Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Late one night in 2019, Anke Innovation (hereinafter referred to as Anke) CEO Yang Meng suddenly woke up from a nightmare.

Yang Meng dreamed that he was sitting in a ramshackle spaceship with a spark in the engine while his colleagues were sleeping. No matter how much he called for help, no one answered. At 4: 00 in the morning, Yang Meng talked about the dream in the Anke senior management group, but no one responded after waiting for a long time.

Early the next morning, Yang Meng, who had not slept for half a night, came to the company and saw Zhao Dongping, the second-in-command of Anke, who was busy, and repeated the dream he had in the early morning. Seeing Zhao Dongping, Yang Meng put her hand on his shoulder and said, "guess who I can't wake up even though I yell in my dream?" that's you! "

Zhao Dongping put down his work, spread his hands and said helplessly, "I'm not sleeping. I'm sending an e-mail." Yang Meng sat down next to Zhao Dongping and talked about her anxiety and the problems Anke faces at this stage. There is only one theme: it will be too late if the company does not transform.

Zhao Dongping paused after hearing what he wanted to say, but in the end he said nothing but was silent for a long time. Although he had many worries, he chose to trust the man in front of him. For some time since then, Yang Meng led Zhao Dongping, chatting with executives two-on-one, lobbying one by one to talk about transformation.

At the beginning, Anke's senior management team, like Zhao Dongping, had a lot of doubts and could not fully understand that it was the best stage of the company's development. There was no rival in the charging category in the market, and the listing was inevitable.

What reforms are proposed at this time? Is it too early? Seeing everyone's reaction like this, Yang Meng talked about the reasons for the reform over and over again, and gradually many people changed their minds.

By the end of this year, Anke broke up the glory and began a new journey in terms of organizational innovation. At this time, it is exactly ten years since the establishment of the company.

It originated from the Amazon dividend and bet on portable battery's time to go back to 2010 ten years ago.

Yang Meng, who also works as a search engineer at Google, found that although Amazon is very popular, many people don't know how to sell goods. He Li, who was still a girlfriend at this time, did not have a suitable job. After discussion, they decided to try the water first to see what was going on.

Yang Meng found Wu Wenlong, her younger brother at Peking University, and the two spent two months writing a website that could automatically grab online goods and move them to Amazon, and finally the merchants delivered the goods themselves. After running the website, it can earn more than $1 million a month, which is much higher than Google's annual salary of $300,000 to $400,000.

Yang Meng joined Google as an intern in 2006, rose to two levels in 2008, and won Google's top award, "Founder's Award." But he didn't get a promotion until he left.

Thinking of this, Yangmeng resigned from Google in 2011 and returned to her hometown of Changsha, Hunan, to concentrate on starting a business and founded Anke. Anke achieved monthly sales of $1 million that year and ranked first in the portable battery category of Amazon in the United States the following year.

Yang Meng

The success of the first battle is inseparable from Yang Meng's poaching of Google colleague Zhao Dongping.

In the early days of her business, Yang Meng looked everywhere for people. Gu Xuemei, an old colleague, recommended him to talk to Zhao Dongping. Come and go, the two became the best entrepreneurial partners.

Zhao Dongping is well-known in the industry and is one of the top 10 managers in the first Google, at least two levels higher than Yangmeng at Google. Moreover, he has been in contact with overseas enterprises for a long time and has a good understanding of domestic and foreign markets. At that time, Google would fly a special plane every year to invite more than a dozen employees and their families to visit a small island in South America for a week to enjoy "imperial" treatment, including Zhao Dongping.

At that time, when Google changed its coach in China, Zhao Dongping did not match the new boss's "temperament" and gradually gave birth to a retreat. Keeping an eye on the sea, he has been looking at new opportunities.

Yang Meng was not only chasing Zhao Dongping, sources revealed that Aoji also extended an olive branch to Zhao Dongping, and also gave his founder's offer. After careful evaluation, Zhao Dongping felt that he had a better match with Yangmeng and finally decided to join Anke. He also brought Zhang Shanfeng and Gao Tao to Anke, who later became the mainstay of Anke.

Zhao Dongping

Zhao Dongping knows how to operate, Yang Meng knows products, and the cooperation between the two can be called perfect.

