China Internet from following to leading, 60 Chinese and foreign benchmarking giants PK.

Original: Wu Meimei IT orange

Author: Wu Meimei

Source: IT orange (itjuzi521)

Recently, Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, made a fire. "If the United States doesn’t act, then China will overtake us! The reason is that digital currency Libra, launched by FB, has been opposed by regulators in various countries only four months since its high-profile release (French and German regulators have issued a joint statement that "the right to issue money is part of national sovereignty and private companies cannot own it"); A quarter of the founding members such as VISA and eBay announced their withdrawal from the Libra Association.

Looking back on the past 25 years, technology has changed and developed by leaps and bounds, and the Internet has experienced two waves of Web and mobile. A number of technology predators such as Amazon, Google and Facebook have been born in the United States, and Silicon Valley has become the "Internet Holy Land" that attracts worldwide attention. While China began to learn from American technology companies after accessing the Internet in 1994, and now the penetration rate of mobile payment has been ahead of the world, far exceeding that of developed countries in Europe and America. Zuckerberg felt the threat from China.

It must be said that this change is closely related to the openness of the Internet: the Internet has crossed national boundaries since its birth. Most of the first Internet tycoons like Li Yanhong in China are returnees, so it is the only way to learn the new models, technologies and products of Silicon Valley in the United States. To this end, IT Orange has sorted out the star Internet benchmarking companies that have emerged at home and abroad in the past 20 years and found an interesting phenomenon-

In recent years, the global 2C Internet has become so popular that it can even be called "outstanding". They have changed the lifestyle of human beings such as shopping, socializing, entertainment, reading, traveling and even eating. As a "backward student", China probably experienced these three stages: the first stage, completely imitating and copying the American model, represented by Baidu search, QQ and Taobao; In the second stage, learn from foreign new models and carry out localization improvement, represented by Sina Weibo, Renren.com and JD.COM; The third stage is to dig deep into the local market and discover new business opportunities and new models, represented by today’s headlines and Tik Tok.

The Internet has no borders, and successful business models are similar.

According to the incomplete statistics of IT oranges, there are 29 American star companies in this arrangement, involving 8 fields, of which 11 are the most social fields, followed by 8 in the local life field and 4 in the cultural and entertainment field. Nine companies have been acquired, and a total of 15 companies have been listed; There are 30 star companies in China, involving 8 fields, of which 9 are social fields, 8 are local life fields, and 6 are cultural and entertainment fields. Four companies have been acquired and 11 companies have been listed. (The article is very long. It is recommended to read it after collection.)

From the perspective of time span, China’s response to the market is getting faster and faster. For example, Taobao was born eight years later than eBay, and WeChat was born two years later than WhatsApp. The recognition and acceptance of the Internet is getting higher and higher, and the online penetration rate is gradually rising. Even the development of cmnet has surpassed that of the United States.

Judging from the outcome, the first batch of Internet start-ups have only been established for 25 years. Whether in the United States or China, most of them have gone to the two common outlets of merger or IPO (the place of listing will usually be Nasdaq in the United States). Why is this happening? The role of capital behind it should not be underestimated.

For venture capital companies to recover their investment, there are only two ways for founders and early employees of technology companies to get the return of starting a business. The first is to be acquired, such as youtube being acquired by google, Youku being acquired by Ali and skype being acquired by ebay. This method is quick to get money and simple to operate, but it is only a short-term cash-out, and there is no long-term return. Such companies often have good technology or many users, but they are difficult to make profits or are in a state of sustained losses.

The second is the initial public offer (ipo) of some shares of the company on the trading market, commonly known as listing, which is suitable for companies with sustainable profitability. It can not only make investors and founders get long-term returns, but also raise funds for the development of enterprises.

Judging from the time of listing, around 2000 was the Internet bubble period. We can see that there were Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and other companies listed in the United States one to three years after their establishment. At that time, China’s Internet-based technology companies also piled up to list in the United States. Whether it is the early four major portals or today’s mobile Internet rookie, except Tencent and Meituan Dianping, the rest are listed in the United States (Nasdaq or new york).

EBay and Taobao have exactly the same business model, and now a moat is established.

