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

Original title: "Didi: restore from now on!" "

It has been more than a year and a half since DiDi App was removed from the shelves on July 4 the year before last.

In a short period of one and a half years, many changes have taken place in the once-dusty travel market, such as Meituan taxi-hailing back online, Cao Cao Travel, T3 Travel and many other second-line ride-hailing companies have also strengthened their promotion, and even Huawei has launched its own ride-hailing app-Petal. Taking advantage of the dust of the Didi incident, all manufacturers hope to get a piece of the ride-hailing market.

However, this pending state did not last long. This afternoon, Weibo @ DiDi posted a message, saying: "for more than a year, our company has seriously cooperated with the national cyber security review, took seriously the security problems found in the review, and carried out comprehensive rectification." With the consent of the network security review office, the registration of new users of "DiDi" will be resumed immediately. In the follow-up, the company will take effective measures to ensure the security of platform facilities and big data, and maintain national network security. "

(Tu Yuan: Didi) since the year before last, DiDi has not only experienced penalties such as removal of shelves and ban on registration, received huge fines imposed by the state, but also lost nearly 20 per cent of his market share, paying a huge price for his rashness. The question is, what on earth did a ride-hailing company do that could cause such a huge shock? After resuming the registration of new users, can Didi still regain its former glory? You might as well listen to Xiao Lei.

01. From the favored son of heaven to the public enemy of the whole people, it is undeniable that up to now, Didi is still a very important brushstroke in the history of ride-hailing development.

In 2012, Cheng Wei, then deputy general manager of Alipay, announced his departure to start a business. Taking a fancy to the online ride-hailing market space at that time, he founded Beijing Xiaogu Technology Co., Ltd. in July of the same year, and launched the "Didi Taxi" ride-hailing App in September of the same year.

With intensive push, excellent publicity strategy and relatively easy-to-use application experience, "Didi Taxi" successfully occupied a place in the early online taxi-hailing market and attracted a wave of fresh investors to bet heavily, including heavyweight investors such as Tencent Group. With the support of Tencent, Didi has developed rapidly. In just one year, Didi has a market share of 59.4%, covering nearly 350000 drivers and about 10 million registered passengers.

(photo Source: Weibo) of course, Didi was not the only player on the market at that time, and the fast taxi-hailing that Ali invested was also a force to be reckoned with. In 2014, the two sides engaged in a head-on confrontation. With the strong support of Tencent and Alibaba, Didi and Kuaidi fought a big subsidy war. At the craziest time, Didi burned 30 million yuan of promotional money a day, and Kuaidi taxi-hailing was more ruthless, easily burning 40 million.

The subsidy war to seize customers has made the burden on both sides heavier and heavier. In the end, Didi was the first to change its strategy, choosing to change the amount of subsidies to random, and users need to get the discount through mobile phone forwarding links. With Tencent's dominant position in the mobile Internet ecology, Kuaidi taxi-hailing soon could not hold on, and this war without gunpowder smoke finally came to an end with the strategic merger of Didi and Kuaidi.

After annexing Kuaidi Taxi, the next step of Didi is to kill Uber. It's still the same subsidy war, but now Didi and Tencent have become more proficient in "information warfare." whether it's sharing on Wechat or retweeting and other activities, Tencent has completely banned Uber. Uber can hardly be seen by users. By 2016, Uber could no longer afford such a loss, and Didi bought Uber's China business.

After these two wars, Didi has almost secured its position as the largest domestic ride-hailing platform, with a market share of more than 90%, and China's local ride-hailing war seems to have come to an end.

(Tu Yuan: Didi) but Didi, which almost won the game, began to expose problems.

In early 2018, Didi was forced to shut down its ride-sharing business after Volkswagen was so angry with Didi Taxi that two riders were killed one after another because of poor regulation.

At the end of 2018, because the safety rectification of the hitchhiking incident was not over, Didi suffered another huge loss, with a full-year loss of 10.7 billion yuan.

In fact, in the ten years since its establishment, Didi has raised up to 23 times and burned hundreds of billions of dollars in total, but it has always been unable to reverse the situation of losses and be unable to stand up and challenge the capital. Even more uncomfortable for Didi, such as T3 Travel, Ruqi Travel and other newcomers began to emerge, all want to get a piece of the market, and eventually there are competitors outside, internal losses, Didi made a dangerous move-to the United States listing.

