Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1563
“LatePost” learned exclusively that AutoNavi held an internal meeting today (March 22) and announced the official merger with word-of-mouth business of Ali Local Life’s in-store business. In the future, all the local life-to-store businesses under Ali will be unified and integrated in the entrance of AutoNavi.
At around 10 a.m., Yu Yongfu, Alibaba partner, president of Ali Group’s life service segment, chairman of AutoNavi Group, CEO of local life company Yu Yongfu, and Guo Ning, COO of AutoNavi, appeared in the live broadcast meeting.
Yu Yongfu said that organizational adjustment is only a means, and the purpose is business development. Don’t mention “you” or “you” after the merger, they are all “our Gaode”, one participant felt that Yu Yongfu especially emphasized “we work together” to do a good job in the store business, “even if everyone wears it now’ Military uniforms’ are different, problem solving comes first.”
The big president of Ali likes to emphasize that he is a man of science and technology, pursuing the rationality of winning without losing. In today’s online meeting, he said that his management method is “rational thinking and emotional decision-making.”
Yu Yongfu has his own unique discourse system. The “541 formation” he leads is a classic football defensive formation; he also likes to cite classic wars in history to explain the current situation facing the business; In the service sector, Ele.me and AutoNavi are called by him two major “land products” – they are the user positions of the home and store business respectively.
Although today’s meeting was twice as long as the original 45 minutes, there was still no mention of specific issues such as how to arrange the word-of-mouth team after the merger and how AutoNavi will develop in-store business. According to feedback from many participants, this is more like a swearing-in meeting announcing the merger of the two businesses.
“LatePost” learned that in the next quarter, the two teams of AutoNavi and Koubei will work together to explore how to integrate, and after a three-month running-in period, they will determine the key direction of business and organizational adjustments. We learned that Zhang Liang, head of word-of-mouth business, will report to Guo Ning, COO of AutoNavi.
At present, the contract subjects, ranks, and salaries of Koubei employees have not changed for the time being, and the stock will not be involved in adjustments for the time being. Word-of-mouth HR told employees that many adjustments are still uncertain, and “listen to the unified arrangement of AutoNavi.”
In this regard, the relevant staff of AutoNavi responded that, as an “open service platform for a better life when going out”, AutoNavi Maps has been committed to providing users with “everywhere familiar” destination services. The addition of the new team will help Gaode To provide better destination services for users and ecological partners.
In the 15 years since Koubei was acquired by Ali, it has gone through four stages of development: Taobao (Taobao), Alipay (Alipay), Hungry (Ele.me), and Gaode (AutoNavi). One of the wandering businesses.
A local person living in Ali believes that “entering Gao” may be the best destination for word-of-mouth in Ali at present-“Taobao and Alipay lack the store experience and intelligence, only traffic; Ele.me has no store intelligence and traffic; Gao German traffic is better, serving destination consumption.”
But most of the industry people we interviewed have not cared about word of mouth for a long time. Someone also asked, “Is word of mouth still alive?”
They focus on the local life of Douyin and the competition of Meituan. A super platform with a daily life of 700 million, which takes up a lot of Chinese people’s time, and wants to become a universal portal for mobile terminals, and an old-fashioned local life service platform that has access to the most merchants and users are competing in the in-store business. The gunfire between the two sides is also spreading to Takeaway field.
This word-of-mouth “into high”, Ali uses AutoNavi as a unified entrance for local life to store business, will it be a good choice? This question, only time can answer.
Established nearly 20 years ago, word of mouth drifted for the fifth time
Looking back at the history of word-of-mouth, the life of this product is longer and more tortuous than most products on the Internet in China today.
In the nearly 20 years since its birth in 2004, Koubei has experienced five stages: being acquired by Ali, entering Taobao, entering Alipay, entering Ele.me, and the latest entry into AutoNavi.
In 2004, Li Zhiguo, a former employee of Ali, founded Koubei.com, which was acquired by Ali four years later. It was merged into Yahoo China and passed on to Taobao, but failed to achieve significant results. The products were hidden by Ali.
Afterwards, Ali continued to explore the local life business. Lu Zhaoxi, then CEO of Ali, launched the Taobao intra-city project “Taodiandian” in 2013, using multiple promotions such as Double Eleven and Double Twelve to guide and transport users for the Taodiandian project. It is weaker than Meituan and Ele.me in terms of offline business expansion and service quality control. In 2014, Taodiandian’s market share, user activity, and city coverage all lagged behind the two.
The local life encountered obstacles again, so Ali tried to restart word-of-mouth. In 2015, Ali and Ant Financial jointly invested 6 billion yuan to restart Koubei, and the Taodiandian team and Ant Financial (later renamed “Ant Group”) offline business team jointly injected Koubei. New Koubei was given the mission to check and balance Meituan while helping Alipay promote offline payments.
