicity copy published by Chang Cheng on the microblog caused great controversy and was denounced as vulgar by netizens. Xiaomi group and Chang Cheng himself apologized successively, and Chang Cheng also donated 100000 yuan to youth education institutions.
Chang Cheng joined Xiaomi for half a year. Tencent Shenwang reported that Lei Jun was not satisfied with Chang Cheng because of the controversy caused by Chang Cheng’s publicity copy published on the microblog and the poor performance of the first show of Xiaomi 10 youth version.
Perhaps this has already laid the groundwork for Chang Cheng’s departure. From Li Weixing to Chang Cheng, Xiaomi stumbled into the next decade.

02 byte expansion

In 2021, Zhou Shouzi left Lei Jun and joined Zhang Yiming.
For Zhou Weizi’s departure, Lei Jun said “there are all kinds of reluctance”. In 2015, when he hired Zhou Shouzi, who was only 32 at that time, to be Xiaomi CFO, many people complained. At that time, Xiaomi was in trouble and was making up lessons. Lei Jun needed someone who really knew finance and investment.
Previously, Zhou Shouzi invested in DST. As a Singaporean, he came to Beijing alone and successively completed the investment in Jingdong, Xiaomi, Ali, Didi, today’s headlines and other projects.
In Lei Jun’s view, Zhou Shouzi is young, smart and has a diligence of revenge on the world. He knows that Zhou Shouzi will meet with 350 entrepreneurs every year during his DST to study entrepreneurship projects and observe the development of China’s mobile Internet. Since 2010, he has been thinking about the core competitiveness of an enterprise every day.
Lei Jun is not mistaken. The book “forge ahead” records the working state of Zhou Weizi during Xiaomi’s IPO. “I’ve thought about every word in the prospectus several times,” Zhou said The prospectus of the H-share version of the HKEx has a full 600 pages.
In August 2019, Xiaomi became a partner and became the president of Xiaomi international in the second year. Lei Jun hoped that Zhou Shouzi could lead Xiaomi to accelerate its internationalization, but Zhou Shouzi chose byte beating, so that he could return to his hometown Singapore to work and turn from mobile phones to short video.
Zhou Shouzi and Zhang Yiming are old acquaintances. It was Zhou Shouzi who invested in today’s headlines on behalf of DST. “Byte beat: the secret from 0 to 1” recorded the scene of the two meeting.
After seeing Zhang Yiming, Zhou Weizi was very optimistic. He noticed the growth track of the application and thought that the founder Zhang Yiming was very capable and confident in the development direction of byte beating. Yuri Milner agreed to lead the round B financing. After the investment, he obtained a 7.2% stake, which is said to be worth $60 million. Today, even after dilution, these shares are still worth billions of dollars.
Zhou Shouzi
Zhou was funded to enter byte, first as CFO and then as CEO of tiktok.
“Zhou Shouzi is very familiar with our business, team and culture. He knew us during his work at DST and promoted DST to invest in us very early.”. Zhang Yiming said. As CEO of tiktok, Zhou Shouzi will be mainly responsible for corporate governance and long-term business planning.
Before taking over the investment this week, tiktok experienced a difficult time and was once banned in the United States. Kevin Mayer, former senior vice president of Disney, was invited to serve as byte coo and Global CEO of tiktok. Unexpectedly, Mayer left his post two months later. As the new US leader came to power, the situation was eased.
At present, tiktok has more than 1 billion monthly live users. Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of meta (former Facebook), said, “tiktok is a very large competitor, and it is growing at a very fast speed. Although we have very fast development, our competitors are also growing rapidly.”
In the future, if tiktok is listed, Zhou’s investment can be described as “professional counterpart”.
Now tiktok is from music in 2018 Ly merged with the original tiktok, after byte bought music for $1 billion a year Ly, it is said that Facebook was also interested in bidding at that time.
Speaking of this, it is necessary to mention Liu Zhen, senior vice president in charge of byte internationalization at that time. Liu Zhen has worked as a lawyer in Silicon Valley for nearly ten years. She is known to the outside world because she launched a “taxi war” with her cousin didi president Liu Qing.
In August 2015, Liu Zhen became the head of Uber China strategy. According to the data at that time, in her first year in office, Uber China carried out business in 60 cities, with more than 500 employees nationwide, and the market share increased from about 2% at the beginning of 2015 to about 30%.
However, on August 1, 2016, Didi travel and Uber China announced their merger. According to the report of people, the people who were extremely sad after the merger also included Liu Zhen. Her expression was stiff and her voice was dumb. It can be seen that she “cried many times”.
Two months later, Liu Zhen joined today’s headlines. Then the latter accelerated its internationalization and successively acquired flipagram and music ly。 When talking about the acquisition at that time, Liu Zhen said it was a process of mutual trust. “We can see the potential of products and talents. We are not simply investing, but really understanding the industry technology to help their development.”
Liu Zhen said that she was impressed by Zhang Yiming’s ambition and that he was able to accommodate talents from multiple cultural backgrounds, which is why she joined. Over time, Liu Zhen’s authority in byte has become smaller and smaller. It is said that after Kevin Mayer joined, she was only responsible for domestic legal affairs.
In May 2020, Liu Zhen left byte and joined Yuanqi forest to be responsible for overseas business.
Expanding bytes, constantly looking for more suitable people.

