Kuaigou’s listing can hardly hide Yao Jinbo’s fall behind

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On June 24, Kuaigou Taxi was successfully listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The public offering price was HK$21.5 per share, an increase of 6% on the first day, and the market value exceeded HK$14 billion.

This means that the first share of the intra-city freight track was officially born.

From the first submission of the listing prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in August last year, to passing the listing hearing in February this year, to postponing the supplementary materials for listing, and finally submitting the prospectus for the second time in April and passing the hearing for the second time in June.

For this dream of ringing the bell, Kuaigou has been waiting for nearly a year.

However, this time, the three Kuaigou truck drivers stood under the spotlight and became the bell ringers. Yao Jinbo did not personally participate in the bell ringing session.

ring the bell three times

Before that, Yao Jinbo had already struck the bell twice in his entrepreneurial career.

The first time was in 2010, when the education field was wildly sought after by capital. In that year, 4 education groups in China were successfully listed: Ambow Education Group went public in August, Xueersi International Education Group announced its listing in September, and Global Education Group announced its listing in October. Tianxia Education was officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and Xueda Education also rang the bell on the New York Stock Exchange in November.

Yao Jinbo, the co-founder of Xueda Education, was the first time he experienced the feeling of ringing a bell, and the first time was always unforgettable, and he still remembers it many years later.

At that time, 58.com was already 5 years old. Although he was happy and excited, what Yao Jinbo really hoped in his heart was that he could take 58.com to ring the bell one day.

In 2013, Yao Jinbo really took 58.com to stand on the stage of the New York Stock Exchange again and successfully IPO. 58.com has become China’s first listed information classification website. This is Yao Jinbo’s second time to ring the bell. He is no longer excited, but even calm, because he is already familiar with the procedures and rules of the US capital market.

“From my appearance on the NYSE to the ringing of the bell, I knew when to clap and when to smile.”

And one of the things he is happiest about is that he successfully dieted and lost weight before the listing, so that on the day of the IPO, he looked more handsome than usual in a suit.

Harvesting two listed companies in just 3 years has made Yao Jinbo’s worth skyrocketing and realized financial freedom.

The car is a symbol of a man’s wealth and status. In the second year of 58.com’s listing, Yao Jinbo was on the hot search because he bought the first Infiniti Q50. One of them, even the key, was handed over to him by the then global president of Infiniti.

In China’s Internet wave, there are very few entrepreneurs who can ring the bell twice in a row. None of the three BAT leaders has unlocked this achievement. Li Xiang, the leader of Ideal Auto, is one (Autohome and Ideal Auto), and the result Yao Jinbo knocked for the third time.

In 2014, Yao Jinbo aimed at the hot O2O track and launched the life service project 58 Daojia. 58 Express and Housekeeping are the two core businesses of Daojia. In November of the same year, 58 Daojia was divided by Yao Jinbo from the same city as 58 and began to operate independently.

At that time, Yao Jinbo said confidently that he had 90% confidence that 58 Daojia would be listed on the market.

It didn’t take long for the express business to be split off and independent. In 2017, it merged with GOGOVAN, an intra-city freight and logistics platform in Southeast Asia, and changed its name to “Kaigou Taxi” to start its own intra-city freight journey, while the housekeeping business was changed to Swan Daojia. .

The flag set up is considered to be realized, but this time it seems that there is nothing worthy of his joy.

In the one year of waiting, Kuaigou Taxi has changed from the second largest in the same-city freight market in China to the third in the industry. In the past four years, Kuaigou Taxi has been in a state of loss, with a cumulative loss of nearly 2.8 billion yuan.

The cheers of the bloodshed are somewhat sad.

The sadness behind the excitement

Before Kuaigou Taxi cleared the IPO, Yao Jinbo had already failed two ace cards.

58.com will be delisted in 2020. Before the delisting, Yao Jinbo announced the blueprint for organizational upgrading: splitting the horizontal information classification platform into multiple vertical industry platforms and going independently to the capital market.

