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

A few days ago, why sharing portable battery has become a hot search topic, this is the fifth time that shared charging treasure has appeared on hot search in the past three months.

Prices rise too frequently, pricing is not standard, easy to borrow but difficult to pay back. As of November 04, black cat complaints have accumulated more than 19820 consumer complaints against small power technology, while listed monster charging has also received 12551 complaints.

Consumers' biggest dissatisfaction is the price increase: the rental fee for sharing portable battery has risen from 50 cents or 1 yuan per hour to 3, 4 or even 10 yuan per hour today.

But in fact, the monster charging, known as "portable battery's first share", has lost money for four consecutive quarters and does not seem to be able to reverse the decline in a short period of time. Portable battery, the monster, reported a net loss of 184.5 million in the second quarter of 2022.

Why share portable battery's price all the way up, share portable battery's enterprise but lose money all the way?

How much has portable battery's rental price gone up? Half of the hot searches related to "shared portable battery" in the past three months are talking about "price increases".

How fast is it going up? According to the incomplete statistics of the Sullivan report, the hourly rental price of shared portable battery rose from 0.50 yuan to 4 yuan from 2017 to 2020.

We randomly selected portable battery points in several different locations in Shanghai (including scenic spots, transportation hubs, business circles and outer rings), and counted the charges for four heads to share the portable battery brand.

We found that the rental price of sharing portable battery is affected by the location to a certain extent: the fee of the scenic spot is generally 2-4 yuan higher than the ordinary portable battery spot. Small Power's portable battery point rental price at the Shanghai Zoo reaches 8 yuan per hour, which is the highest price in our statistics.

Even though many points still remain at 3 yuan and 4 yuan per hour, the image of portable battery's enterprise "price increase" has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and has even been named a new generation of consumer "assassins".

Xiao Hongshu user @ Dark Magic Xiao Ming (a pseudonym) complained after posting his bill that he had been deducted by three portable battery enterprises: "the price has secretly gone up, it will cost 4 yuan an hour." then I was afraid that we would find out that the skill had been changed to two and a half yuan for an hour. "

Talk show actor House even wrote a joke about "sharing portable battery's rising Price": "do you remember how much it was per hour when it was first on the market? 50 cents. Now sharing portable battery, 3 yuan, 4 yuan, and 6 yuan …... you really don't wonder, what kind of electricity is it rented to you?"

"is it a hundred-year-old telegram handed down by Edison at that time?"

It can be seen that the public is quite disgusted with the price increase of sharing portable battery. According to the survey data of Ai Media Consulting, more than half of the respondents said they could not accept the price increase of sharing portable battery.

Although sharing portable battery is judged to be a rigid demand to a certain extent, and in actual consumption behavior, consumers are not sensitive to such a low price increase as portable battery's rental price, but no matter how strong the pricing power is, there can't be an endless rise in prices.

Moreover, even if the price is rising, the business of sharing portable battery is losing money.

How much did you lose from sharing portable battery's business? The pinnacle of the sharing portable battery industry may be in 2021: in April of that year, Monster charging was listed on NASDAQ in the United States, which seemed to break the spell of not making money in the sharing economy and was crowned as "portable battery's first share".

According to the prospectus, Monster's revenue in 2019 and 2020 was 2.02 billion yuan and 2.81 billion yuan respectively, and the net profit was 160 million yuan and 75.43 million yuan respectively.

In April 2021, its shares were priced at $8.50 a share. But by November 04, 2022, Monster's share price had fallen to $0.68 per share, reducing its market capitalization by more than 92%.

Behind the plunge in share prices is the continued loss of monster charging.

Monster charging has lost money for four quarters as of the second quarter of 2022.

Shortly after listing, Monster began to lose money in the third quarter of 2021, while overall revenue began to show negative growth from the fourth quarter of 2021. The total loss on Monster charging has reached 429 million in the last four quarters of the year.

Only a year ago, it could make a profit of 8 million yuan in a single quarter.

So what on earth is it that makes the monster charge from profit to loss, and the listing is the peak?

The root cause of the loss: the cost of sales is too high. From the financial data, we can see that the biggest reason for the loss of Monster charging is that the cost of sales is too high.

Since the launch of Q1 in 2021, Monster has spent more and more money on marketing.

Marketing expenses include advertising, promotion, market research, salespeople and so on. Generally speaking, in the case of fixed sales, the lower the marketing expenses, the better the efficiency of the enterprise.

But the marketing cost of monster charging is rising all boats. In the past three years, the marketing cost of monster charging has risen from 67.4% in 2019 to 82.3% in 2021. By 2022 Q2, the rate of marketing expenses had reached 96.3%.

