Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1149
Can’t go anywhere. Shell stayed in Beijing to celebrate its listing.
The venue reproduces the layout of the exchange’s opening ceremony. The company name and ticker symbol are printed on the blue background wall. On the stage stood Shell executives, investors and grassroots store representatives. They counted down five seconds with the exchange, and when the market opened, millions were pumped into the stock market.
The external environment is hardly optimistic. The epidemic has hit the world one after another. The shadow of a potential recession has caused the stock market to drop more than 20% in a very short period of time. But Shell is still optimistic, and it rose 87% that day. In a few months, Shell will expand recruitment and expand its business areas when capital is relatively abundant.
This is the summer of 2020, and Shell is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
A year and a half later, a similar but shorter ceremony was held at Shell Beijing headquarters. The same statement of long-termism, executives and grassroots store representatives took a group photo to celebrate Shell’s listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
But this time, the joy only stayed on the first floor of the headquarters. Downstairs, to the music of “This is a home, you and I go together through wind and rain”, layoffs are going on upstairs.
A number of people familiar with the matter told LatePost that this round of layoffs at Shell is mainly aimed at headquarters employees. The layoffs range from management cadres to grass-roots employees, from business to technology, with unlimited levels, functions, and businesses. This is the third personnel adjustment of Shell in the past six months, and it is also the most extensive one. Some people don’t know where the road is, and some people don’t know when the end will be.
This round of China’s determination to tighten real estate regulation is unprecedentedly strong. The impact of Shell today is due to the slowdown in economic activity, but it is also related to the management’s business strategy after the US stock market listing. In addition, the death of the founder forced Shell to accelerate the transition of power. Various factors are superimposed, and labor pains are being transmitted from top to bottom.
If the transition from Lianjia in 2018 was a watershed for Shell, then 2021 may be the same.
Contrarian expansion
Shell has nominally had two big expansions. Once, in 2018, Shell was established on the basis of Lianjia, and nearly 20,000 Lianjia employees were mobilized overnight to go to Shell. Because the chain is directly piped by shells, this expansion is more like the left hand and the right hand.
The other time was between the second half of 2020 and the first half of 2021, when the number of employees rose from 87,000 to more than 110,000. In the first half, 40% of the brokers and 30% of the platform operators were added, and the second half was to serve new strategies, such as an increase of about 1,000 employees in the home improvement business, about 400 in the home business, and more than 200 in the rental business.
Counting Lianjia’s real estate brokers who use external brands to access Shell, the platform has a workforce of nearly 500,000 people.
At the end of this year, Peng Yongdong, chairman and CEO of Shell, proposed the strategy of “one body and two wings”. One is the real estate brokerage business group (real estate transaction), and the two wings are the big home furnishing business group (home improvement and home furnishing) and the Huiju business group (rental). Shell hopes to continue the successful experience of second-hand housing transactions and standardize non-standard items in the home improvement market. The home business hopes to sell home furniture to users when selling houses.
These two businesses are viewed internally as Shell’s second growth curve.
They are also the business that Peng Yongdong is most concerned about in the past year. He will show up at new business seminars and discuss issues with business group employees.
Peng Yongdong also made a big deal. In July 2021, Shell announced the acquisition of Shengdu Home Improvement, with a transaction price cap of 8 billion yuan, including the acquisition of a 49% stake in Shengdu for no more than 3.92 billion in cash, and the acquisition of 51% of Shengdu with restricted shares worth 4.08 billion. Equity. The cash portion of the deal closed in April this year. During the period, Shell and Shengdu renegotiated part of the consideration for the acquisition of restricted shares, and finally achieved 100% control of the latter by issuing about 44.31 million ordinary shares to Shengdu Home Improvement.
But one person familiar with the deal still finds it expensive. The revenue scale of A-share company Dongyi Risheng Home Improvement is similar to that of Shengdu. Shell was valued at about 3 billion yuan when it reached the deal last year.
Home business is not so easy to do. Change the person in charge twice a year. Different person in charge has different business ideas. It is to learn from IKEA and make its own brand; Fortunately, the family was quite rich at the time.