During this period, Ali once debated whether to adopt a horse racing mechanism, which not only supports Koubei Waimai to compete with Meituan, but also competes with Meituan through the acquisition of Ele.me. “LatePost” previously reported that Ali’s investment department supported the latter at the time. Fan Chi, then CEO of Koubei, and Peng Lei, then chairman and CEO of Ant Financial, supported the Koubei team to do it themselves.
In the end, Ali chose to invest US$1.25 billion to buy Ele.me in April 2018. Half a year later, Koubei and Ele.me jointly established Ali’s local life service company, and the data of Koubei continued to decline.
The importance of word-of-mouth in Ali’s local life was once on a par with Ele.me, but its deep binding with Alipay also laid hidden dangers for its development. Wang Lei, who was the CEO of the local life company at the time, once said: “Looking at word-of-mouth from the perspective of the time, we must support the battle of payment, (this also determines that it is) difficult to become another platform alone.”
At the beginning of 2022, “LatePost” once exclusively reported that Koubei’s catering business has shrunk from the 40 cities it directly operated in the past to 11 cities (now less than 10 cities), focusing on first- and second-tier cities. Its shrinking idea is to direct sales only in profitable cities, and turn the rest of the cities into a service provider model. Catering is the most important business of Koubei, which contributes about 70% of its transaction volume, but it is in a loss state.
Word-of-mouth has encountered obstacles in the layout of Ali’s local life, but AutoNavi, which was originally in a marginal position in Ali’s business system, has grown step by step and has become one of Ali’s most eye-catching businesses in the past few years.
AutoNavi’s daily life has reached over 100 million stable, and has reached a new stage of expansion
The rise of AutoNavi began when Yu Yongfu took over in 2015. At that time, AutoNavi Maps was in a fierce battle with Baidu Maps. The two sides chose two different development routes. Baidu Maps wanted to be an O2O platform, but AutoNavi Maps retreated to map tools. Yu Yongfu took office After cutting off the O2O business, let AutoNavi focus on doing more LBS (location-based service) products.
A year and a half later, AutoNavi Maps Daily Live, which was originally at a disadvantage, began to surpass Baidu. Baidu Maps continued to invest in O2O and continued to lose money. The poor user experience caused a large number of users to switch to AutoNavi. Since then, AutoNavi’s DAU has grown from 30 million to more than 100 million in 2021, stably becoming the number one in China, ahead of other map platforms.
In July 2021, Ali will form the life service sector based on the three major businesses based on geographic location services, namely AutoNavi, Local Life and Fliggy, under the unified responsibility of Yu Yongfu.
At the Ali Investor Conference at the end of that year, Yu Yongfu elaborated on his plan for the life service sector. Yu Yongfu believes that maps are the best carrier for the entire real world. He hopes that AutoNavi can use a map to carry food, clothing, housing and transportation, and connect all destinations together through maps, so that users can not only refuel and recharge on the map, but also find food. Destination and book hotel tickets.
Yu Yongfu judged that the demarcation point of the local living market is who can reach 300 million DAU, and the market will transform from the pursuit of scale to the pursuit of efficiency. At that time, Ali’s entire life service sector and Meituan’s daily active users were around 100 million, which was still far away from this dividing point.
“LatePost” learned that there used to be a “121 theory” inside AutoNavi, which explained the three development stages of AutoNavi products:
- “1” refers to 1 million DAU (number of daily active users), and AutoNavi can only do one function well at this stage;
- “2” refers to 20 million DAU. Before that, AutoNavi should focus on product experience. After achieving this data indicator, AutoNavi can start to consider building a platform;
- The second “1” refers to 100 million DAU. At this stage, AutoNavi can do distribution and start to do other things.
At present, according to QuestMobile data, the average monthly DAU of AutoNavi has exceeded 100 million for 24 consecutive months, reaching the stage where it is capable of distribution. The average monthly DAU of Meituan has also stabilized at more than 100 million since July 2022.
Aggregated taxi rides and local life services are all “other things” chosen by AutoNavi.
In February of this year, AutoNavi’s average daily taxi-hailing volume reached 8 million at one point, ranking second in the online car-hailing market without a doubt; after word-of-mouth is merged into AutoNavi, there will be more room for experimentation in the in-store business , just yesterday (March 21), AutoNavi also officially launched the function of “pick up along the street” for Starbucks coffee. AutoNavi self-driving users place an order for Starbucks in AutoNavi, and they don’t need to get out of the car when passing through the store. coffee. This service was first launched in 150 stores in Beijing and Shanghai, and will be implemented in more than 1,000 Starbucks stores across the country in the future.
AutoNavi’s thinking on “destination service” starts more from the B side than the C side. In terms of online car-hailing, AutoNavi started by gathering the low-end transportation capacity that was cleared by Didi, and seized the gap in Didi’s off-shelf to grow rapidly; in the hotel business, AutoNavi also connected to Fliggy, Qunar, Tongcheng, Platforms such as Ctrip and third-party merchants encourage multiple channel merchants to bid on AutoNavi, and consumers can choose the merchant with the best price to place an order.