The key to the rising cost of sales lies in the fierce competition among portable battery enterprises: hot business circles, tourist attractions, transportation hubs and other high-flow areas are the "sweet cake" that every portable battery enterprise wants to enter.

To this end, portable battery enterprises in admission fees, incentive fees, sharing fees, are forced by the pressure of competition, a large amount of profits to cooperative businesses.

The financial report of Monster charging and the prospectus of small Power Technology both show that the fees paid by portable battery to merchants and agents have continued to rise in the past three years:

At present, the operation modes of monster charging are direct operation and network partner (that is, agent) operation.

In the direct operation mode, monster charging signs a contract with the merchant directly, usually paying the merchant an admission fee first, and then paying 50% and 70% of the income as a commission.

It is reported that in September 2021, in order to enter Universal Studios, a number of sharing portable battery companies, such as small Power, Street Power, and Monster charging, participated in the bidding, and finally Monster charging became the first shared portable battery partner of Universal Studios in Beijing with an admission fee of 7 million yuan.

In order to reduce such high admission fees and reduce the cost of sales as much as possible, shared portable battery enterprises are working hard to expand the agent model. Through agents, portable battery companies have to pay a higher commission rate, between 75% and 90%, but waive a high admission fee in most cases.

Generally in first-and second-tier cities, the competition in popular areas is fierce, sharing portable battery enterprises will choose the direct operation mode and sign agreements with merchants directly. However, in third-and fourth-tier cities and towns, they will choose to cooperate with agents who hold more commercial resources.

During the three-month period from March to June 2022, the operating point of monster charging rose from 38.9% of the total to 43.2% across the country.

Although to a certain extent, this reduces the cost for the brand and transfers the risk of operation and maintenance to the agents, it may also cause downward management difficulties because of the lack of direct communication with the merchants.

These are just one of the many challenges faced by the sharing portable battery enterprise.

The growth rate slows down and the revenue model is simple. How many troubles will there be in the future? In fact, from the transformation of the operation mode, we can see that Monster charging, like several other portable battery enterprises, is sinking the competitive track from first-and second-tier cities to a lower-level market.

This is also because the market for sharing portable battery has become saturated in first-and second-tier cities.

In the past three years, the average lease duration of sharing portable battery has declined, and the growth of the average number of leases has also slowed down.

Portable battery's average rental time per user in 2020 is only half of that in 2017. And the number of leases in 2020 increased by only 3.85% compared with 2019, but the growth rate in 2018 was as high as 202.17%.

At the same time, although the number of points and the total number of users are still increasing, the growth rate has also slowed down.

The saturation of the first-and second-tier markets is only one of the reasons for slowing down point and user growth. The impact of the epidemic on the offline business circle has also spread to the shared portable battery industry to a large extent.

The market growth rate of the shared portable battery industry was 100.10% in 2019, but fell to 14.8% by 2020.

On the Q2 earnings call in 2022, Cai Guangyuan, CEO of Monster charging (CEO), also cited the epidemic in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu and other first-tier and new first-tier cities as the reason for the decline in revenue: "due to the outbreak of novel coronavirus, our GMV fell by 34% in April and 27% in May." (although in 2021, when the impact of the epidemic was relatively weak, monster charging also lost about 125 million yuan. )

The reason why the epidemic has dealt such a big blow to the sharing portable battery industry is mainly due to its over-reliance on offline channels. The single revenue model is another problem facing the whole sharing portable battery industry at present.

Although brands are trying to find a second growth curve, there are no particularly successful cases so far:

In April 2021, Monster launched the Luzhou-flavor liquor brand "Kaihuan", hoping to create a new liquor brand beyond the paid portable battery. But a year and a half later, in October 2022, the flagship Kaihuan store on Taobao had 24000 subscriptions, and the best-selling Kaihuan classic series 42 °sold only 42 bottles a month.

In May 2021, Xiaodian said in its prospectus that it would cooperate strategically with short video companies to provide short video and live marketing solutions for partners and other businesses. But after the listing failed, the plan was also stranded.

Zhu Mang Technology, which is formed by the merger of Sodian and Jie Dian, directly calls the portable battery track a "training ground." so far, it has tried to share charging piles, smart retail containers, smart lockers, advertising machines, and so on. In July this year, the official account of Soudian was quietly renamed from "Sodian" to "YoGo leisurely purchase selection" and embarked on a new way to test the waters with goods.

However, there is a long way to go, and the inflection point is far away.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: DT Finance (ID:DTcaijing), text: Cai Yiji, Editor: Tang Yiqin, Visualization: Qi Tongyi, operator: Su Hongrui, producer: Tang Yiqin

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.