The division tested user group purchases and sold nearly 8,000 pots. In the end, about 1,700 pots were returned due to quality problems. It also planned to open its first offline home furnishing store in Chengdu in the second half of last year, investing tens of millions of yuan, but it has not yet opened.
The number of directors increases and the organization becomes bloated. Before this adjustment, Shell had about 500 directors (not including its affiliated brands such as Deyou and 21st Century).
According to a technical source, the company has a project review meeting every year. At the 2022 review meeting, a team proposed to develop a food delivery robot, which can be used as a public welfare undertaking and provide services to nursing homes. Another team proposed a group of three or four people to work for a year, striving to develop speech recognition technology comparable to iFLYTEK. These project declarations are initiated by the director-level staff led by the team.
By 2022, the entire CTO line will have 8 centers with 1,500 employees. Ye Jieping, the chief scientist who joined Shell from Didi in 2020, led the three centers. At the peak, the total number of people exceeded 1,000, which was more than three times the size of the team he led in Didi.
Among them, AIT (Artificial Intelligence Technology Center) alone has increased to more than 340 people. AIT is subdivided into 8 departments, including business intelligence department, intelligent decision-making department, data intelligence department, data science department, AIT products, speech and language technology department, risk control product department, AI innovation research – including almost all Mainstream technical direction.
They may want to use machine learning of historical housing transaction information to rate new houses, score brokers and stores, and evaluate potential buyers who are most likely to sell; or use semantic recognition and image recognition to detect online communication between customer service and brokers Whether to achieve standardized services. All of these designs are designed to improve the effectiveness of shell people.
Heavy manpower and heavy investment are very important path dependencies for Shell. Senior executives frequently mention that they want to make things more important internally and externally. Only by doing so much can there be a strong enough moat. One can imagine the difficulty of trying to make business light in a company where “doing business heavy” is politically correct. Moreover, in the real estate transaction business with a long business chain, there are limited links that require “artificial intelligence”.
People who originally wanted to improve overall efficiency through technology and data, and deal with problems such as personnel expansion, turned out to be solving problems, bringing new problems.
A CTO line employee told us that the team has a lot of businesses that explore the nature of the future. Not only the Shell family is doing these things, but the value of their current value to Shell is still open to question.
As the shells swelled, the real estate sector began to cool.
From the second half of 2020, China will further tighten real estate regulation. On the basis of restrictions on purchases and sales, the scale of developer financing and banks’ loans related to real estate will be regulated. The path dependence of developers on “taking out land with debts, starting construction, pre-sale of new houses, returning housing payments, and taking out land with borrowings” has basically been completely broken.
Developers have to speed up the sales of existing projects and collect payments as soon as possible. They are looking for consignment sales of shells with the highest degree of transaction standardization and the largest brokerage team in the market. In 2018, Shell’s new housing business accounted for only 26% of total revenue, and it accounted for 53% two years later. It will further increase to 57.55% in 2021.
This is the gilded bonus. With the contraction of downstream demand, the market has shifted from incremental competition to stock competition, and dividends have gradually drifted away. Zuo Hui posted on Moments as early as November 2019 expecting this change, he said:
The GMV of new houses this year is about 15 trillion +, but we judge that GMV will gradually come down.
It is difficult for us to focus on the new house business. We have never looked at it, and the proportion of second-hand housing GMV must be getting higher and higher; in addition, developers have always had the theory of real estate chamber pot, and the channel is also the developer chamber pot. The market is not easy to use, and the market OK, put it back. It’s just that we are willing to use it as a chamber pot, but from the perspective of risk control, it is more certain to do a good job of second-hand.
As Zuo Hui expected, one year after the big expansion of Shell, in September 2021, the sales area and sales of new housing products decreased by 13.2% and 15.8% year-on-year. The central bank’s survey showed that only 19.2% of residents at that time expected to increase their spending on home purchases in the next three months, and more than half of the respondents would increase their savings.