The pillars of the 58 series to enter the capital market are Zhuanzhuan, Swan Daojia, Anjuke and Kuaigou Taxi.

The first to strike was Anjuke.

The founder of this real estate information service platform established in 2007 was originally named Liang Weiping. In 2015, Yao Jinbo acquired Anjuke at a price of 267 million US dollars. He gave Liang Weiping a promise to make it the No. 1 home search in China. platform.

Anjuke is indeed recognized as Yao Jinbo’s best asset, and it was once regarded as the key support for Yao Jinbo’s return to the front line of the Internet.

In April last year, Anjuke submitted a prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. As a result, when the prospectus expired, it failed to pass the hearing of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Until now, the prospectus has not been updated.

On the contrary, its biggest competitor, Shell, a subsidiary of Lianjia, successfully launched its second IPO in Hong Kong last month. Yao Jinbo’s promise to Liang Weiping was not fulfilled.

The second relay is that the swan arrives home. In July 2021, Swan Daojia officially submitted an IPO prospectus to the New York Stock Exchange, hitting the first share of China’s home service platform.

This ace has confidence, and this confidence comes from the fact that it is the TOP 1 of the family service platform. According to iResearch data, in terms of GTV in 2020, Swan Daojia is already the largest home service platform in China, although it is still in a state of loss.

But it was not very lucky. In the same month, the State Council issued the “Opinions on Strictly Combating Securities Illegal Activities in accordance with the Law”, and the regulators began to strengthen the scrutiny of Chinese companies’ overseas listings. It is precisely because of this variable that Swan Home has suspended its planned initial public offering in the United States.

It only took 17 days from the high-spirited fight to the death of the flag, and as soon as this listing plan stopped, it came to the present.

Even if Kuaigou Taxi is successfully listed today, it cannot stop Yao Jinbo’s disappointment. The failure of the first two trump cards reflects the business decline of 58.com to a certain extent.

The speed of Internet updates has exceeded Yao Jinbo’s imagination. He said in 2015: “I predicted that local life and life services would be a typhoon, but I did not predict that it would be a typhoon.” Especially the shells of Lianjia and the beauty of Wang Xing The two groups are eating away at 58’s two trump card businesses.

Wang Xing is 3 years younger than Yao Jinbo. He often goes to Yao’s house for dinner. Even Wang initially consulted Yao when he decided to start a business. The market value of Meituan has exceeded 300 billion US dollars, making it the third-highest Internet company in China at that time.

So much so that some people said when it was delisted that 58.com was a very successful company in the Internet era, but not very successful in the mobile Internet era.

This kind of failure is not limited to the performance level, but also because of the loss of popular reputation.

If you search for “58 cheated” on Baidu, more than 200 million results will pop up. On the Chinese Judgment Documents website, there are nearly 5,700 criminal cases related to 58.com, involving fraudulent security deposits, intermediary fees, drug trafficking and prostitution.

Chinese netizens nicknamed 58.com, the largest gathering place for scammers in China.

The Internet has memories. People still remember that his original intention of starting a business was to be deceived because he rented a house. He wanted to make 58.com a life service platform that everyone trusts.

Now, as soon as Yao Jinbo posts on Weibo, someone will call him a liar, worried that he will run away one day. And his Weibo has changed from being fully visible at first to only being visible for half a year.

Internet legends of yesteryear

No one can deny the past. Once upon a time, Yao Jinbo was a legend in the Chinese Internet industry.

In 1999, when most people didn’t realize the wave of the Internet, Yao Jinbo, who had just graduated from university, took advantage of his spare time to set up a personal website for domain name registration transactions – E-domain.com.

Yao Jinbo likes domain names. He even registers and collects the domain names he likes. Compared with other people’s collection of red wine or calligraphy and paintings, this is a special hobby.

And thanks to this habit, nine months later, Yao Jinbo sold E-domain to Wanwang, the head service provider of enterprise network applications at the time. The first pot of gold also joined Wanwang as a product director.

Xueda Education was an educational enterprise founded by him and two other people during his tenure at Wanwang. By 2010, he not only rang the bell with Xueda Education, but also became the vice president of Wanwang.