In 1995, pierre-Omidyar, an American engineer of Iranian origin, put the yard junk and flea market on the Internet, which was originally called webauction and later called ebay. Later, ebay gradually changed from an online flea market to an online free market, helping small businesses in e-commerce to open their own stores through eBay.

However, the biggest problem ebay is also facing is fraud. There are many fakes. In 2007, The Times reported that the author of Harry Potter sued ebay for selling pirated books. In the same year, Louis Vuitton sued ebay for selling counterfeit lv brand goods and claimed 37 million euros from eBay. Previously, tiffany, a famous jeweler, also filed a similar lawsuit with the court. Some fraud gangs take advantage of the loopholes in ebay’s transaction feedback (comment) system to sell some small commodities at low prices, get high scores, then sell thousands of dollars of big commodities, and then run away.

The core of C2C online trading mode is to solve two problems, namely, credit problem and payment problem. In view of the credit problem, ebay’s solution is to let buyers and sellers evaluate each other and form a set of credit evaluation system. In terms of payment, cash, checks and credit cards all have obvious disadvantages. In 2002, PayPal, an online payment company, was acquired (but in July 2015, PayPal was split and listed independently, and the 13-year "marriage" between the two companies was terminated). Taobao has also spared no effort to solve the above two problems, such as "counterfeiting" and improving community rules; In 2004, Alipay, a payment guarantee platform, and Want Want, an instant chat tool, were successively launched, which was also one of Ali’s forward-looking strategies.

Taobao’s biggest competitor was eBay, and Taobao Xiaoer left the seller on the Taobao platform for free. Then, around the Taobao system, Ali launched the IM chat tool Ali Want Want, the data marketing platform Ali Mama, through train, Juhua, Tmall (formerly Taobao Mall), Yitao, etc., and established a strong e-commerce ecosystem; In addition, according to the investment map statistics of IT orange companies, Ali also acquired 66 companies, represented by Youku, UC browser and Hungry; 158 enterprises have been invested strategically, which have blossomed in the fields of entertainment, logistics (rookie network), cloud computing (Alibaba Cloud) and enterprise services.

At present, Alibaba’s market value is $465.2 billion, equivalent to three ebay+PayPal (with a total market value of $152.5 billion); In terms of the number of users, the number of buyers of ebay in the world has reached 175 million, the number of retail users in China has reached 785 million, and the annual active users of Taobao and Tmall have reached 256 million and 227 million. Obviously, in the field of e-commerce and consumption, the market prospect and scale of Internet enterprises in China are far greater than those in the United States.

Amazon and Dangdang started as online bookstores, and the ending was quite different.

Also in 1995, bezos, an analyst on Wall Street in New York, founded Amazon, a B2C online bookstore. In order to avoid taxes reasonably, bezos chose to open an online bookstore in Seattle instead of Silicon Valley in California. Because buying books is not like selling clothes, it is a standardized commodity, and it can’t be returned casually, so it is suitable for online sales. It took Amazon only seven years to reach the turnover that barnes&noble, the largest chain bookstore in the United States, took 130 years to reach (in 2002, Amazon’s turnover reached $3.9 billion, while barnes&noble reached $3.7 billion in the same period).

Obviously, the ceiling of the online bookstore is obvious. For sustainable growth, Amazon has developed from the largest online bookstore to an online department store in the United States and assumed the role of a transaction guarantee platform. Users pay money to Amazon, and Amazon keeps customers’ payment information confidential, and charges merchants a handling fee. At the same time, it stipulates the maximum charge for each product (on ebay, some products are priced at a penny, but they charge more than ten dollars for postage).

In June 1998, Amazon Music Store was officially launched. In order to compete with its rivals, Amazon has adopted a large-scale expansion strategy to become the largest online music product retailer; On August 19, 2004, Amazon acquired Joyo.com with a total capital of 75 million US dollars and officially entered China. In 2005, Amazon Prime service was launched, and until March 2014, the membership service kept the price of $79. 2006: AWS Amazon cloud service was launched; Amazon Kindle； was released in 2007; In 2012, it acquired the robot manufacturing company Kiva for $775 million in cash.

