In addition to Weibo, there is also WeChat
Please pay attention
WeChat public account
Shulou
2025-01-22 Update From: SLTechnology News&Howtos shulou NAV: SLTechnology News&Howtos > IT Information >
Share
Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--
Asked if Meituan was expanding without borders, Wang Xing said: "I don't think we should set limits on ourselves. As long as the core is clear-who do we serve? what services do we provide to them? we will keep trying all kinds of business."
Later, the development of things is also true. Focusing on the business development in the field of life services, Meituan has always regarded "high frequency driving low frequency" as the underlying logic of growth. Wang Xing himself also wants to build Meituan into a super life platform.
A few years ago, this really seemed like a very attractive good business. According to data from iResearch Consulting, China's local living service market will reach 19.5 trillion yuan in 2020 and will reach 35.3 trillion yuan by 2025. But now it is different from the past. On the one hand, with the launch of new businesses such as Meituan selection and Meituan buying vegetables, Meituan's pressure on the cost side has increased year by year; on the other hand, Baidu, Douyin and Alibaba have entered one after another, making the competition in the industry increasingly fierce.
In terms of financial data, the addition of the two has directly led to the decline of Meituan's growth engine in the past two years.
Correspondingly, there are a lot of questions from the secondary market, and they don't seem to like the new business that Meituan continues to open up. Since 2021, Meituan's share price has fluctuated all the way down, falling by more than 60%. Despite the environmental factors that the Internet as a whole is in a revaluation, Meituan himself has not given the market enough confidence in business development. so much so that in August this year, foreign media also exposed the news that major shareholders had sold their shares.
Meituan is experiencing the biggest challenge in history. Although Wang Xing has always stressed the need for long-term patience and takes Amazon's long-term investment as an example, compared with Meituan, the latter has a larger membership system and a high degree of membership stickiness, which makes it comfortable on the road of business diversification. Meituan, on the other hand, did not go smoothly on the road of building a super life platform.
01. The super living platform makes Meituan carry a heavy burden on the front users is Meituan's core resources. From group buying to takeout, Meituan has always pursued a market strategy of small profits and quick turnover to achieve the rapid growth of users. However, with the disappearance of the Internet demographic dividend, the core of the problem is how to extend the lifetime value of users. Judging from the publicly disclosed data, Meituan's annual active user growth is gradually slowing down, of which, the number of users in the second quarter of this year decreased by about 8.2 million compared with the first quarter.
Meituan transaction user number and its year-on-year change trend chart source self-made and the number of increasingly saturated users correspond to the intensification of competition among peers. For example, in August this year, Douyin announced that it would join hands with ele.me to enter the local life racetrack. With the help of Douyin's strong traffic system, the unique competitive advantage of the "user-rider-merchant" tripartite growth of Meituan takeout has become difficult to maintain.
The reason is that Meituan's plate is too big, and the river and mountain laid down by the iron army in the past has put a sharp increase in the pressure on its operation. With reference to the business logic of high-frequency band and low-frequency band, when the high-frequency business is declining, it is bound to have an impact on the low-frequency business. At this stage, Meituan's main source of profit is still the arrival, hotel and tourism business, which means that the deceleration of takeout business indirectly weakens Meituan's cash flow capacity.
Therefore, in the past two years, Meituan has been constantly trying to develop new incremental business to maintain the past growth. For example, Meituan was launched in 2020, when community group buying was once considered a new tuyere, and Meituan also shifted his strategic focus, but the reality was not as expected.
As Meituan preferably plays the quality card and is located at the middle and high-end user level of first-and second-tier cities, Meituan not only increases the input cost of supply chain, but also misses the sinking market with the greatest demand for community group buying. According to the financial report, in 2020, Meituan's new business revenue totaled 27.2 billion yuan, with an investment of 38.1 billion yuan. By 2021, although the revenue from new business increased to 50.2 billion yuan, the cost soared to 88.6 billion yuan.
After two consecutive years of exploring losses in new business, Meituan realized the limitations of the community group buying business. Later, Meituan changed direction and decided to dig deep into the market and make use of the supply chain laid down by the community group buying in the early stage. trying to combine the rider network of takeout business to develop real-time retail. This correct decision temporarily relieved Meituan, which showed that Meituan's loss fell by about 75 per cent in the second quarter of this year compared with the same period a year earlier.
According to the estimation of Zheshang Securities, by 2025, the real-time retail scale will exceed 700 billion, and the CAGR will reach 28%, which has a broad space for development. At that time, Meituan will be able to achieve rapid development by virtue of the rider network that has been operated for many years. But the problem is also thorny, similar to community group buying, the real-time retail track has a large number of players and the competition is more fierce. In the face of the joint competition of Douyin + ele.me and JD.com + Dada, Meituan, who grew up under the picture-text interaction system, is not so indestructible by relying on the moat formed by the takeout business.
The most typical example is that in order to gain a firm foothold in the field of real-time retailing, Meituan plans to upgrade Meituan to tomorrow's supermarket and puts forward the slogan of "real province". This means that Meituan will continue his profit strategy of small profits and quick turnover. According to LatePost later, Meituan is trying to increase the number of SKU from the current 1500 to 3000, catching up with Sam and other membership supermarkets.
The next round of huge investment is coming, Meituan under the pressure of the capital market, burdened with new business, but whether the new business can create enough profits is not known.
02. The super life platform needs a super life platform that people understand in the traffic center. It does not simply aggregate all the services together, but requires a variety of services and multiple management methods. At the same time of decentralized management, a core point is required to connect all functions together to form a complete business system.