03 Jingdong aftershock

In November 2021, almost within a week, JD was exposed that Xu Ling, Zhou Bowen and Xiao Jun had resigned.
To some extent, this is the aftershock after the disintegration of Jingdong “troika”. In recent years, Liu qiangdong has retreated behind the scenes. Xu Lei, Chen Shengqiang and Wang Zhenhui, the former top leaders of JD retail, JD digital and JD logistics, have formed a “troika” and are active in front of the stage.
But at the end of 2020, the “troika” was suddenly broken up.
First, Chen Shengqiang was appointed Vice Chairman of Jingdong digital division and chief of staff of Jingdong group, and Li Yayun, chief compliance officer of Jingdong group, served as CEO of Jingdong digital division; More than a week later, Wang Zhenhui resigned and Yu Rui, JD’s chief human resources officer, was appointed the new CEO of JD logistics; In September 2021, Xu Lei became president of JD group, and Xin Lijun, former CEO of JD health, took over JD retail.
In terms of the company structure, Xu Lei is responsible for the daily operation and coordinated development of various business sectors and reports to Liu qiangdong, who will devote more time to long-term strategic design, young CEO training and Rural Revitalization.
In May 2021, Yu Rui led JD logistics to list in Hong Kong. Jingdong Digital Technology Co., Ltd. was listed and stranded, merged with Jingdong cloud and AI business, and renamed Jingdong technology. It is reported that it wants to IPO again.
Xu Ling is from Jingdong digital science and Xiao Jun is from Jingdong Logistics. Zhou Bowen previously led the cloud and AI business. After the disintegration of the “troika”, the three people were more or less affected at the business level.
Xu Ling worked in the headquarters of many banks, joined jd.com in 2013, and later participated in the establishment of jd.com together with Chen Shengqiang. Xu Ling led the team to launch Jingdong’s “white note”, “Beijing Agricultural Loan” and other financial products. After Jingdong finance transformed into Jingdong digital section, it integrated the original personal services and enterprise services, set up a digital finance group, and Xu Ling served as the person in charge.
Three months after Chen Shengqiang left office, Xu Ling was transferred to the CSO system of JD group as the head of the strategic planning department and reported to Liao Jianwen, the CSO (Chief Strategic Officer) of JD group, who is responsible for strategy and investment. In July, Liao Jianwen retired due to physical reasons. The CSO system strategy department was renamed the strategy Department of JD group, which was in the charge of Xu Ling and reported to Liu qiangdong. Other departments of CSO system are also adjusted.
After leaving office, Xu Ling sent a wechat circle of friends saying, “I have always regarded curiosity and courage as my life creed, but from these experiences during this period, I found that there is a great lack. Curiosity and courage are both doing more and will be unbalanced. I should add another one to myself. I chose reconciliation, which is more rational, thinking and letting go.”
In February 2017, Liu qiangdong said at the 2017 annual meeting of JD group that in the second 12 years, he hoped to transform all the business models established by JD in the first 12 years into a pure technology company.
Qiang Dong Liu
Liu qiangdong began to attract technical talents in many ways. In September of that year, Zhou Bowen joined JD and became the vice president of JD group. He was responsible for the relevant business of JD AI research and Platform Department and reported to Liu qiangdong.
Previously, Zhou Bowen worked at IBM’s headquarters in New York, served as the president of IBM research artificial intelligence Basic Research Institute, chief scientist of IBM Watson group and IBM outstanding engineer, and was responsible for IBM’s global strategy and implementation of basic research in artificial intelligence and deep learning.
In December 2019, jd.com set up a cloud and AI business department to integrate the three business departments of jd.com cloud, artificial intelligence and IOT. Zhou Bowen was responsible for reporting to Liu qiangdong. At the same time, a technical committee was established, with Zhou Bowen as the chairman.
With the establishment of Jingdong technology, Zhou Bowen’s scope of authority has been reduced. According to 36 krypton, Zhou Bowen wants to do something big, such as listing his business. After the merger, although his position is attached to the CEO of JD technology, he has no real job. After leaving Jingdong, Zhou Bowen will start a business in AI direction.
Among the three, Xiao Jun has been in JD for the longest time. He joined JD in 2007 and participated in the design of JD’s early front-end website and supply chain system. After that, X business unit, which was responsible for it, tried to build a set of intelligent warehousing and logistics system, including unmanned warehouse, unmanned aerial vehicle, unmanned car, unmanned supermarket, etc.
For example, for UAVs, Xiao Jun once told me, “the requirement of president Liu (Liu qiangdong) is that the cost center should turn to the profit center, that is, you can spend money without restriction and make money in the future.”
Compared with Xu Ling and Zhou Bowen, some people in Jingdong also felt that Xiao Jun left suddenly without any sign.
After the disintegration of the “troika”, some people left and some came up. Jingdong is forming a new management structure and governance system, and the real trader is still Liu qiangdong.
This is the case with the company, the iron boss and the flowing executive.
This article is from WeChat official account, ID:value_creation, and is published by Guo Zhaofei, 36 krypton.