58.com was a company he founded in 2005, but he felt that the most powerful thing he did was not to bring 58.com to go public, but to facilitate the merger of Ganji and 58.com.cn.

In business, sometimes mergers are a better way to end a war and look to the future. After returning from the listing in the United States, Yao Jinbo launched an attack on Yang Haoyong, the CEO of Ganji, with text messages and invitations to eat.

On a certain evening during the Spring Festival in 2015, Yao Jinbo and Yang Haoyong formally held the last merger negotiation for more than 20 hours at the Westin Hotel. He fought against several major shareholders from Ganji alone, and stopped several times on the way. The shareholders of Ganji left one by one. He himself wanted to slam the door several times, but insisted on talking about the next morning.

The valuation quotation is the core of the debate, and Yao Jinbo chose to make concessions. From the initial 7:3 to 6:4, and then to the final 5:5, 58.com invested 43.2% of Ganji in the form of stock exchange + cash. This is a concession, but also a pattern.

Later, someone asked him the most successful thing in the ten years of starting a business, Yao Jinbo said without thinking: “58 rush to merge.”

He wasn’t as low-key back then as he is now. After listing, he expanded the boundaries through investment and mergers and acquisitions, such as Guquan Car Wash, Charm 91, Tubatu, Momo, China Talent Network, Anjuke, e-Driving, Driving School Yidiantong, 273 Used Car Trading Network, Baojia Car Rental, etc. It’s all in his pocket, of course, including going to the market.

He said, kill all vertical sites.

The big guys in the Internet circle gave him face and bought his account. At the 2016 and 2017 World Internet Conferences, Yao Jinbo organized a dinner party, cooked wine and discussed Taoism, and discussed Internet + life services.

His guests included Chen Hua, founder and CEO of Singba, Zuo Hui, chairman of Lianjia, Zhou Yuan, founder and CEO of Zhihu, Zhou Hongyi, CEO of 360, Cheng Wei, CEO of Didi Chuxing, and Fu Sheng, CEO of Cheetah Mobile.

Even Zhang Xiaolong, the head of WeChat, gave him three points of thin noodles. In 2015, 58 launched the APP “Zuanzhuan” focusing on the transfer of idle items.

Before the launch, Yao Jinbo found Zhang Xiaolong, a fellow from Hunan, and the WeChat team behind him to communicate many times. In the end, the WeChat team stopped the related projects under development and turned to support Zhuanzhuan.

end

But that glorious era that belonged to Yao Jinbo is obviously long gone.

Kuaigou Taxi is as cautious as Yao Jinbo now. Not only did it make clear in the prospectus that it would lose money in the future, but the statement about intensified or fierce competition appeared 25 times in the prospectus.

It can be determined that Kuaigou Taxi is giving the capital market a precaution in advance.

In April of this year, Hou Mou, an employee of 58.com, published a long article online saying that after he joined Anjuke, he participated in the 58 Love Fund charity project initiated by the company. When the employee himself or his immediate family member has a serious illness, he can apply for funding.

However, after his father suffered from cancer, he applied to 58.com for funding, but the application was not only rejected, but he also received a notice of dismissal soon after.

Many employees still remember the phrase “employees are brothers” said by Yao Jinbo at the 2016 annual meeting, and also remember that in 2019, which was regarded as the winter of the Internet, he promised not to lay off employees.

But there is love in the world, but capital is ruthless.

Maybe this is Yao Jinbo’s current way of living. He likes to read, and he has a habit of throwing it away and never taking it off the plane after reading it. In the many flights back and forth over the years, he has only taken one book off the plane, and that is Kazuo Inamori’s “Book” Living Law.

This is one of his favorite books. After reading it, he feels that life is a kind of cultivation, and all other non-outdated and unimportant additional products.

I don’t know if the feelings of employees are also an unimportant additional product for Yao Jinbo?

This article is reproduced from: http://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/csj/2022-06-24/doc-imizmscu8511908.shtml
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