Now that word-of-mouth has been merged into AutoNavi, the breakthrough that AutoNavi can seek in store-to-store business may also come from the B-side. As a low-commission LBS matching platform, it helps small and medium-sized merchants on the B-side to solve problems such as traffic and payment. If we start from the C-side idea, Koubei will directly face the problem of mismatching users’ minds—the mainstream mind of most users is not to open the map to find restaurants, play and buy food—the decision-making path through the map becomes longer instead.
An industry insider believes that it will take longer for AutoNavi to adapt to the mentality of users to go to the store, but this is also what AutoNavi under Yu Yongfu is good at. When AutoNavi first tried to enter the taxi-hailing field in 2017, users were not used to hailing taxis on the map. However, AutoNavi has helped most users gradually develop the habit of taking taxis on AutoNavi through a series of strategies such as providing subsidies, online car-hailing bidding for low-price taxis, and converting users through public transportation navigation.
Catch up on the fiercest competition of the year for local living to shop
Although a number of people from Ali commented on us, the merger of Koubei and AutoNavi, with the support of the latter’s 120 million daily active users and more product strategies, may be the best opportunity that Koubei has encountered in the past few years. The product is more in line with word-of-mouth business.
The current battle situation is that Koubei will face the fiercest competition with a single-digit share in the in-store market. The biggest variable comes from Douyin. This super product with 700 million daily active users is putting more resources into the battlefield of local life, and has even begun to affect the position of Meituan, the number one player in the market. 2023 will be a fierce competition in local life. Year.
As early as 2019, when Douyin was still fiercely competing with Kuaishou, the management team of Douyin believed that it should return to the positioning of the product itself-“see and connect”, and the connection does not only stop at information and people, but also includes services.
Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, put forward his own suggestion at that time, to go deep in “catering, shopping, and travel”. Douyin Group CEO Zhang Nan’s “extreme imagination” for Douyin is to become a universal portal for users’ mobile terminals. Douyin’s daily activity should be as high as its monthly activity, and it can become an inseparable product in users’ lives. Users open Douyin to brush content, which can also be used to shop, choose restaurants, make travel plans, buy air tickets and book hotels.
“LatePost” once reported that Douyin will start to promote the local life business in 2021. In 2022, the turnover of local life will be close to 90 billion yuan. At the beginning of this year, the real turnover of local life in 2023 will be nearly 400 billion yuan. aggressive goals.
Douyin’s entry into the hinterland of Meituan started with low prices. The former chose to put on the shelves a group of food and beverage group purchase packages with prices lower than that of Meituan, and cultivated a group of users who would actively search for restaurants and milk tea shops on Douyin and place group purchase orders. Since then, Douyin has begun to adjust its product structure, encouraging merchants to produce better video content to increase consumption conversion rates, and also adjusted the platform algorithm and recommendation mechanism to give more recommendations to videos created by high-quality merchants.
At present, in addition to catering, Douyin is also successively attracting investment in areas such as travel and tourism, and will start a full-scale competition with Meituan from local competition with in-store catering as the core to the entire local life business.
Previously, some Douyin people believed that Meituan was slow to respond to its competition. Several Meituan people told LatePost that Meituan noticed Douyin’s quick group buying action when it arrived in the store last year, and the countermeasures on the business side stayed as simple as possible. Don’t be more expensive than Douyin, give certain traffic support to merchants, and encourage merchants to put more preferential packages on the shelves.
Last year, Meituan’s in-store business focused more on refined upgrades and cost reduction and efficiency enhancement, such as improving the matching accuracy of internal algorithms and users; hoping to expand to a greater extent; expanding the scale of users and the number of new recruits.
A person from Meituan said that there was a consensus within Meituan last year that Douyin’s live broadcast e-commerce business is more efficient and has higher returns. In contrast, local life is more complicated and has lower returns. .
Meituan is more in a wait-and-see state about this, and the company has spent more time recognizing the logic of the two businesses and realizing the threat of Douyin. It is understood that Meituan has long expected that Douyin will be involved in local life and will make some rapid breakthroughs with the help of traffic, but when the opponent is in front of it, the business development is faster than Meituan imagined.
However, Douyin’s competition has also inspired Meituan’s determination to fight and change internally. A management of Meituan recently said internally, “Small success depends on friends, and great success depends on opponents.”
At present, some production and research support departments of Meituan have received a clear signal that the number of goals of the S-Team, the highest decision-making body of Meituan, has increased compared with last year, most of which are to support the needs of in-store business. Meituan will continue to reduce costs and increase efficiency this year, but will relax cost restrictions on investment in in-store business, and do its best to support in-store business.
“LatePost” learned that Meituan has made it clear that it will concentrate its superior resources to deal with Douyin’s attack. Measures include but are not limited to investing in content ecological construction, giving merchants more preferential policies, and putting more subsidies to attract consumers.
With the increasingly fierce competition between Douyin and Meituan, Gaode has increased his investment in local life, and this will be an uneasy year.
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