Starbucks, the “coffee giant”, has been on the cusp of public opinion recently.
First, on February 14, the topic of “Starbucks customer service responded that the police were driven away from eating boxed lunch at the door” was posted on the microblog hot search, which aroused heated discussion among netizens; Two days later, on February 16, Starbucks made headlines again because of the price increase. According to the official app of Starbucks, the prices of many products, including American coffee and latte, were 1-2 yuan higher than before.
Starbucks was once known as the ancestor of the coffee industry. It has been in China for 23 years. It has more than 5000 stores in more than 200 cities across the country. China has become its second largest market in the world.
Starbucks store, picture / Starbucks China official microblog
However, the repeated negative social news and food safety problems have led many consumers to re-examine Starbucks. The coffee giant has slowly stepped down from the altar and lost its aura.
In addition, Starbucks has fallen into the situation of “surrounded by heroes” in China.
Before, Rui was lucky to save itself and rebirth, staged a reversal against the wind, and is becoming the most powerful challenger of Starbucks again. Later, new brands such as manner, m stand and three and a half tons rose rapidly with capital support. These local coffee brands attracted coffee users with accurate operation strategies, constantly introduced new products and flexible marketing methods, forming a trend of encirclement and suppression against Starbucks.
Starbucks’s “midlife crisis” has come.