Developers began a spate of debt defaults. Vanke, which has always been in a healthy financial position, said that developers will shift from rapid expansion to ensuring cash flow security, which is equivalent to shrinking bones and losing weight.
Peng Yongdong also emphasized in the third quarterly earnings conference call last November that “the security of the payment is greater than the commission rate”. At the same time, the operation focus of Shell began to tilt more towards home improvement and leasing business, and mobilized the core strength of the main business to support the home improvement business. Liang Lei, the new general manager of Shell Home Improvement Beijing business, was previously the operation director of Beijing Lianjia, the city general manager of Tianjin Deyou, and the general manager of South Jiangsu Shell.
Shell entered the home furnishing industry in a big way, and Zuo Hui led Lianjia to transform Shell despite everything, the courage, execution and path are so similar. But the market is different, the environment is different, and the past accumulation is also completely different. Selling a house and home furnishing and home improvement seem to be closely related, but in fact there is a huge difference.
A Shell person commented that Peng Yongdong is a rational person and will not insist on wrong things, but “he may not fully think about where Shell will go, what to do with the main business, and what to do with the second curve.”
When the main business is about to peak, Shell acquires upstream non-leading companies at a premium, consuming valuable cash and equity that could have been used for additional financing. When macro changes accelerate in 2022, Shell put on the table a contraction strategy that should have been implemented earlier.
shrink, from people to organizations
April 23, the fourth anniversary of the shell.
Around the anniversary, Peng Yongdong canceled the routine value seminar for all employees, and convened COO Xu Wangang, CTO Yan Mi, CFO Xu Tao and other members of the Shell Small Class Committee to hold a meeting and settle the account. Also participating in the meeting was the HR group “Alpha”, which deals with cadre affairs. It is understood that the executives finalized the indicators at the meeting to significantly reduce the labor cost of Shell headquarters. Branches around the shell are also laying off staff.
Shell has three major business groups, the real estate brokerage business group, the large-scale home furnishing business group and the Huiju business group, corresponding to “one body and two wings”. The real estate brokerage business group has about 2,000 people, accounting for half of the headquarter staff. This business group not only has the largest number of people, but also involves the most complex business. It involves both online and offline, and has strong interaction with technology, finance and legal affairs. (COO) defines this sector. Second only to the line of business is the line of technology (CTO).
The technology line is the fastest-expanding department of Shell in the past few years, providing technical solutions for the operation of the Shell platform. Before this adjustment, the business line had 12 centers and the technology line had 8 centers.
The complexity of history will bring the complexity of structure. Shell is not a new company, it was transformed from a 20-year-old company, and the production, research and technical teams are almost all newly formed after 2018. At the same time, Shell has experienced many acquisitions and mergers, and it is a hybrid, with both a self-operated (chain home) system and a franchise system.
In the Lianjia system, the power is divided into two. The Lianjia stores in Beijing and Shanghai are independently managed by Wang Yongqun, the Lianjia COO. The Lianjia stores in the two places together contribute about 30% of the real estate transaction volume to the entire Shell. The chain stores in the remaining 20 cities, as well as all franchised brands (Deyou, 21st Century Real Estate, Shell Point, Rendao, etc.) and tens of thousands of franchisees are managed by Xu Wangang, COO of Shell Group.
According to employee descriptions, the two COOs are strong personalities and have considerable internal prestige. They also reported to Peng Yongdong.
Before his death, Zuo Hui was away from the front line for a long time and handed over the management responsibilities to Peng Yongdong. But he remains the reformist and contradiction coordinator of all systems, an undisputed authority. After Zuo Hui’s death, Peng Yongdong began to implement the class committee management, trying to ensure fair decision-making by sacrificing some efficiency.
The three business groups have three sets of class committees, and the real estate transaction business group has the most luxurious lineup. The members include CFO Xu Tao, CHO Zuo Donghua, Shell COO Xu Wangang, Lianjia COO Wang Yongqun, and Beijing Lianjia head Li Yanfeng; The appointments are Yan Weiyang, head of home improvement, He Shengxiang, head of home furnishing, and Zheng Shenzhen, head of strategy and investment; the class committees of Huiju Business Group are Song Yunyun, head of rental function, Zhang Shanshan, head of rental operation, and Song Chunhui, head of rental strategy.