Like most foreign traders, Anke poured cheap Chinese-made goods to the United States in the early days. With the introduction of $30-40 batteries, Anke earned its first bucket of gold. At this time to catch up with the outbreak of smartphones, the company found that portable battery as the largest accessory must have a huge demand.

Amazon attaches great importance to the evaluation of product quality, and Yang Meng has been staring at the comment area. He found that the review area has a lot of professional evaluation content, even more professional than the product manager. These contents are of great significance to Anke.

In order to improve the efficiency of product selection, Yangmeng has specially developed a system to judge users' needs for products by grabbing and analyzing user evaluations. This also plays a key role for Anke to move towards the road of self-research.

In this way, portable battery's own competitors are not many, coupled with Anke's emphasis on product quality, the company's growth rate is very fast.

With regard to the story of the rise of Anke, it is rumored that Zebao is the guide of Anke. It is said that Yang Meng at the time of Google met Sun Caijin, the founder of Zebao while playing ball. Sun Caijin also graduated from Peking University, several years older than Yang Meng, and the two have a lot in common. Later, Sun Caijin began to do business with Yang Meng, and the two companies shared suppliers.

But this is more of a legend spread in rivers and lakes.

From improved products to omni-channel, Anke became rich from Amazon families, but unlike the branding model of many Amazon sellers, Yangmeng has always wanted to be a brand.

For the sake of performance-to-price ratio, the production requirements of most branded products reach 80% of the original factory, and it is enough to control the cost at 40-50%. Even if it is removed by Amazon due to quality problems, it can continue to sell on a new page.

This approach has a remarkable short-term effect, but it is difficult to increase the gross profit margin in the long run. As a result, many sellers continued to expand new categories to fill the growth gap. On the other hand, brand logic should be refined and deep in a single category.

The quality of the sticker is unstable after all, coupled with the continuous price war can not afford, the company's genes do not match the traditional foreign trade, Yang Mengxin horizontal, directly chose self-research.

In 2012, Yang Meng and six or seven people formed an R & D team and came to Shenzhen from Changsha to explore the R & D path. A year later, Anke's self-developed products went on the market one after another, and all the products sold in 2016 were switched to self-research.

Apart from the price, what the market needs is a strong sense of design, high quality products, the key step is to improve.

R & D engineers will test, analyze and improve all the finished products and raw materials on the market one by one. For example, if the loss of most rechargeable plugs is 500, Anke has increased to 1000. Then through the user evaluation system to understand the real situation of the product, the user put forward the fever, plug break, compatibility and other problems, the R & D team directly changed to the problem disappeared.

For a period of time, Yang Meng and hundreds of engineers cooped up in the laboratory every day to study where the heat dissipation was bad and where the loss rate was too high. This increases the cost by 10%, but increases the price by 20%.

Coupled with outstanding achievements in the rechargeable category, Anke has secured the leading position in the rechargeable category and has been strongly supported by Amazon officials.

After 2015, Amazon's customer service manager approached Anke to discuss cooperation, according to sources. Anke needs to maintain its brand strength and provide a steady stream of quality products, and Amazon provides multiple green channels for traffic. So for a while, all the rechargeable pages on Amazon were filled with Anke.

But if you want to be a truly global brand, Anke can't be limited to Amazon.

After 2016, Anke began to explore off-site marketing, marketing on YouTube, corresponding to opening experience stores in various channels. Anke, which completely launched the brand, has a great reputation. By the end of this year, Anke's portable battery appeared on the shelves of more than 3000 Wal-Mart stores in the United States, and since then, Anke has gained a foothold in the domestic market.

After winning the offline market in the United States, Anke went global.

Through market research, the Middle East team made a series of localization measures, such as customizing gold charging wires for Tuhao, opening offline stores in the local CBD, poaching people with Huawei and other large companies' background and channel resources to vigorously push channels, and so on.

After years of efforts, Anke's offline revenue has reached 40%. At a time when Anke is committed to brand cultivation and internationalization, many cross-border big sellers are busy betting profits with capital.