Collapsed image of quality life

Since entering the Chinese market, Starbucks has always been bound with “high-end”. The high product price, unique coffee culture, atmosphere filled “third space”, coupled with the long-term publicity of the brand tone, have shaped the high-quality image of Starbucks in the eyes of consumers.
But today, the image of this quality of life is collapsing.
On February 13, a netizen tweeted that a Starbucks in Chongqing drove away the police who ate boxed lunch at the door and complained maliciously. In response, on the evening of February 14, Starbucks China issued a statement of apology through its official microblog. According to Starbucks China, at about 5 p.m. on February 13, four policemen came to the store, and the store arranged the policemen to eat in the outdoor guest area. Later, because other customers wanted to eat in the outdoor guest area, the store partner and the police involved caused communication misunderstandings due to improper words when coordinating seats.
Starbucks response, figure / Starbucks China official microblog
Subsequently, the incident continued to ferment on the social platform, and Starbucks’ response also caused a large number of netizens’ dissatisfaction. Some netizens said in the comment area that “this statement seems to be a misunderstanding? Not an apology”, “China can have no Starbucks, but not without the people’s police”. Some netizens Amway have set up other coffee brands, Some netizens expressed their dissatisfaction with Starbucks with practical actions. According to the boiling point video report, a local citizen found that someone in front of Starbucks sent white flowers and threw rotten eggs on the floor. When the cleaners wanted to clean, they were discouraged from cleaning.
On February 16, Starbucks ranked first on the hot search list due to the “price rise”. The prices of many products, including American coffee and latte, have increased by 1-2 yuan compared with the previous ones. Taking the American style most often purchased as an example, in Starbucks app, the price of large American style was 28 yuan, but now it has risen to 30 yuan. In this regard, Starbucks stakeholders said that the pricing was made after considering a number of factors such as operating costs. From February 16, 2022, Starbucks will slightly raise the prices of some drinks and food in its stores in mainland China.
It is worth noting that this is the second price increase of Starbucks in four months. The last time was in October 2021, and the price increase was mainly on the food side. Meanwhile, Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson said that due to inflation, rising labor costs and other factors, prices are expected to continue to rise in the coming months.
The price rise is superimposed with the public opinion crisis of “expelling the police”. No wonder consumers are targeting Starbucks. This is not the first time Starbucks has been deeply involved in the vortex of public opinion. Previously, Starbucks also caused many dissatisfaction due to the rejection of coins, food safety and other issues, which greatly reduced its corporate image.
In August 2020, an online blogger released a video in which the blogger planned to pay Starbucks orders with coins, which was rejected by store staff. The rejection of coins triggered a lot of heated discussion, pointing out that Starbucks was suspected of breaking the law. Subsequently, Starbucks China left a message in the comment area of the official wechat top article saying that there was no rule to reject coins and apologized for the poor experience of individual customers. However, at the bottom of the message, netizens said “this is really the most perfunctory explanation I have ever seen”.
In addition, at the end of last year, Starbucks was exposed to food safety problems such as using expired ingredients and selling overnight bread.
In December 2021, the Beijing News reported that when undercover in two Starbucks stores in Wuxi, they found the problem of touching the red line of food safety, including the expired use of a variety of ingredients. At the same time, the clerk would cover it up by tearing off or modifying the shelf life label; In addition, there are also problems in the store, such as wiping the trash can with the bar towel and continuing to sell overnight bread. In this regard, many netizens commented that “speechless, Starbucks uses expired raw materials for more than 30 cups?”.
Starbucks store, picture / Starbucks China official microblog
After events, the halo of Starbucks gradually faded. On the contrary, “arrogance” has become synonymous with Starbucks.
In the “2021 China Coffee online comment Mining Research Report” released by ncbd (food treasure Dictionary), Starbucks received as many as 56% of the bad comments in terms of services, of which “arrogance” appeared the most.
Obviously, the rising product prices, the “black history” of using expired food and the “arrogant” service attitude make the quality of Starbucks products completely inconsistent with the product image and high-end brand positioning, and are also wearing away the loyalty of consumers. Its carefully shaped image of quality life is gradually collapsing.