More than one Internet giant in China uses the class committee system for management, but they are mostly implemented locally. The reason is that the new and old businesses need to strengthen coordination, or there is no Superleader in the short term, so the class committee is only a transitional product. exist. But Shell is different. It fully implements the class committee system in the company. At the same time, none of the three business groups has appointed a clear leader.
Important matters are discussed in their respective class committees and finally voted for resolution. This means that no one can make all the decisions, and everyone on the class committee is jointly responsible for the results. At the same time, the above three sets of class committee members do not include Peng himself. The implementation of the class committee system can allow most conflicts to be resolved in collective decision-making. As a CEO, you only need to make decisions that the class committee cannot decide, and there are not too many such moments.
Before and after the implementation of the class committee system, the shell management began to repeatedly discuss whether the organization should shrink and how to shrink it.
Most Shell people interviewed said the management consensus was that the organization was indeed redundant. But “what is necessary redundancy and what is unnecessary redundancy” did not seem to reach a consensus at the time.
After repeated discussions, management’s decision last year was to control rather than shrink directly – try not to recruit new people.
Instead of releasing the vitality of the organization, the small-scale operation led to a stalemate within the organization. It was not until the situation changed that a drastic adjustment was made today.
Previously, there were about 4,600 employees in the Beijing headquarters office area of Shell. After the completion of this round of adjustment, the number of employees at the headquarters will be reduced to about 3,000, and this number may change in the future. The CTO line has about 1,500 employees. The three centers managed by Ye Jieping are the hardest hit areas for layoffs. Only about 300 of the more than 1,000 people remain. CTO Yan Mi was transferred to Beinuan Doors and Windows, a sub-business under the new home furnishing business. The proportion of layoffs in the home improvement and home furnishing business group and the Huiju business group is 20%-30%.
Behind the adjustment of personnel is the adjustment of organization. In one of the two wings, the home furnishing department will be merged with the home decoration department; previously the production and research system was parallel to the business system, and now part of the production and research is merged into the business system (COO line) to achieve a backbone for management; the COO line previously had 12 centers, Today it is consolidated into 5 centers. Work content overlaps, and departments with wasted manpower, poor communication, or conflicts of interest are integrated into three or four.
Many employees mentioned that COO Xu Wangang likes to talk about Kazuo Inamori’s turnaround in JAL internally. After he was airborne and vigorously reformed for a year, his income fell, but profits increased—this is also the purpose of this round of adjustment for Shell.
Some generals have left because of this. Ge Jing, the former vice president of quality and who once built Lianjia’s second-hand housing quality control system, stepped back to serve as a consultant. Many employees are confused about this, not only because she is really good at Shell, but also because the company used to emphasize quality the most. Now the person who builds the quality system has gone to the second line, and her independent department has to be merged into other business lines.
Shell junior management posts and front-line HR who execute the order don’t know what standards to cut, how many people to cut, etc. They only know how to list them and then cut them off. Indicators are layered, and the actions are out of shape, as we see a lot of things today.
During the tumultuous two weeks, laid-off employees received two options. The first one is that after the one-month quiet period and the holiday, the option vesting period is not reached, and all options will be voided. The second is to take the beginning to the end of the vesting period as a unit year, and settle by percentage until May 9, when the current round of layoffs is officially announced.
As with elusive layoff criteria, employees don’t know who can be dealt with under the second option.
A Shell employee who has undergone several adjustments said that key positions such as the second-hand housing core transaction system have been replaced by three persons in charge within six months. There are also business leaders who were temporarily told to leave, but did not know who to hand over the business to.
A middle-level executive pointed out that this adjustment can solve the long-standing synergy problem in the past, but it will inevitably create other problems. For example, the production and research product team is divided into the offline business line management. The latter pays more attention to the current performance, while the production and research pursues long-term rationality. He believes that the most extreme situation that may happen in the future is, “Industry and research degenerate into an IT department.” Another person likened, “To survive with a broken arm, you should cut off your tail and disobedient hands, rather than stab yourself in the heart.”