Today, Amazon has become the second largest Internet company in the world, with a market value of 881.1 billion US dollars, second only to Google, and has successfully surpassed the leading Facebook a few years ago. Its business involves e-commerce, intelligent hardware, video, cloud, media and other fields.

Dangdang, which is also an online bookstore, has recently been plagued by negative founders and its share price has plummeted, with a market of only $500 million. Where is the failure of Dangdang? It is largely attributed to the founder’s own pattern and strategic vision, including the positioning of the company, the attitude towards competitors, and the brand marketing PR without strengthening their own business capabilities and improving their core competitiveness.

For example, when the sales volume of paper books fell due to the influence of e-books, Dangdang positioned itself as an online bookstore, only playing in the book market. Even if the category expanded 3C and new clothing business later, it was not a strategic focus. Even in August 2011, Li Guoqing publicly stated at the 2011 Internet Conference, "Dangdang’s 3C products are only a stopgap measure, and if the opponent gives up Dangdang, it will also give up. "So that in the face of JD.COM’s attack on the book category, Dangdang’s share is gradually eroding, and the competition in shopping malls is always cruel.

Another example is Li Guoqing’s exultation. He was quite proud of his creative planning case of "Dare to Do and Dare to Dangdang" and awarded the CEO Award to the team. May I ask: "What is the core of the slogan? Optimize the after-sales return service, or improve the delivery speed, or discount more? Shouting a slogan in the air is not to compete in PK strength, but to fight a public relations war of words.

The worst star Internet companies in history are Yahoo and Renren.

In July 2016, after a series of management turnover and strategic mistakes, Yahoo with the highest market value of $128 billion finally sold its Internet core assets to Verizon Communications, an American telecom operator. This former internet star can’t help but be embarrassed.

Yahoo was founded in the dormitory of Stanford University in 1994, and was initially positioned as a web portal. Compared with Google defined by "search" and eBay defined by "auction", Yahoo executives have different definitions of their own companies, which may be "email", "news" and "search". After six CEO changes, including founder Yang Zhiyuan, he can make it clear what Yahoo is. It is still a vague Internet portal.

In 2000, Yahoo and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin discussed the acquisition of Google for $1 billion, but the two sides could not agree on the purchase price. In 2006, Yahoo considered buying Facebook for $1 billion. But once again, the two sides abandoned the transaction because they could not agree on the price. Some former Yahoo employees said that the reason for Yahoo’s slow decline is very simple: it missed development opportunities such as search, social media and mobile.

Seeing him climb a tall building, seeing his building collapse.

Another "he is my brother" Renren. com, whose market value has fallen to freezing point, has a share price of less than $1. In 2018, it was sold to Duoniu Media at a low price of $20 million, which caused another sigh.

Before the transaction, Chen Yizhou said, "I declare that I am no longer suitable to be a social product for young people. Renren. com, I have used it much less recently, although I logged in almost every day until a year or two ago. Most of our social colleagues have left their jobs. Although I think they are awesome, you don’t think so, and I can’t help it … So, who will do it? I definitely didn’t do it. It’s possible to contract with an awesome person inside the company (it’s unlikely, if you can’t be a user, you will still be scolded …), or to cooperate with an awesome external team and company! 」

Speaking of it, Renren originated from the campus network founded by Wang Xing, focusing on real interpersonal relationships and real-name registration system. It was acquired by Thousand Oaks Group in 2005 and renamed Renren in 2009. Began to March into the white-collar market from campus; In 2011, Renren.com quickly caught up with the number of QQ users and went public in the United States. At its peak, its market value reached 9.4 billion US dollars. For a while, it became a daily routine to find junior high school students and college alumni on Renren.

It was also in that year that WeChat appeared.

Renren’s failure is more due to Chen Yizhou’s strategic mistakes in transformation and the team’s execution is not in place. Netizens use this jingle to describe the operation of Renren. com: "Common sense of life and makeup skills are the secrets of the twelve constellations. I don’t regret the success of recording, and the thesis is full of IELTS questions. The golden sentence of love is the portal, and the tears of men and women are painful. What heartache did you read? No, it’s not Chinese. 」

Of course, there is also ill-timed luck. Why did Facebook succeed in the same SNS community, but Renren failed? Compared with Facebook, the first factor is that everyone is in a fierce competitive environment, followed by the diversity of the population structure of netizens in China and the huge differences in habits and preferences.

