It's not as simple as Baidu being out, AT confrontation, the biggest earthquake on the Internet is happening (transfer)
Text / Yan Jiuyuan
BAT has become a thing of the past, and China's Internet landscape has evolved from a "three-legged confrontation" to a "two-pole confrontation" between Ali and Tencent, and the AT era has officially arrived.
Recently, Alibaba and Tencent released their financial reports for the second quarter of 2016, which can be regarded as the official declaration of the arrival of the AT era.
Alibaba has achieved the strongest growth since its IPO, with revenue in the new quarter increasing by 59% year-on-year to 32.154 billion yuan; Tencent achieved the largest growth since 2012, with revenue in the new quarter increasing by 52% year-on-year to 35.691 billion yuan. The combined market capitalization of both stands at $240 billion.
Alibaba and Tencent have left their domestic rivals far behind. Baidu and other companies in the second tier are far from the "AT pole" with a market value of more than 180 billion US dollars. BAT no longer constitutes a commensurate top three in terms of size.
If you add the $60 billion valuation of Ant Financial, which also belongs to Ali, Ali has entered the $300 billion club; and Tencent has also entered the first camp of the global Internet map. Compared with the peaks of global Internet companies: Google's market value is 540 billion US dollars, Amazon's market value is 360 billion US dollars, and Facebook's market value is 350 billion US dollars. At the same time, China's AT poles have obtained the qualification to challenge the "three mountains of the Internet".
"Heroes in the world, only make the king and the ear." In addition to the absolute leadership in market value, the reason why they have become two poles is that in China's Internet landscape, only Alibaba and Tencent have built their own complete ecosystems.
However, it is not necessarily a life-and-death struggle in front of the AT two. In the era of the Internet of Everything, Alibaba and Tencent have set up a completely different style of Internet life for each of us. This is of course not an either-or choice, but the key problem for users is that after different entrances, they lead to completely different life forms. And each user's demand for different life forms will largely determine who can take the lead in future competition between the AT poles.
The AT era has its own origins, and each has climbed to the top. Alibaba and Tencent have completely different development concepts and paths. From the three aspects of strategic planning and implementation, their respective methods and advantages of "going overseas" to participate in international competition, as well as the core ecosystem composition and corresponding service capabilities, we may see that after the "two entrances", it belongs to each of you and me. A picture of a person's Internet life.
1. Ali is desperately planning, and Tencent is desperately making money
Ali has an important change. Starting from this fiscal quarter, it has disclosed financial information for the first time according to four departments. In addition to the core e-commerce business, the other three departments are cloud computing, digital media and entertainment business, innovation projects and other businesses.
"Do you still think that Alibaba is just an e-commerce company? Many investors don't see it that way." After the second quarter earnings report of 2016, Alibaba used this sentence as the beginning of its Weibo.
E-commerce still accounts for the bulk of Ali's revenue, but what attracts the most attention is the recasting of its business map. Cloud computing, digital media and entertainment, and innovation projects are identified as three "emerging engines":
cloud computing
Among all Alibaba's businesses, Alibaba Cloud has the steepest growth curve. In terms of growth rate, Alibaba Cloud has surpassed Amazon's cloud business. Morgan Stanley therefore asserted that Alibaba will transform into a data company, while Deutsche Bank believes in a research report that Alibaba Cloud's revenue has surpassed Google's, presenting a "3A" pattern of "Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud". It is estimated that by 2020, cloud computing revenue will exceed 100 billion yuan, accounting for 27% of Ali's total revenue.
Great entertainment
Although it is still in the overall loss, it has a huge volume and a revenue growth rate of nearly 300%, behind which is a large number of users and a broad service space.
Cainiao Network
The core value of Cainiao Network lies in its logistics big data and cloud system. Credit Suisse evaluates it as an innovative business model "shared logistics information system", and CLSA defines it as a "data company". Cainiao is also at a loss, but through the big data-driven social logistics collaboration platform, it not only builds competition barriers for Alibaba e-commerce in terms of logistics speed and cost, but also aims to become one of China's commercial infrastructures.