There are also shell management that the major adjustment means that some kind of change has begun. Without layoffs it would be worse, and the organization would be more rigid. But he also sighed, if it can be acted earlier and in batches after the listing in 2020, what is the point of this.
A heavy legacy
On the one hand, the whole company made a drastic adjustment, on the other hand, the board of directors completed the succession issue in a tense, orderly and united manner.
In 2010, Peng Yongdong was dug by Zuo Hui to Lianjia. Before that, he was a senior consultant of IBM strategy and change, and Lianjia was his client. Peng Yongdong promoted and led the smooth transformation of Lianjia in the mobile Internet era. In 2018 he took over the company completely.
When Zuo Hui was alive, he owned 24.9% of the shares and 76.8% of the voting rights. As CEO, Peng Yongdong owns 3.1% of the shares and 1% of the voting rights. As a professional manager, this ratio is not low. But after Zuo Hui’s death, Peng Yongdong became the chairman and CEO of Shell. “As the helm, this control is not necessarily enough.” said a secondary market investor.
On November 8, 2021, the first change of control occurred.
The board of directors and the Zuohui Family Trust agreed that Peng Yongdong and Yiyigang would convert their Class A ordinary shares into Class B super voting shares, totaling approximately 157 million shares. At the same time, in addition to converting the same number of Class B shares into Class A shares, Zuohui Family Trust also irrevocably authorized all the voting rights represented by these shares and the remaining 727 million Class B shares to Baiyuan. will be exercised in partnership.
Shan Shan has just been the co-founder of the company, but he has already retired from the front line and does not specifically participate in the company’s operations. According to Zuo Hui’s previous arrangement, Baihui Partnership’s rights include: nominating Shell CEO and appointing executive directors. If the appointed executive director is rejected by the board of directors, Baihui Partnership can bypass the board of directors and appoint interim executive directors. These privileges are activated after the Zoho Partnership owns five LPs.
At present, Baihui Partnership has only two limited partners, Peng Yongdong and Shan Shan Gang. Its general partner is Ample Platinum Holdings Limited, which is controlled 50% by Peng Yongdong and Shan Shan Gang.
After this round of transformation, the voting rights of Peng Yongdong and Shan Shan Gang increased to 9.5% and 4.1%, the voting rights of Zuo Hui Family Trust dropped to 64.4%, and the total voting rights of the three parties were about 78%.
On May 12, Shell was listed on the Hong Kong stock market, with new changes in equity and voting rights. The Zuohui Family Trust converted all of its 727 million Class B shares into Class A ordinary shares and no longer enjoys super voting rights.
Almost at the same time, Peng Yongdong and Shell co-founder Shan Shan were granted huge equity incentives.
According to Shell’s 2022 Share Incentive Plan, Peng Yongdong received 71,824,250 restricted Class A ordinary shares granted by the board of directors. Based on the listing price of Shell Hong Kong shares of HK$30 per share, the incentive is worth HK$2.15 billion. Shell co-founder and executive director Shan Shan Gang was also granted approximately 53.8682 million restricted ordinary shares, valued at approximately HK$1.615 billion. However, this is only for reference, and the economic rights and interests obtained by the two are subject to the actual ownership of the restricted shares.
CFO Xu Tao specially sent an internal letter to explain this, he wrote:
1. The share ratio of S and Shan Zong is only 4.16% today. Compared with the chairman of comparable listed companies, the share ratio of CEO and co-founder is low, or in fact the lowest.
2. In order to address the impact of the U.S. Overseas Company Accountability Act on the uncertainty of the company’s future or long-term Sino-U.S. relations.
3. In order to continue to maintain the “super voting rights (wvr)” after the main listing on the main board of Hong Kong, according to the requirements of the Stock Exchange, the share ratio of the two founders shall not be less than 10%, or the economic interests shall not be less than 8 billion Hong Kong dollars, otherwise Super voting rights are automatically invalidated.