Meituan in the past chose to "eat". On the basis of grasping the high-frequency demand of "eating", taking takeout as the communication starting point, the business was extended to shops, hotels and even taxis, and finally formed a diversified scene of "catering + other".
Meituan's ecosystem Tuyuan Tianfeng Securities Research Institute, but on the basis of the continuous decline in the growth rate of users of the takeout platform, and in the face of the pressure exerted by Douyin, Meituan began to realize the need for a new core business. so that it can not only drive the growth of the number of users, but also organize all its businesses to become the traffic portal of the super life platform, so co-city retailing has become the first choice.
However, the development of retail business has not fundamentally solved the dilemma faced by Meituan. Because Meituan's own strategic positioning is still focused on solving the deterministic needs of consumers, this leads to the fact that most of Meituan App users come with clear needs, from search to purchase, users will not stay too much. According to QuestMobile data, in June this year, Meituan's DAU was 91 million, and the average daily use time for a single user was 16 minutes. As a result, retail is still a business that drives user growth and makes an operating profit, rather than the "connector" needed by the super living platform as we understand it.
Not only that, whether it is takeout, taxi-hailing, hotel, or retail business, Meituan's main audience is still the post-80s and 90s in first-and second-tier cities, traffic pool and user pool have not been expanded on a large scale. A super living platform serves the same group of people from beginning to end, so it is naturally difficult to break through the upper limit of application.
Douyin, on the other hand, has successfully expanded its live streaming and group buying business on the basis of short videos. Wechat, under the pressure of Douyin and Kuaishou, the video account has been used for as long as moments. The reason is that the two platforms have a large user scale and a high degree of user stickiness, just like a huge traffic pool, which can be distributed according to different priorities. With the support of a steady stream of traffic, its business has also developed rapidly and slowly become a super platform.
Thus it can be seen that the construction of the super platform needs a traffic pool that can absorb a large number of users, which is used as the core to expand the boundary, so that the various services are connected in series to form a business closed loop. Obviously, Meituan is also aware of this, so this year, Meituan has successively tried to build a traffic ecology by cooperating with Kuaishou and vigorously developing live streaming business, but so far, it has achieved little effect. Meituan has a total of 364000 fans on Kuaishou platform, and the number of video likes has always been maintained between 100,300.
From group buying to takeout to retail, Meituan's strategic focus has been changing, and the slogan has also evolved from "T-type strategy" to "Food+Platform" to today's "retail + technology". However, under the market and user demand-oriented strategy, Meituan will inevitably face the pain points of weak user stickiness and scattered business.
Imagination is limited by O2O connectivity difficulties from another point of view, the super life service platform, in the final analysis, still realizes the O2O business closed loop. But O2O business is both a gold mine and a trap.
O2O (Online to Offline), as its name implies, refers to the combination of offline business opportunities with the Internet, making the Internet a foreground for offline transactions. Popular point, that is, all the original offline transactions will be completed online, the current major areas of life services can be used, has broad prospects for development. The "China O2O Market Research report" has predicted that domestic O2O will be the next trillion-level market.
But now the O2O market is really mature enough to enable Meituan to achieve sustainable profits? I'm afraid not.
In fact, it can be inferred from the name O2O that the difficulties in the development of the O2O market are mainly in two aspects: one is the online flow entrance, and the other is the offline user connection.
All along, the local life service is committed to solving the problem of matching efficiency from users to businesses, from online to offline, which requires a high degree of networking and informationization both online and offline. The problem is also here. With the development of the Internet, online platforms such as Meituan, ele.me and Douyin are improving day by day, while offline large-scale and standardized links are stagnant, and the expansion of local life services is facing bottlenecks.
When the O2O business has gradually stepped into the public's view, various Internet companies have also entered the bureau one after another, and the online competition is becoming increasingly fierce. In the face of Ali, Baidu, bytes and other Internet companies, Meituan can gain a firm foothold in the competition of life platform traffic entrance.
If the online platforms of Internet enterprises develop steadily in the competition, then the development of offline business is mostly at a standstill. The founder of an O2O company said: "O2O is still hot at both ends, and the Internet side is very hot, but tens of millions of local merchants have not yet been involved in the O2O wave."
Take Meituan as an example, at present, the O2O business of local life is mostly focused on group buying and coupons, and does not really link with merchants. As far as the catering field is concerned, although many businesses have opened takeout services, they all have their own independent online ordering and payment system offline, which has not really been combined with Meituan's online business.
Not only that, due to the field of local life, there are many businesses, which leads to different degrees of information between different businesses, the platform is difficult to unify access. Therefore, in order to be able to link smoothly, the platform not only needs to develop its own IT business, but also needs to set up equipment in the store, and the platform needs to invest a huge cost. But even so, there are many businesses are not willing to fully deploy online business to the platform.
Moreover, even if the platform is willing to make long-term investments to smooth the offline business of O2O, the new question arises: how long and how large-scale will it take for O2O business, which depends on commission for a living, to get its money back, or even whether it can be paid back? The answers to these questions are not clear. Like the O2O business, Meituan still needs some time to prove the feasibility of the super life service platform.
This article comes from the official account of Wechat: new eyes (ID:xinmouls), author: gu Yu, Editor: Sang Mingqiang
Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.
Views: 221
*The comments in the above article only represent the author's personal views and do not represent the views and positions of this website. If you have more insights, please feel free to contribute and share.
Continue with the installation of the previous hadoop.First, install zookooper1. Decompress zookoope
"Every 5-10 years, there's a rare product, a really special, very unusual product that's the most un
© 2024 shulou.com SLNews company. All rights reserved.