The three major sectors other than core e-commerce just reflect Jack Ma's plan to "crawl forward" for Alibaba's business, that is, its businesses take turns leading the way. According to the plan:
From 2017 to 2019, Ant Financial, a super unicorn with a valuation of US$60 billion, was the leader;
From 2019 to 2021, Alibaba Cloud will take over;
From 2021 to 2024, the rookie will take the lead.
Just like the relay athletes, the Ali business will take over the baton one by one.
Ali people claim that this is "to repair the roof on a sunny day". Through a series of layouts such as big data cloud computing, payment and finance, logistics, big entertainment, and rural Taobao, Ali initially has the ability to provide and upgrade Internet infrastructure to the entire business community.
Some people commented that this concentrated display of the new business matrix reflects Ali's determination to leave the comfort zone. It is said that when Alibaba Cloud was first founded, except for Wang Jian, no one on Alibaba's board of directors knew what cloud computing was going to do, but Jack Ma still insisted on making huge investments year after year. Cainiao, Wenyu, and rural Taobao seem to be going through the same process.
If Ali's goal is no longer to be a pure e-commerce company, Tencent is using all the good steel on the sharpest blade, and increasingly becoming the largest, profitable and unchallenged game company.
Mobile gaming is Tencent's crown jewel. Mobile games contributed 9.6 billion yuan in revenue in the new quarter, compared with 4.4 billion, 4.5 billion, 5.3 billion, and 7.1 billion in the four quarters of 2015.
Since the fourth quarter of last year, Tencent's mobile games have shown explosive growth and brought huge benefits to Tencent.
Due to the popularity of smartphones, the growth of China's PC terminal game market has slowed down in recent years, and Tencent decided to shift the company's main business to mobile games as early as 2014. In the fourth quarter of 2014, Tencent announced: "In terms of online games, the company will expand its leading position in the Chinese market from PC to mobile." During the previous two sessions, Ma Huateng made it clear to the media that Tencent The main business will be the layout of global mobile games.
Unlike Ma Yun's constant tossing and searching for new boundaries, Ma Huateng is focusing on continuing to devour the big cake of the game market. In people's minds, Tencent's biggest killer, social products, actually only accounts for a small portion of its revenue.
Ma Huateng once said: "In the past, everyone thought that Tencent could do everything, and we also took a detour. We have changed a lot in the past two years, cutting off more and more businesses... Since we entered mobile game operations Since then, a lot of energy has been devoted to deploying global mobile games, which is our main business."
Today, Tencent accounts for 6 of the top 10 games in the Chinese Apple App Store, and 10 of the top 20.
League of Legends, represented by Tencent, has long occupied the throne of the world's most profitable online games, accounting for nearly 12% of global online game revenue at its peak. In the whole 2015, the top three games in the global PC revenue: League of Legends, Cross Fire, Dungeon and Warriors, and their Chinese agents are Tencent.
Games are also the core channel for Tencent to turn its advantages in social software into revenue. Mobile QQ and WeChat have become unique and terrifying channel barriers for Tencent's mobile games. At the same time, Tencent keenly grasped the trend of mobile game adaptation of terminal game IP, and obtained the operation rights of a large number of high-quality IP-adapted mobile game works of competitors in the terminal game era, such as "Legend of Blood" in cooperation with Shanda, from Giant Company "Journey" in hand; on the other hand, new smartphone game types are constantly being introduced, such as fishing games and new role-playing games.
Mobile QQ and WeChat have become the best ways for gamers to display, communicate and cooperate with friends, and share game peripherals, which further attracts massive attention and users.
The earnings of Supercell, the world's top game company and developer of the star product "Clash of Clans," have not been included in the new quarter's earnings report. On July 25 this year, the Wall Street Journal disclosed that the EU has approved Tencent’s acquisition of Finnish mobile game developer Supercell for about $8.6 billion. "The Wall Street Journal" commented on this: This largest overseas acquisition in Tencent's history shows that the company has completely returned to the field of games that it is best at.
