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

On the afternoon of August 14, Sina Finance learned exclusively that with the continuous promotion of Alibaba's organizational reform, Ali Group has made it clear that Ali Group will continue to develop independently and accelerate incubation as an independent business within Alibaba Group.

According to Alibaba insiders, nailing has always been an independent business of Ali, which was in charge of Aliyun Intelligent Business Group before the organizational change of "116N". Not long ago, Aliyun announced that it would be spun off and listed from Ali Group, while Nail made it clear that it would develop independently. The insider stressed that Aliyun and Nail will continue to maintain close business cooperation, which has not changed.

With the box horse, rookie, Ali Yun and so on have announced the listing schedule, whether the nail will soon enter the second batch of listing preparatory list, it is not known.

As a start-up project launched in 2014 and on track in 2015, nails have been incubated within Ali for nearly nine years. According to Questmobile, the number of MAU (monthly active users) has stabilized at around 200m in the past two years. "although it reached 200m when the epidemic first broke out in 2020, the number of students and teachers attending classes at home quickly faded, and the nails had not yet had time to think about how to retain these users," said the insiders.

This task has been entrusted to the current nailing team, and how to turn the extensive scale into a high-quality scale has become the key for the business to prove its value to Ali again.

After more than two years of product optimization, acquisition or redo or abandonment, Nail hopes to truly have corporate customer value. "products have changed a lot in the past, especially products with low code that can really help small and medium-sized enterprises digitize their business," said a manufacturing industry CIO. "although there is still room for improvement in the product experience, it can be ignored in terms of capability and cost performance."

Overseas, Slack, which was born in the same year as Nail, has more than 20 million active users, with only Nail's 1Universe 10, but it generated $270 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2022. Salesforce expects Slack's revenue to exceed $4.2 billion by the end of 2025. The former bought Slack for $27.7 billion in 2020, the largest acquisition ever made by the world's largest CRM SaaS service provider.

However, unlike Slack, the commercialization of nails started relatively late and was officially announced in March 2022. Slack earned more than $100 million in 2016, two years after it was born.

"Nail used to pursue the size of users, and there was almost no need to think about making money," said one SaaS industry source. "it was also the prime time of the to C Internet. Only Alibaba can invest in a to B business every day for several years, and it won't take a decade to be a to B in China."

This also reflects the different circumstances of the software industry at home and abroad, such as high degree of standardization, mature market and natural commercialization of foreign software. The domestic software industry has a high degree of customization, born free, and the market mind needs education.

However, judging from the official disclosure of nails, the commercialization of nails has made rapid progress.

In September 2022, Ye Jun, president of nailing, said in an interview with the media that the revenue growth rate of nails was more than three digits, and the total absolute value of income was not high for the time being, but the gross profit margin was very high, exceeding the average level of the software industry. In June this year, he said again that the nailing target would break even within three years.

Several reliable sources say there are already investors looking to invest in nailing. "Nail is the to C of to B, which is a very unique target in the whole industry. If you bring in outside investors, you will definitely be competing for it," one investor said.

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