Qianhai Patuxun was busy betting against cross-border profits from 2015 to 2018. In 2018, a tree was acquired by Tianze Information. In the same year, Tongtuo was also acquired by Huading shares and bet on profits. Zebao also carried out mergers and acquisitions with Xinghui Precision. These companies have no time to be offline and give Anke a lot of opportunities.

At this point, Anke has become an international brand in the real sense. From 2016 to 2018, Anke's revenue reached 2.5 billion yuan, 3.9 billion yuan and 5.23 billion yuan, completely widening the gap with its competitors.

Continue to expand new categories, Anke tried to tear off the charging label consumer electronics companies, it is difficult to rely on a single category to the end.

After all, the growth of the rechargeable category is limited, and in order to find new categories to sustain business growth, Anke has thought of a lot of ways. In the past few years, Anke has successively entered the fields of TWS headphones, intelligent speakers, projectors, outdoor power and so on. In addition, Anke has been involved in the research and development of complex categories since 2016.

Yang Meng brought in Zhu Fanghao, who is not only skilled, but also an important driving force in the process of Anke's reform.

Zhu Fanghao has been involved in smartphone research and development for nearly 17 years. As an "old mobile phone man", he served as president of 360 mobile phones and president of Coolpad Internet and e-commerce from 2000 to 2016.

After years of ups and downs, Zhu Fanghao has a deep understanding of consumer electronics. The reason why I chose to join Anke is also very simple. At that time, Zhu Fanghao felt that the development of smartphones had entered a bottleneck and wanted to look for new growth opportunities. Yang Meng's sentence "carry forward the beauty of Chinese intelligence" moved him and joined Anke at the end of 2016 to become the leader of the complex category "Zhixin Business Department".

Zhu Fanghao

However, after joining Anke, Zhu Fanghao's day was not smooth.

Due to the large initial investment in complex categories, the performance of the department lost money in the first three years, and several categories of research and development were either eliminated by the function of smartphones or poor response by the market. The security camera developed in the second half of 2017 was among the top four in Europe and the United States by 2020 and ranked first in Australia and Western Europe by 2021. The performance of the department gradually flattened out from losses. Zhu Fanghao took a breath.

Despite stepping into the complex category early, a "major event" occurred in 2021, which made Yangmeng aware of the bottleneck in the company's development.

In 2021, several major domestic sweeping robot companies went overseas one after another, which caught Anke by surprise. The current situation is that Anke has made few transactions in the domestic market, and its reputation is far less than that of Corworth, Stone Technology, Cloud Whale and other companies. This matter has attracted a great deal of attention within Anke.

In fact, Anke entered the field in 2016, targeting overseas and targeting iRobot. The first few years have been very smooth. Anke has ranked in the top three in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, Japan and other countries by virtue of the mature playing style in overseas markets and the market share of many models.

In the face of the fierce coming from domestic manufacturers, Yang Meng kept reflecting. He believes that the core reason is that the company's investment is not enough. According to public data, Yang Meng calculates that some competitors spend 200 million yuan a year on floor-sweeping robots alone.

When it comes to deeper reasons, Yang Meng admits that Anke's steps are still too conservative. In addition to sweeping robots, the development of other new categories is also general. Some of them are lost, and the volume of the successful ones is not as high as that of charging.

What on earth is the problem?

From the shallow sea to the deep sea, to climb through the huge waves to return to the original choice, the basic logic of Anke's entry into the charging track is that this incremental market has a lot of room for development.

At the same time, as a product with short R & D cycle and long life cycle, the threshold for entry is low and the profit is fast. If divided according to the market, such as portable battery, these products with light R & D, small market share and various categories are collectively referred to as shallow sea products; on the contrary, products such as smartphones, computers, televisions, etc., with heavy R & D, large market share and few categories, are deep-sea products.

Anke started out with shallow sea products. However, the reality is that with the development of technology, some products have gradually changed from the shallow sea to the deep sea.

For example, the floor-sweeping robot is no longer a much-criticized product that changes direction by "bumping". It adds a lot of mechanical and structural engineering parts, which requires a lot of manpower, energy and money, and the requirements for team research and development have also become higher. This means that Anke has to go into the deep sea step by step.