Starbucks is losing Chinese young people

Today, China is Starbucks’ second largest market in the world. According to the annual report of fiscal year 2021, the Chinese market contributes 12.7% of Starbucks’ global revenue, reaching US $3.69 billion. In the financial report, Starbucks specially stressed that “China is our fastest-growing market and our second largest market.”
For this reason, Starbucks closed its stores in other markets while opening stores in the Chinese market against the trend. The financial report shows that as of January 2, 2022, the number of Starbucks stores in the Chinese market has reached 5557 and is accelerating to enter more cities. In fiscal year 2022, Starbucks plans to have 6000 stores in China and 230 cities.
Behind the crazy expansion, Starbucks is trying to hold the world’s second-largest market, but to continue to stabilize its performance, Starbucks may face a more thorny problem - losing Chinese young people.
Figure / Starbucks China official microblog
On the one hand, Starbucks can dominate the global coffee industry by relying on classic products such as latte, cappuccino and furuibai. However, in recent years, it has not been able to capture the preferences of young consumers in terms of product innovation and marketing methods.
First of all, at the product level, Starbucks has no special hot models in new product research and development in recent years, and even has the situation of “rollover” of new products for many times. Up to now, the product that Starbucks can get out of the circle is xingbingle, which was launched many years ago.
In the summer of 2019, Starbucks launched eight “ice cream” series, but make complaints about the worst Starbucks. In the first half of 2020, Starbucks introduced other plant meat products such as lasagna and pasta through the concept of plant meat, but these products have also been blacklisted by many users. Even at the 50th anniversary of Starbucks in 2021, its new products are traditional classic series such as latte, cold extract and furuibai, without new actions.
On the contrary, Starbucks has been doing well around the brand. For example, in 2019, Starbucks launched the spring Limited “cat claw Cup”, and the price on the second-hand trading platform was even fried to nearly 1000 yuan. But it also inevitably raises questions, does this mean that Starbucks’ main business has begun to touch the ceiling?
On the other hand, with the upgrading of the demand of the new generation of consumers, the young consumer groups, the main force of consumption in the coffee market, have become more rational and mature, and gradually look at those once sought after foreign brands in a more objective way, including Starbucks, The younger generation of consumers have realized that Starbucks is only affordable coffee in many developed countries abroad, not “high-end” coffee.
If Starbucks was the only coffee choice for consumers in the past, then there are countless choices for consumers in today’s Chinese coffee market, and Starbucks is no longer the only one. According to the “Shanghai coffee consumption index” released by first finance and economics, Shanghai, as the main penetration place of coffee culture, has 6913 cafes, far more than New York, London and Tokyo. It is the city with the largest number of cafes in the world.
It can also be seen from the financial report data that the same store sales of Starbucks are continuing to decline. In the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2021, Starbucks’ same store sales in China decreased by 7%, while in the first quarter of fiscal year 2022, the decline expanded to 14%.
Most importantly, when young consumers are faced with a variety of coffee choices, the reference factors are no longer limited to the freshly ground coffee culture. Cost performance, personalization, convenience and quickness are all the needs of young people. No matter from which perspective, Starbucks is no longer the best choice for young people of this year.