Facebook is facing declining MSN, MySpace and Google+, Renren is facing QQ space (personalized primary school users), Baidu Post Bar (irrigation users), and later Weibo (groupies) WeChat, etc. However, everyone did not think about their core competitiveness, focused on serving the original college students, blindly transformed to serve all netizens, and finally became a nondescript product.

Therefore, it is not that Renren is too weak, but that its opponents are too strong. (Who has been spared by Heaven. jpg)

China’s version of Meituan’s comments are strong and United, and the American versions of GroupOn and Yelp are declining after listing.

Yelp is an online review website in the United States. It was established in 2004 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange on March 2, 2012, with an IPO financing of 100 million US dollars. The current market value is 2.48 billion yuan.

Groupon, the originator of the group buying website, was founded in November 2008, and it quickly became popular because of "launching a discounted product every day and limiting everyone to shoot once a day". On November 4, 2011, Groupon landed on Nasdaq; The IPO raised 700 million dollars. Since then, Groupon has developed rapidly. At the beginning of 2015, its business spread to 47 countries around the world, and its business scope expanded from group buying to online shopping. It also launched group buying business with Gaopeng.com (Gaopeng.com), a joint venture established by Tencent.

However, Gaopeng.com was finally closed. In 2016, Groupon CEO Rich Williams said that he realized that "the supply and product growth did not meet expectations, and the high-frequency local services were not invested enough and needed more investment; Shopping for low-profit goods can increase income, but it is not conducive to the healthy development of the company … "

As of October 29, 2019, Groupon’s share price has fallen to $3, and Groupon’s market value was as high as $16 billion. At present, it is only $1.7 billion. Since 2018, company executives have been seeking business for sale, and Ali is one of the potential buyers.

Perhaps witnessing the tragic end of Groupon, Meituan. com refused to go public independently. At the end of 2014, Wang Xing talked about how to treat the heavy trading model and the light information service model in an interview with Forbes Chinese website. The current market value of heavy Groupon has been surpassed by the light Yelp.

Wang Xing: Now Yelp is 3.8 billion, GrubHub is 2.9 billion and Groupon is 5.4 billion, slightly more. But if you look at Priceline (that is, booking), it has nearly 60 billion. They are both very low, and I think they are not doing the right thing. Our current valuation is higher than both of them. (Meituan is valued at $7 billion, almost twice as fast as Groupon.)

It can be seen that Wang Xing’s purpose is by no means as simple as buying a website, but to become a giant in the field of local life services like booking and Priceline. According to the statistics of IT Orange Company’s investment map, Meituan has invested in 69 enterprises, accounting for half of the local life, especially in the catering field. It is not surprising that Meituan takes out food and merges with public comments. In September 2018, Meituan Dianping was listed in Hong Kong, with a current market value of 68.1 billion yuan, ranking ninth, second only to booking, with a difference of nearly 20 billion US dollars.

TIkTok (overseas version of Tik Tok) is popular in the United States, which led to Facebook plagiarism.

TIkTok and Tiktok are on fire, and the earliest fire is musical.ly, which may be the earliest short video APP； in the world to cut into 15 seconds; Musical.ly officially appeared in the North American market in 2014. Since then, it has developed rapidly and once topped the US App Store list. The product was developed by a team of less than 10 people from China in Shanghai and San Francisco. It was once regarded as a "miracle" of China’s Internet products in the primary market. In 2017, the company was ready to enter the domestic market.

At this time, Tik Tok, which was hatched in today’s headlines, was launched in September 2016. In the first half of 2017, she launched the Tik Tok Red Man Project, and invited 300 talents from platforms such as Weibo and xiaokaxiu to sponsor "China has Hip Hop", and Wu Yifan made great efforts to stand on the platform; By June of 2018, the number of daily users in Tik Tok exceeded 150 million, and the number of monthly users exceeded 300 million, making it a phenomenal product.

Among them, the most obvious change comes from the platform content. In the early days, the most popular content of Tik Tok Platform was mainly singing and dancing and moving mirrors by hand, accounting for more than 50% of the content. Nowadays, the popular content in Tik Tok Station is more diversified and balanced, covering 19 categories, among which music, dance, food, animals, sports, parent-child and travel all account for about 5%.