4. Since the day we listed, S and Shan will continue to promise not to sell shares for an additional 180 days during the earliest 180-day lock-up period, and the subsequent additional issuance in November 2020. After Mr. Zuo’s death, he will continue to be locked for one year from May 24, 2021. After the listing on May 11 this year, the lock-up continued to be extended for half a year.
According to Xu Tao, the issuance of additional shares to Peng Yongdong and Shanyigang is to meet Hong Kong’s minimum shareholding ratio for super voting rights. According to the requirements of the Stock Exchange, the shareholding ratio of the two founders shall not be less than 10%. However, even if Peng Yongdong and Shanyi Gang accounted for the newly granted shares, their total shareholding reached 7.5%, which still did not meet the relevant regulations of the Stock Exchange on shareholders applying for super voting rights.
Shell’s explanation is that they were able to qualify for exemptions as the rules allow. The first is that Shell’s market value exceeds HK$80 billion. The second is to increase the shareholding ratio of holders of super voting rights (Peng Yongdong, Shan Shan Gang). Finally, Peng Yongdong and Shan Shan Gang were entrusted to exercise the voting rights of the Zuo Hui Family Trust based on the power of attorney arrangement.
After completing the above steps, as of May 17, Peng Yongdong owned 22.5% of the voting rights and 4.8% of the equity. Single Gang owns 10.2% of the voting rights and 2.7% of the equity. Zuohui Family Trust owns 17% of the voting rights and 23.3% of the equity. The total exercisable voting rights of the three parties has reached 49.7%.
So far, Peng Yongdong has changed from a professional manager to a de facto founder of the company.
A person close to Zuo Hui said that, based on what he knows about Zuo Hui, this may be the best arrangement for the company.
According to Shell, this arrangement is also related to the drastic changes in the capital market to a certain extent. From the preparation of the Hong Kong stock market to the final listing, the share price of Shell once fell to $7. “To keep control of the company stable, the board ‘firmly supports’ co-founders for supervoting.”
There is no law that says management can only be rewarded if the company is profitable or has a better share price than its peers, but that would be more respectable. Former Nintendo chairman Satoshi Iwata and “Mario” series game producer Shigeru Miyamoto took voluntary pay cuts of 20%-50% in 2011 and 2013, when the company was underperforming.
“In the absence of any performance betting clauses, no company will give professional managers so many shares, even the founders, and they will issue additional shares directly.” Investors with shells questioned, even if this is to satisfy voting rights On the grounds of restrictions, “it is also generous and unprecedented.”
But at least the board believes that having the person who actually runs the company as the owner of the most control will help the company weather the storm better. In the second half of last year, Shell’s revenue declined year-on-year and its operating profit turned negative. The net loss for the year was RMB 525 million. The company’s share price has fallen more than 70% since its June 2021 high.
A Shell shareholder said that Zuo Hui had hesitant to go public. But Zuo Hui finally decided to take Shell to the market, one of the reasons is that he believes that listing is the safest way to pass on the company, and the management, the board of directors, and the public shareholders can restrict each other.
As for Peng Yongdong himself, he has more rights and inescapable responsibilities. What he inherited is not only a listed company with tens of thousands of employees, but also the legacy left by Zuo Hui, including his uncompeted career, commitment to the industry, and various legacy from the rapid development in the past. contradiction.
Since then, his life trajectory has overlapped with Zuo Hui and this company.
Both glory and loss
When Zuo Hui died, Shell was the largest real estate brokerage platform in China. One-tenth of the country’s annual 20 trillion yuan real estate transactions come from here. Industry and macro, business and current politics, the good and bad of all aspects therefore act on it in a more violent way.
Some people miss Zuo Hui, saying that if Lao Zuo were there, “some things will happen earlier, some things will not happen, and some things will stop sooner.” When people mention Zuo Hui, they will say “he’s a good guy” rather than “he’s a successful entrepreneur”. This is because Zuo Hui’s personality and the values he advocates and adheres to may be more memorable than his achievements.