New coffee players encircle Starbucks

Compared with Ruixing challenging Starbucks alone a few years ago, the competition in today’s coffee market is obviously more intense. Local coffee brands have sprung up, forming a trend of many new coffee players encircling Starbucks.
In 2021, the capital market accelerated the pace of investment in the coffee market, and the track is hot. Based on this, new coffee players are speeding up horse racing and enclosure.
According to the investment and financing data report of the five “new catering” tracks in 2021 released by qicha, the total amount of financing disclosure related to the domestic coffee industry was nearly 6 billion yuan in the first October of 2021. Popular brands such as sengine Yingji coffee, manner and M stand even got two or three rounds of financing in the first half of the year. In addition, there were three and a half, yongpu, algebraist New brands such as nowwa and Nova coffee are rising rapidly with the further boost of capital.
Overview of cash absorption of popular catering categories in October before 2021 / report on investment and financing data of five “new catering” tracks in 2021
In addition, many cross-border players are eyeing the coffee track. For example, China Post officially entered the coffee market. The post office coffee landed in Xiamen International Trade Building and officially opened on February 14.
All these make Starbucks face unprecedented challenges in China. More importantly, Ruixing is reborn through self-help and staged a reversal against the wind, and is becoming the most powerful Starbucks Challenger again.
At present, Starbucks has lost its proud throne of “the first number of stores”. As of January this year, Starbucks has 5557 stores, while Ruixing coffee has exceeded 5671 stores in the third quarter of 2021.
Secondly, Ruixing, who is good at using the Internet, is better than Starbucks in product innovation and marketing.
In order to meet the preferences of young consumers, Ruixing can create popular products repeatedly while maintaining the high-frequency update speed. In the internal letter released by Guo Jinyi, it was mentioned that in 2020, Ruixing launched 77 new ready-made drinks and 113 new ready-made drinks in 2021.
Among them, the “thick milk latte” launched in 2020 is regarded as the heaviest new product to save Ruixing coffee in the industry; The “raw coconut latte” launched in 2021 is even more difficult to find. According to the data released by Ruixing’s official wechat, the “raw coconut latte” has created a single month sales volume of raw coconut series products of more than 10 million cups in June, refreshing the sales record of Ruixing’s new products; On the basis of raw coconut latte, Ruixing further developed and launched the “velvet latte”. Only nine days after the launch, the sales volume exceeded 2.7 million cups, becoming another popular model.
Ruixing had a financial fraud crisis, which is its “pillar of shame”, but also forced it to live on its own blood. Therefore, in terms of marketing, Ruixing also works very hard to find the preferences of young people.
In the summer of 2021, lilushu was selected by Ruixing as the recommender of Ruixing ice coffee due to the fire of the talent show “Creation Camp 2021”, and launched the first cooperative advertising film “Ruixing yyds”. Ruixing used lilushu’s own social topic gene to play with topics such as “raw coconut latte never leaves work” and continued to market products.
Recently, Ruixing is betting on Zhonggu ailing. In the sports event of the Winter Olympic Games, Ruixing attracts countless eyes through marketing means. On February 8, Gu ailing won China’s third gold medal in the women’s Freestyle Ski platform diving final of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games. Ruixing immediately sent microblogging congratulations and launched a 4.8% discount coupon to invite users to “drink to the champion”. This wave of marketing has also won a good market response for Ruixing. Many customized products of Ruixing Gu ailing were once sold out. Drinking a cup of customized Ruixing of Gu ailing at one time has become a way for many netizens to celebrate.
In addition to Ruixing, the newly emerging concept of manner’s main boutique coffee is gradually moving from a 2 ㎡ small store in Shanghai to the whole country. Manner avoided the direct competition with Starbucks and other brands by choosing a location adjacent to Starbucks but at a lower price than Starbucks, attracted more heavy coffee users, and made manner succeed in breaking the circle among a number of coffee brands in a small but refined mode.
Manner coffee store, figure / manner coffee official microblog
More importantly, the small and refined manner has good revenue. According to public information, since the accelerated expansion in 2019, manner has become the fourth brand in the number of chain boutique coffee stores in China, and all stores are directly operated. According to latepost, an investor said that manner’s revenue in 2020 was 200-300 million yuan, with a net profit margin of more than 10%, of which all stores in Shanghai were profitable. Meanwhile, manner’s gross profit margin is more than 50%, which is similar to that of Starbucks.
With the rise of boutique coffee brands such as manner and M stand, Starbucks is losing ground step by step under the encirclement and suppression of domestic coffee brands through different playing methods. The coffee track is surging, and a new round of fierce battle is about to be staged. Can Starbucks still sit in the position of “big brother”?
(the first picture of this article comes from Starbucks China’s official microblog.)
This article is from WeChat official account, ID:yikecaijing, and is published by the 36 krypton.