As a product company, Anke's biggest advantage is that it relies on the brand advantage brought by product stability, not technological subversive innovation. It is mentioned earlier that the floor-sweeping robot has been surpassed, and the problem lies in the insufficient investment in research and development. Even trickier, Anke's rivals are startups that focus on a single category. If you want to follow the glory of the rechargeable category, it is very difficult to achieve the TOP level of each category.

Anke's development bottleneck, in addition to the above-mentioned technology research and development investment is not enough, but also reflected in the limitations of the organizational structure. Zhu Fanghao has a deep experience of this.

Zhu's Zhixin team, which involves many complex categories, has a long R & D cycle. The original organizational structure of each department is independent, everything has to be done all over again, and even refined to the basic manpower, legal affairs, operation and other parts, which consumes a lot of departments. It is also difficult for the team to recruit all-round talents who are highly skilled, have an international vision, and happen to understand e-commerce, marketing and legal affairs. other departments of the company have their own assessment indicators, so the support they can provide is very limited.

Because you have to do everything by yourself, the team develops slowly. This virtually delayed Anke's march toward the deep sea.

Not only is Zhixin limited by organizational ability, but also the failure of outdoor power supply is reflected here. Yang Meng believes that this is mainly due to her limited management radius.

Anke laid out this category as early as 2015, but so far it is far from the limelight, Zhenghao Innovation, which was founded in 2017 and is the team of Xinjiang. Zhenghao entered the Chinese market in 2020 and opened official flagship stores on major e-commerce platforms. After the completion of round B financing in 2021, it is valued at $1 billion, with the latest round reaching $2 billion and entering the quasi-IPO phase.

For a long time, Yang Meng has always been at the forefront of the product. With the development of the company, Anke has set foot in no less than 20 categories, and his energy is limited after all.

In the quarterly OKR meetings from 2019 to 2019, Yang Meng starts the meeting at 9 a.m. every day and discusses the products with each project leader one by one. In the back, he really couldn't stand it, and the rest of the categories had to be dealt with by his subordinates. as a result, the effect was very average, and the outdoor power supply was inside.

When it comes to the management radius of managers, there is still a story about the establishment of Zhenghao innovation. Wang Tao, the founder of Dajiang, is also working on the first-line products, but he only grasps two models a year, and gives the surplus to the bottom of the people. And power supply is not the core business in DJI.

There is a saying that, due to "undervalued, slow progress", the head of the power supply had to lead the team to run away to start a business. This incident also made Wang Tao reflect on his bottleneck in management.

The road to political reform has a long way to go. 2019 was the most difficult year for Yangmeng.

According to outsiders, Anke's figures were very good this year, with revenue of 6.655 billion yuan and net profit growth of 68.85%. However, he has been nervous.

The development of the charging category is gradually falling into a bottleneck, and the company urgently needs to find a new breakthrough. For a period of time, Yang Meng was so worried that he couldn't sleep every night.

The road to corporate transformation is indeed on the agenda, but in which direction should it turn? This is another headache.

One day Yang Meng asked the executives to talk about reform, and Zhu Fanghao handed him a book called "Huawei can, so can you" for him to read first. No one thought that Yang Meng was a treasure. She not only read the book many times, but also solemnly recommended it to the team.

To some extent, Anke's change draws on the experience of Huawei. In order to reform, Yang Meng also asked more than a dozen consulting companies to find a way. However, the answer is that "choosing us will reduce the risk of business failure." This kind of answer could not convince Yang Meng, so he decided to do it himself.

Yang Meng dragged Zhao Dongping, Zhu Fanghao and others to discuss how to change it over and over again.

When it comes to advantages, Anke has been close to the market, years of accumulated experience, a product from research and development to new, there is a very mature methodology, coupled with brand accumulation, open up the supply chain, the overall efficiency is much higher than that of peers, the product iteration speed is very fast.

When it comes to disadvantages, executives, including Yang Meng, are still very limited in energy, consume a lot of heavy research and development, and need more support. Zhu Fanghao is in the complex category, and his feelings are the deepest.

After many rounds of discussion, everyone unanimously decided that since it is difficult to recruit generalists and the management radius of executives is limited, it is better to let go and precipitate the ability of the company in the whole organization.