This seems to have become Peng Yongdong’s shackles.
From Lianjia to Shell, in the more than ten years of incremental games, Zuo Hui led the team through seven or eight rounds of long and short real estate cycles, survived “SARS” and financial crisis, and seized the “four trillion” “shanty reform monetization” Chance. In times of crisis, he did not close stores and lay off workers on a large scale. The crisis has passed, and the scale of well-prepared shells (chain homes) has doubled.
A Shell Institution shareholder believes that although Peng Yongdong has been mentioned as No. 1 in the past two years, Zuo Hui has been standing behind him. All successors need to prove their ability, otherwise they will not be able to establish authority. It’s just that when Peng took over, the wind changed and the time and space left for him dwindled.
The situation is more complicated than before. According to statistics from the People’s Bank of China, as of the end of March, only 16.3% of urban respondents believed that housing prices would rise, which is already lower than at the beginning of the outbreak in 2020. More residents tend to save, and developers reduce land acquisition and accelerate construction. The supply and demand of real estate are limited in two stages, and the cyclical downward trend has not been reversed.
The industry is both prosperous and damaged. The home improvement and home furnishing business in the downstream of the industrial chain fluctuates with the real estate cycle. Shengdu Home Improvement, which Shell acquired last year, suffered a net loss of 110 million yuan a year. According to Wind statistics, in 2021, the revenue of A-share decoration and decoration companies will decrease year-on-year, and the net sales margin will drop to -16.08%, the worst data since statistics.
Home business is not easy. Shell is an application that many people open once or twice in their lifetime. Consumers want to buy TV sets, electric kettles and pots and pans. There is no reason not to go to super e-commerce companies such as Taobao, JD.com, Pinduoduo, and vertical companies such as Suning and Gome. retailer.
Similar to achieving high frequency from low frequency business, there are not many successful examples in the world. Amazon, which attracts half of American households to buy products at least four times a year, is also not doing well in the more frequent fresh food e-commerce. After burning billions of dollars, I finally bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. No business is ever great.
The rapid changes in the environment inevitably make people feel that all failures of the enterprise are inevitable. But the more difficult the day, the more it reflects the founder’s pattern and values. 20% layoffs can be said to be an industry problem, and more layoffs can only be a strategic decision-making problem for the top leaders. They could have anticipated market turbulence earlier and raised the margin of safety without having to burden so many employees with management mistakes.
“When a big company does business, you can’t just cut it today and continue to do it tomorrow. No one will do it with you.” A person close to Shell said that in those days everyone sacrificed other opportunities and fully trusted you before they came to you. here.
Everyone is responsible for what happens to them, whether they want to or not. This is true of employees, and so is the helm of the company.
On May 20, the anniversary of Zuo Hui’s death, Peng Yongdong posted a post in memory of the old leader, saying that Zuo Hui spent his life accomplishing the phrase “doing the hard and right thing”. This is also the first time Peng Yongdong has made a speech in the turmoil. “To the industry and to the team, Lao Zuo is like a big umbrella. When faced with dark clouds, he will cover the wind and rain.” Peng Yongdong wrote, “This year, we have faced every ‘difficulty’ alone…”
This year the most common words of Shell employees are also this sentence – “We are really difficult.”
Shell is the first Chinese internet company to face succession issues due to the death of its founder. But even if Zuo Hui is still there, every battle will be difficult to fight.
Zuo Hui often mentioned the “big one” in his lifetime to remind the team that Shell is far from this “big”, and it is not that good. What’s more, the environment and paths have changed. Shell was born out of the chain family 20 years ago, but the globalization pathway from trade to industry to capitalization that helped them take off has become almost invisible.
This is true both at home and abroad. Tony Fadell, the father of the iPod, said that in a world where most CEOs need to be politicians, it’s unclear how Jobs would survive such an environment.
For Peng Yongdong to break through with shells today, success is as difficult as failure. No chance, no luck.
This article is reprinted from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1149
This site is for inclusion only, and the copyright belongs to the original author.