Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

Recently, Mogujie released his unaudited financial report for the third quarter of fiscal year 2020. According to the financial report, as of December 31, 2019, Mogujie's GMV was 6.299 billion yuan, an increase of 8.0% over the same period last year. Overall, GMV growth has not changed much, compared with the mainstream platform, this growth can be said to have stalled.

However, Mogujie's live broadcast business has become the biggest focus of this quarter's financial report. Mogujie's investment in e-commerce live broadcast over the past year has finally borne fruit, and the strong growth of the live broadcast business speaks for itself. According to the financial report, the live broadcast business GMV reached 3.352 billion yuan, an increase of 99.5% over the same period last year. For the first time, live broadcast business GMV accounted for more than half of the total GMV of the platform, reaching 53.2%.

Over the past year, Mogujie has made a lot of moves in the field of e-commerce live broadcasting, from anchor service to supply chain upgrading, and then to online and offline linkage to enhance the matching of people and goods, gradually increasing the tilt to live resources. According to the Q3 financial report, Mogujie has added about 5000 anchors and can watch live content for more than 3800 hours a day, an increase of 11.8% over the previous quarter. The live broadcast business MAU (average number of monthly mobile active users) increased by 132.7% compared with the same period last year.

In addition, the number of active buyers from live streaming business on Mogujie's platform increased by 32.4% year-on-year to 3.2 million. It is not difficult to see from these data that e-commerce live streaming has indeed brought new changes and new vitality to Mogujie.

But will this change and vitality continue in Mogujie? Will Mogujie, who has slightly improved by relying on e-commerce live streaming, usher in a new turnaround? There is a great deal of uncertainty in these.

From exploding to going astray

Mogujie, who suffered for several years in 2018, was finally listed at Nijiao at a price of US $14, but Mogujie, who touted himself as the "number one Chinese stock in fashion technology", did not make a comeback.

On its first day of trading, it continued to open at a low of $12 a share, falling as low as $11.58 per share. After a difficult close, the market capitalization on the day was $1.497 billion, less than half the valuation three years ago.

The situation of opening high and going low contrasts sharply with the brilliance of Mogujie. When Mogujie was founded in 2011, it was still very dazzling. By providing fashion information sharing and shopping guide services for young women, it soon became an influential fashion content community in China.

Mogujie once released a figure that said that it was originally scheduled to reach 100000 DAU at the end of 2011, but it was close to 200000 in April of that year, then set the year-end target to 500000, and finally reached 1 million, which is enough to show the popularity of Mogujie in the early stage.

But the good times did not last long. Mogujie, who had been a traffic "porter" for Taobao in September 2013, was mercilessly blocked by Ali amid rising conversion rates and rising performance. It was this ban that directly led Mogujie to transform e-commerce and fell into a passive position in development.

Helpless mushroom street line their own e-commerce platform, but this did not bring a turnaround for Mogujie, on the contrary, due to the lack of platform system and suppressed by other platforms, the development of e-commerce platform is not smooth. In its online "Singles Day" debut in that year, the results were a mess, and then it was "encircled and suppressed" by Ali again. Alipay unilaterally terminated the service to Mogujie.

This blocked almost all the lives of Mogujie, and since then Mogujie began the fancy road of "self-help". At the e-commerce level, Mogujie merged with business-like Meili in 2016, launched a live broadcast business in the same year, tried to use big data to provide wearing advice to users in 2017, and Mogujie, who suffered for five years in 2018, finally went public.

But at this time, Mogujie has already forgotten his original intention, do not know whether he is a community or e-commerce. And the industry's definition of Mogujie has long been very vague. To express it in an imaginative way, it is a community e-commerce live broadcast complex that integrates pictures and texts, short videos, live streaming, beauty, clothing, funny, stars and other contents, but the effect is not satisfactory. This is obviously not suitable for Mogujie's development path.

When live e-commerce made a comeback last year, Mogujie, who was lost, seemed to see hope, so she focused on the live business again, but it was too late for Mogujie, who had lost a lot of blood.

Live broadcast is not a life-saving cure.

After entering 2019, e-commerce giants such as Taobao and pinduoduo have increased their e-commerce live streaming one after another, and their strong brands, categories, resources, traffic and other advantages are far from being matched by Mogujie.

In 2016, it was the tuyere of live streaming, and e-commerce live streaming also sprang up at this time. 2016 is also the starting point of Mogujie's live broadcast business, but unfortunately, Mogujie did not seize the opportunity to promote it to the core business direction, let alone fully connect it with e-commerce.