TikTok’s overseas version of TikTok won market recognition after it was launched in January 2018. India’s Economic Times quoted the data of Sensor Tower, a world-renowned third-party data monitoring company, as saying that the global download volume of TikTok in the first quarter of 2018 was 188 million, of which India accounted for 47%. Facebook ranked second with 176 million, with India accounting for 21%.

Since TikTok’s strategic focus is on the US, Japanese and Indian markets, in 2017, ByteDance (the parent company of today’s headlines) bought musical.ly for $1 billion to seize the US market; In August 2018, musical.ly and TikTok, which have more than 100 million monthly active users, were integrated into a brand-new short video platform.

In just one and a half years, TikTok has covered 150 countries and regions, covering 75 languages, with more than 700 million monthly active users worldwide, including 200 million users in India. In contrast, Facebook currently has 300 million users in India, but TikTok has surpassed Facebook in downloads.

In November 2018, Facebook released a video application-Lasso in a low-key way. The product did not hold a press conference, and even foreign media called it a "clone version of Tik Tok" from China.

Lasso also adopts the mode of vertical screen and cyclic video playback, and slides up to switch to the next video. Users can filter videos through # theme tags, and Lasso puts popular tags at the bottom of the video playing page. In addition, the length of the video recorded on Lasso is set to 15 seconds at most, and users can add background music, adjust the slow speed and fast forward to increase the interest of the video.

As Taylor Lorenz, the author of Atlantic, commented on Twitter, "It’s like Facebook moved TikTok’s video content. 」

According to foreign media reports, by the end of September 2019, Lasso had been downloaded 425,000 times, while TikTok had been installed 640 million times outside China during the same period, with a total of 1.4 billion times. Zuckerberg has felt the great threat of TikTok, so he can understand what he said at the beginning.

It can be said that from learning imitation to active innovation is a process of Internet development in China. We can see that there are both successful experiences and painful lessons, which are insignificant in the long history of China, but still worth studying.

For example, from the perspective of business models, the most successful models that have been verified in the PC Internet era are mainly e-commerce, instant chat, and online search. They have made Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu respectively, and the relatively successful model is the US group comment in the local life field. Didi in the field of travel; What comes out of the mobile Internet era is the innovation and subdivision of the original model, such as Pinduoduo, a representative of social e-commerce, and Tik Tok, a short video community.

In addition, most of them are either lack of profit model or out of scale. For example, business socialization has been tepid in China, and the development of LinkedIn has not been smooth after it entered China, or it is not suitable for China’s national conditions. For example, the habit of dining reservation in Chinese has not been cultivated, so the development of catering reservation enterprises represented by small secretary for ordering food is not successful; And anonymous society, represented by "No Secrets/Secrets" in the transformation, was once on fire for a while, but in the end, it could not escape the supervision under low-cost cyber violence and the closure under the difficult realization.

It is necessary to explain that personally, the business model is essentially a strategy or an idea, unlike literary and computer works, which have "copyright" and cannot be protected; Moreover, the scale of the company’s final development and whether it can grow rapidly are not all determined by the business model. Even if it is the same model, the strategy is wrong, and the mistake may be beyond redemption. Say a thousand words and ten thousand words, learn from them or copy and plagiarize them; For competitors who are also startups, this is understandable. What entrepreneurs are afraid of and what netizens criticize is nothing more than the "unkind" copying of Dafa by giants.

Throughout these decades, 2C Internet products (including APP) have formed an oligopoly pattern in both the United States and China, and the entrepreneurial field has become more and more subdivided, which also means that innovation is becoming more and more difficult. On the other hand, China’s 2B Internet products are still a wasteland waiting to be developed. On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, a giant with a market value of $12 billion like Slack has been born in the United States, which was founded in 2009. So far, there is no 2B Internet company in China. When will the spring of domestic SaaS come?

The content of the article has reference: Wu Jun’s "Top of the Tide"

Original title: "Tik Tok swept the world and cited FB plagiarism, China Internet from following to leading | Detailed explanation of PK of 60 benchmarking giants at home and abroad"

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