Newzoo's data shows that Tencent's total revenue in 2015 was US$15 billion, of which Tencent Holdings' game revenue was as high as US$8.5 billion, which means that the contribution from games has already exceeded half. And through the acquisition of Supercell, Tencent Holdings' game revenue has soared to at least $13 billion. This not only means that in the global game market of 99.6 billion US dollars, Tencent will dominate the share of 13%. At the same time, it also indicates that more than 70% of Tencent's future revenue will come from games.
Tencent has achieved the goal of becoming the world's largest game company, and is reaping the double dividends of the explosion of the Chinese game market and the explosion of global mobile games. The American "Fortune" magazine even asserted: "Tencent will no longer show itself as a social media giant." Unlike Ali's painstaking bet on the future, for Tencent, the best time is now.
2. What do you rely on to climb over the "three mountains of the world"?
Like Tencent's acquisition of Supercell, Ali also has its own star-level acquisitions. In April of this year, Ali announced the acquisition of Lazada, a Southeast Asian “Taobao”, for US$1 billion. This is the largest overseas investment by a Chinese e-commerce company to date.
However, after reviewing the process of going overseas, it can be found that Ali's going out is not limited to e-commerce business. At the same time as the acquisition of Lazada, Alibaba Cloud had just completed the expansion of its data center in Singapore.
Cloud computing is the vanguard of Ali's going overseas. In May of this year, Alibaba Cloud Computing entered the Japanese market and set up a data center in Japan; at the same time, it entered the Korean market. In the first stage, the service focuses on industries such as games, e-commerce, and communications. From then on, Chinese, Japanese and Korean companies will likely use a unified cloud computing platform to expand their global business together. With the opening of data centers in Europe, Australia, and the Middle East this year, as well as the data centers in the US East, US West, Singapore and Hong Kong that have already been opened, Alibaba Cloud will compete with AWS and Azure globally.
In addition to cloud computing, Alibaba's Cainiao Network has also entered the Japanese market. With the services of Cainiao, the shipping cost of cross-border e-commerce transactions between China and Japan has dropped by more than 30%. At the same time, Cainiao Network and Kazakhstan Post have reached comprehensive cooperation in cross-border e-commerce and logistics in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Take Russia as an example. Previously, it took Russian users up to 1 month to purchase goods on AliExpress, but now it has increased to an average speed of 3.8 days.
At present, Cainiao's cross-border network has connected to 110 warehouses around the world, covering 224 countries and regions.
Alipay's overseas expansion is even more in-depth. In the first quarter of this year, the number of Indian "Alipay" Paytm users invested by Ant Financial reached 135 million, an increase of more than 5 times compared with 2015, making it the fourth largest "wallet" in the world.
Alipay has penetrated into more than 70 countries and regions, including Airbnb, Agoda, Bookings and other major hotel and accommodation booking websites; Uber, Grab and other taxi software; Starwood, Marriott and other multinational hotel chains, as well as many airlines, More than 70,000 stores in nearly 20 countries and regions in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea have access to Alipay.
During his trip to the United States last year, Jack Ma once said: "Over the next ten years, overseas markets will account for half of Ali's revenue."
The core word of this sentence is actually "future". In the strategy of going overseas, Ali does not rely solely on mature e-commerce business to directly harvest profits, but follows the logic of business map recasting, builds basic services with big data cloud computing, logistics network, payment and finance, and drives e-commerce business at the same time Expand overseas.
However, it must be noted that the cloud computing and logistics networks involved in Alibaba's overseas operations are all at the forefront of the field. Not only must it compete with global giants, but at the same time, it is full of technical and commercial uncertainties. Alibaba is betting that the "future" can Whether it succeeds remains to be seen.
Tencent's key word is clearly "now", securing its place as the world's largest gaming company.