Today, although Mogujie has improved slightly under the help of the e-commerce live broadcast trend, but under the oppression of the giant, the possibility of the live broadcast business rescuing Mogujie from suffering is still slim.

According to the financial report, Mogujie's total revenue in the third quarter of 2020 was 270 million yuan, of which commission income was 141 million yuan, down 19.6 percent from the same period last year, while marketing service revenue fell 44.9 percent to 72.46 million yuan. From the perspective of income structure, the proportion of commission income has further increased to 52.30%, mainly due to the shift of the company's strategic focus to the development of live broadcast business, resulting in a reduction in long tail merchants' expenditure on marketing services.

At the same time, the financial report shows that Mogujie's active users continue to decline. In the third quarter of fiscal year 2020, Mogujie had 26.6 million annual active users, down 22.90% from the same period last year. There has been a month-on-month decline for two consecutive quarters, which means that the loss of Mogujie users is serious.

Compared with 60 million at its peak, its users have already lost more than half. You know, the number of active users is the most important indicator of e-commerce platform. Mogujie as an e-commerce platform, traffic is the basis of its performance growth, the decline of active users will directly lead to revenue growth in trouble, which will be a vicious circle.

After tossing about for such a long time, Mogujie has been in a state of loss and has not changed the status quo. According to the financial report, Mogujie realized a net profit loss of 1.635 billion yuan in the third quarter of 2020, down 803.31% from the same period last year, and the loss gap further widened.

Although the continuous increase in the live streaming business made Mogujie's GMV increase by 8.0% compared with the same period last year, it still failed to break Mogujie's own difficulties in obtaining users and continuing to lose money.

And Mogujie has no advantage in doing live broadcast business. Compared with the comprehensive advantages of Ali, JD.com, pinduoduo and other platforms, Mogujie appears to be lack of resources and backward technology, and its development resistance can be imagined. Therefore, Mogujie, who continues to make efforts in the live broadcast business, has not been able to bring substantial performance growth through the live broadcast.

In addition, the company's research and development expenses, market expenses and management expenses have always been in a high-start state, operating cash flow UR continues to be negative, its own hematopoietic ability is weak, almost entirely rely on capital transfusion. Mogujie is weak in fundamentals and has been unlikable in the capital market. Coupled with the continued turmoil in the capital market, the problem Mogujie is facing is even more serious.

Obviously, for Mogujie, chasing tuyere will not solve the real problem. Even so, on January 20, Mogujie officially released his live broadcast report card in 2019 and live broadcast plans for 2020, which will still be oriented to beauty, home, medical beauty and other categories in the future. however, it is difficult to change Mogujie's situation of "getting up early in the morning and catching up for an evening collection" in the live broadcast field, and it is even more difficult to rely on live broadcast to recreate glory.

The future is more difficult.

From the perspective of the overall environment of the entire e-commerce industry, Mogujie's bad situation, in addition to his own strategic problems, there are also some external environmental impact.

The hot development of e-commerce has been in China for more than a decade, and it is obvious that the dividend period of online traffic has peaked in recent years. Now the whole industry is talking about new retail and sinking the market, which is very disadvantageous to the weak vertical e-commerce.

When Ali, pinduoduo, JD.com and so on fight for customers, online traffic has basically been carved up by these giant e-commerce companies. There is no background, no big backers of small platforms or vertical e-commerce traffic share is even smaller.

In addition to the lack of comparability in terms of volume, in terms of prices, social e-commerce companies that mainly hit the sinking market, such as pinduoduo, Juhuashuo and Jingxi, have also killed their prices to the lowest in the network. I'm afraid it's not easy to save yourself through a cost-effective route. In this track, the situation of vertical e-commerce survival is becoming more and more serious.

At the same time, new competitors with their own traffic, such as Xiao Hongshu, Douyin and Kuaishou, entered the game, which further intensified Mogujie's external competition. Another question worth pondering is, is the money in the female market still so easy to earn? At the moment, this is open to question.

Take Xiaohongshu as an example, the "recommended" community Xiaohongshu has gathered 250 million users, but this super traffic pool has not been able to get through the profit closed loop of e-commerce. After accepting Ali's investment, Xiaohongshu started a new round of commercial transformation, focusing on the advertising business.

Mogujie, whose positioning is becoming more and more blurred, is more and more difficult to retain customers as before, and various attempts have not found a breakthrough. under the current e-commerce pattern, with the entry of various new platforms, the chance that Mogujie can turn against the wind is even slimmer, and the road ahead can only be more difficult.

(official account of Liu Kuang / tr. by Phil Newell) ID:liukuang110

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