02, the undercurrent surging post-"Didi" era is the so-called, the crisis of an industry giant is an opportunity for thousands of players in the industry. The huge gap left by Didi's silence has made countless players in the industry / outside the industry eager to try.

Some time ago, Gao de, which only worked as an aggregation platform, launched its own brand "Rocket Travel", and its market share also rose all the way; before that, Huawei and Tencent also began to enter the ride-hailing market and started the business of the aggregation platform; while players such as T3 Travel and Cao Cao Travel also released bold words; veteran players such as Meituan were also steady, and everyone kept an eye on Didi's cake.

(photo Source: rocket Travel) in addition to players in the industry, many car companies have also joined the ranks of online ride-hailing. According to Tianyan, in July last year, Guangdong Xiaopeng Automotive Technology Co., Ltd. registered trademarks such as "XPENGROBOTAXI", "Xiaopeng Zhihang" and "Xiaopeng Zhihang". In August last year, Xilai set up a sales and service company in Yantai, which includes ride-hailing operations, and new energy manufacturers seem to be laying out their ride-hailing business and Robotaxi business.

For car companies, the establishment of online car-hailing enterprises can expand the scope of business, increase car sales, make passengers feel comfortable and attract them to buy. Second, you can operate online car-hailing to quickly accumulate self-driving data, verify the reliability of products in a short period of time, and efficiently learn about the optimization of production and operation of vehicles and batteries in different use scenarios, road conditions and climates. feed back the development of the whole self-driving system.

(photo Source: Hengdao Robotaxi) interestingly, although various travel manufacturers are eyeing covetously, according to data from Analysys and other institutions, DiDi's market share has fallen from the highest 90% to 70%, but it seems to have entered a long period of stability. No matter how much competitors increase profit-making measures, it seems to be getting harder and harder to take leftover food out of DiDi's mouth.

In my opinion, the main reason for this is, of course, the well-known gap in the user base. As a veteran domestic travel APP, compared with those emerging platforms that are difficult to call "compliance" drivers, Didi has a huge first-mover advantage in the travel field, and a large number of drivers and passengers effectively ensure the timeliness of ride-hailing operation and consumption.

You know, the biggest motivation that motivates users to use a tool App is "easy to use". In the field of travel, for drivers, "easy to use" means that the platform can recommend qualified users in time; for users, "easy to use" means that their travel needs can be quickly responded to by the platform. The habits of users are difficult to change, and the market foundation laid by Didi in a decade does not seem to be shaken in a short time.

Of course, it is difficult to judge whether there will be any new changes in the pattern of the travel market as capital continues to pour in.

03. Can we restore our former glory? In any case, the resumption of user registration marks the beginning of the trough of Didi after more than a year of cold winter. The question is, can they regain their former glory?

In my opinion, it is difficult for Didi to go back to the time when its market share was as high as 90%. Admittedly, with the return of App such as DiDi, Didi finally had a chance to blow the bugle of counter-attack. In addition to launching a counter-offensive against competitors such as Rockets, T3 and Cao Cao in an effort to regain market share, they can also actively discuss access issues with aggregation platforms such as Douyin, Wechat and Huawei.

(Tuyuan: Didi) not only that, the full liberalization of the epidemic prevention policy is also an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the ride-hailing industry, whose growth was once stagnant. With the release of epidemic prevention and control, people's enthusiasm for travel is recovering rapidly, it can be clearly sensed that more and more passengers are willing to take a taxi, and the entire ride-hailing industry will have certain growth opportunities in the future.

But even if it is in the right place at the right time, the road ahead is still not easy for Didi. After a long period of conservative operation, it is obvious that employees, drivers and passengers have lost some confidence in Didi. According to the survey of colleagues around them, because of "easy to use", "deep integration with maps" and other reasons, Gaode aggregation seems to have a trace of replacing Didi, and the online ride-hailing aggregation model seems to be becoming the darling of the new era.

The increase of players in the industry, the improvement of competition and the popularity of the convergent taxi-hailing model are all challenges that Didi must face after its recovery. The problem is that under the circumstances that the state explicitly forbids marketing activities such as subsidizing customer acquisition, Didi has no way to use the traditional "subsidy war" to set off another price war, and how to get back the lost 20% market share will be a must-solve problem.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: Feng Xingxing (ID:fengchuxing2021), author: sandwich

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