The acquisition of Supercell is by no means Tencent's first foray into the international gaming market. At the World Mobile Game Conference in July 2014, it was disclosed that Tencent has invested 50 cases in the game industry, covering 10 countries and regions. Among them, 2010 and 2014 were the two years when Tencent invested the most in the game field, and they were also the key points for Tencent to enter the mobile game market.
In the past ten years, Tencent has acquired a total of 32 game companies worldwide, including 16 PC game companies and 16 mobile game companies, of which 25 are overseas game companies. In addition, Tencent has also invested in a console game company, a web game company, and a game publishing company. The cumulative investment exceeds 10 billion US dollars.
In terms of revenue data, in the entire game industry, Tencent has ranked first in the world; in the field of mobile games, Tencent ranked third in the world. However, from the perspective of revenue structure, the main source of Tencent's game revenue is still the Chinese market. The purpose of acquiring Supercell is simple: to achieve the dominance of the "main business" mobile game, and use this as a springboard to enter Tencent's game business into the international market and achieve a true global first.
Today, Tencent owns Riot Games, which develops League of Legends, and about 40% of Epic Games. It is also a major shareholder in CJ Games, a South Korean game development and publishing company. It also owns Activision Blizzard and Glu Mobile. Take a certain share, and Blizzard bought King Digital Entertainment for $5.9 billion.
On a global scale, Tencent has established a complete ecological chain from game development, distribution, operation, competition, to information and peripheral products. It can even be said that Tencent indirectly controls about one-third of the world's top ten game companies. game revenue.
Compared with the game business's global expansion, Tencent's overseas expansion of social business is much more low-key.
As early as 2005, QQ operated in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries, and it was always a bit tepid. After 2013, WeChat also began to go overseas. However, compared with Whatsapp and FaceBook, the growth of WeChat overseas users is difficult to break through the bottleneck. Judging from the financial report of the new quarter, the growth rate of WeChat accounts has decreased significantly, from a single quarter growth of 60 million in the first quarter to 43 million in the second quarter.
It can be seen that Tencent's global layout strictly follows Ma Huateng's "main business of mobile games", social networking is placed in a secondary position, and games are the main force of the hurricane. This is closely related to the rising trend of the global game market and Tencent itself to harvest the current strategic thinking.
There is no doubt that Tencent will sit firmly on the throne of the global game industry for a long time in the future, but the problem is also obvious: if it wants to compete with Google, Amazon, and Facebook, the "three international mountains" of the Internet, it is impossible to rely on games alone. Is it enough? Gaming is obviously the most lucrative industry, but throughout the history of the Internet, no gaming company has ever been able to compete with a company like Google that provides the basic technology of the Internet or a company like Amazon that provides basic services for Internet commerce.
Tencent's easy harvesting in the game field, and the corporate strategy formed with the harvesting habits, are based on the subculture of young people with Chinese characteristics (consists of economic, political and social stratification and other factors), and the accompanying The explosion of game culture and game market. But this foundation is a special case, not a universal one. Tencent's overseas siege is aimed at controlling the entire game industry from the ecological chain, but the ultimate goal of realizing the largest settlement has to return to the Chinese market.
The provision of commercial infrastructure is universal, which means that it is far more difficult than the game field. On the other hand, Ali, e-commerce itself is not an industry that can be harvested in a short time. It is like building a shopping mall. Buildings cannot be built out of thin air. Roads, water, electricity and coal must go first. This is destined that Ali can only export to the sea with basic commercial services as the first. Not only does it build bridges for e-commerce, but itself will become a bigger business.
3. The two entrances in front of you
No matter how the business structure changes and upgrades, Taobao has always been the soul of Ali.
Taobao is not only as simple as the birthplace and the most important business for Ali. Taobao is the core scenario where Ali reaches users, understands users and empowers users. It is the starting point for Ali to build the relationship between people and business, and it is also the source of inspiration for Ali to develop all business forms in the future. By observing Taobao's evolution strategy, we can more clearly see the direction of Ali's overall strategy.