Anke referred to the change model of Huawei, Ali, Google, etc., and concluded that in the first stage of the reform, senior management should devolve decision-making power and resources to manage the architecture, and each product line is the smallest business unit. the person in charge should take good care of the corresponding category.

Accordingly, the department functions are divided into three parts, BP is responsible for business problems, COE expert center is responsible for solving problems, SCC shared service center is responsible for daily trivial work extraction, scheduling and so on.

Therefore, each department of Anke is assigned to the functions of human resources, data analysis, process management and so on, and the assessment index of the person in charge of the functional business has become a talent who can train how many people can take charge of it.

The biggest gain is Zhu Fanghao's Zhixin Business Department.

After the reform, he and his team are only responsible for innovation and R & D, and the efficiency has been greatly improved. In less than a year, the department has hatched more than 20 categories, and its revenue has exceeded 4 billion yuan, making it the third largest category in parallel with charging and audio.

In fact, the reform has also had a big impact on Anke.

On the one hand, after the listing of the company, some of the core backbone of the charging category chose to leave; on the other hand, the strategic plan to return to China to seek growth did not win the expected growth.

Starting in 2020, Anke's growth began to slow, with net profit growing at 18.7%, according to the data. Anke currently has a market capitalization of only about 30 billion yuan.

By contrast, SHEIN, which was once a cross-border Gemini with Anke, grew rapidly in 2019, with both GMV and market capitalization gradually opening up. It is rumored that Anke and SHEIN discussed the stock swap around 2016, although they finally gave up because of the slightly complicated operation, which shows their appreciation of each other's team.

In response to Leifeng.com 's question of "what do you think of SHEIN", Yang Meng leaned forward, paused for a moment and said: even if she had to do it all over again, Anke would not choose the path of SHEIN.

Therefore, if you return to envy, Yangmeng will still choose the way you want to go.

Yang Meng's colleagues and friends tell us that today's Yang Meng is much more tolerant than it was then. At that time, Yang Meng had a strong penchant for product cleanliness and had a problem with the rampage of white-brand products produced by other cross-border sellers, but today he is very tolerant.

Yang Meng took the initiative to tell us about his previous three experiences. The first was when he participated in the Mathematical Olympiad, the second was when he was a student at Peking University, and the third was in Google.

When I took part in the Mathematical Olympiad in high school, I got a good score of 150 in the first joint exam, but only got 0 in the second joint exam, which directly lost the opportunity to go to the provincial training team.

When I was studying at Peking University, everyone was studying hard on the subject of mathematical analysis. It was very hard to stay up all night for a year. As a result, a classmate in Hubei got a full score of 100 after reading only one day before the exam.

While working at Google, Yang Meng met Jeff Dean, a technology giant. As an academician of the American Academy of Engineering, Jeff Dean is known as Google brain and can be said to be the founder of Google technology. After working together for a year, Yang Meng found that Jeff had a particularly strong long-term memory, as if he had a mobile library in his head, and his skills could not surpass him at all.

These three experiences let Yang Meng know what is meant by others and that some things can not be achieved through hard work. Obviously, the problems encountered by Anke today also made Yang Meng start to calm down again.

Today's Yang Meng is calm and determined. This is the pathfinder that Anke needs to cross the trough.

It is written later that Anke is now ushering in the second phase of reform.

This year, Anke set up a "R & D laboratory", Zhu Fanghao and other core technology backbone coefficient is listed, the aim is to precipitate the core R & D capabilities in the company's organization.

Facing forward, Anke will return to outdoor power, while also increasing investment in intelligent cleaning products.

The former as the foundation of the company, Anke has many advantages; the latter comes more from the industry itself.

Yang Meng also imagined the future with us. In Yang Meng's view, the future belongs to the robot company. If Anke does not have the underlying technology of the robot, it can only become a second-rate company. While robot human products need to be updated iteratively, AI intelligence and other technologies will bring a great change to the traditional home appliances. So there is room for growth for ten years, and there is a good chance for Anke.

For Anke, however, there are still two questions to answer: where on earth is the boundary of shallow sea products companies? When will Anke find the next "explosive"? Only time can give the answer. Fortunately, the post-80s Yang Meng is still very young.

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