Taobao daily active users opened Taobao seven times a day on average in June, and Taobao users posted more than 20 million comments every day. Alibaba CEO Zhang Yong said in the new quarterly financial report: "With intelligent data-driven social, community and personalized services, we have changed the way 434 million active users interact on the platform, and gradually realize the vision of live@Alibaba."
Shout out "live@Alibaba", indicating that Ali's social fear after the rise of WeChat has determined a new response.
Ali's more thorough transformation of Taobao is to upgrade Taobao from operational traffic to operational data through the drive of intelligent data, so as to become a completely open, tool-based basic service (data product) for merchants and buyers. Thereby, an ecosystem with self-growth vitality.
Data is the key word of Taobao's future. It is said that Alibaba's internal research department has put forward the direction of "digitalization of all business and businessization of all data"; data is also the key word of Alibaba's future. Based on big data and cloud computing, it provides Business, payment, finance, logistics and other products, and finally complete the infrastructure construction in the era of intelligent business.
If Ali's gaze is downward, to build infrastructure at the bottom of future business forms, then Tencent's gaze is upward, to harvest users' time and attention.
Our attention is the treasure house of Tencent. In the interpretation of the new quarterly financial report, Tencent disclosed that the ARPU value (average revenue per user) of MMOG games is between RMB 310 and RMB 415, the ARPU value of casual games is between RMB 85 and RMB 350, and the ARPU value of smartphone games is between RMB 85 and RMB 350. The ARPU value ranges from RMB 150 to RMB 165. Such a high ARPU value comes from a large number of users, and more importantly, from the user time occupied.
According to Quest Mobile’s June 2016 ranking of total app usage time, Tencent’s WeChat, QQ, QQ Zone and QQ Light Chat occupied four of the top ten longest-running online social fields, and occupied the top two name.
At present, the construction of social business and commercial application scenarios represented by WeChat is still immature. For the use of social software, Tencent is still most handy in leveraging its channel advantages, attracting users' time and attention, and bringing the most convenient and lucrative realization through the game business.
One is the control of the overall ecological chain of global games, and the other is the attention contributed by Chinese users. These are the two foundations of the future Tencent empire. The starting point of all Tencent strategies is based on the continuous consolidation and strengthening of these two pillars.
As AT has climbed to two poles, the era has come when a few giants provide access to Internet life for the whole people. In this era, small and medium Internet companies will parasitize on the infrastructure of giants and jointly form and prosper an ecosystem; each of you and me Will be included and live in this ecosystem.
And Ali builds downwards, Tencent gains upwards, and after the entrance, it is a completely different Internet life.
Based on data and computing, Ali will be responsible for the construction of a complete set of "Internet water, electricity and coal" infrastructure such as transactions, payments, logistics, and business tools; Ali's services will constitute the bottom layer of future business, and our lives are closely related to the business ecology that grows from this. , we ourselves are also the factors that allow the business ecosystem to continue to grow and evolve.
Tencent will form another complete ecosystem with social software, media platforms, global control and the entire industry chain represented by WeChat and QQ. The time and attention of each of us is this ecosystem. The most critical resources included also provide the most important output of this ecosystem.
The two different ecosystems are the projections of different styles of Alibaba and Tencent. Ali originated in the wild and embraced the all-encompassing business public with three religions and nine streams, and has the tenacity to bear weight and pioneer; Tencent is more like born with a silver spoon, and its star products always fit the current era, and have the ability to explosively sweep users and realize it. , Behind the calm mask of "engineering culture", decisiveness and efficiency are its biggest characteristics.
In any case, AT is the essence of China's Internet development so far. The difference is that Tencent is already harvesting the present, while Ali is focusing on betting on the future. After the "two poles", the future that each of us is closely related to is accelerating.
This article was published by Yan Jiuyuan authorized by Huxiu.com and edited by Huxiu.com. To reprint this article, please indicate the author's name at the beginning of the article, maintain the integrity of the article (including Huxiu notes and other author identity information), and please attach the source (huxiu.com) and the link to this page. Original link: http://www.huxiu.com/article/161926/1.html