Title
Text: Great Detective
Source: Lilmos
On June 6, Ctrip Chairman Liang Jianzhang appeared in Zhuhai Chimelong to start a weekend live visit to the store, reaching a record 36.23 million gV on the same day.
Before that, Liang Jianzhang traveled to 31 cities in China at the speed of brushing a city in two days, and 11 live broadcasts brought 400 million yuan in sales. He also became the chairman of the new live streaming influencers, and various appearances became memes.
The blow of the pandemic to the travel industry is clear. But under Liang Jianzhang's live broadcast, investors have seen confidence, and Ctrip's stock price has finally gradually climbed from the lowest point of $20 this year to $29.08.
However, if you bought Ctrip on September 30, 2013 at the closing price of the day at $29.18 and held it until now, the yield is almost zero.
In 2017, Ctrip's share price reached an all-time high of $60.65 per share, with a total market capitalization of $36 billion.
Since then, Ctrip's stock price has begun to gradually decline, and now it has been cut off. Even in 2019 before the epidemic, Ctrip's stock price fluctuated around $40, and it was only 2/3 of the high.
Today's Ctrip, like a circle, is back to the original point.
Since last year, Ctrip's top shareholders have reduced their holdings, with the largest shareholder Baidu cashing out $1 billion, booking $106 million, and baillie Gifford cashing out $570 million. Although the reasons for the reduction are different, it is obviously not positive for the capital market.
As early as 2015, Ctrip's market value had exceeded $10 billion. In 2016, Ctrip welcomed its first female leader, CEO Sun Jie.
Sun Jie once used "my youth, my Ctrip" to describe her years at Ctrip. As soon as the leader, who has gone from Ctrip's cfo all the way to CEO, took office, Sun Jie emphasized that Ctrip's next goal is to achieve internationalization.
However, the 2020 "Black Swan" COVID-19 pandemic has hit the global tourism industry hard, and Ctrip's international business has also been seriously affected.
According to the financial report, in the first quarter of 2020, Ctrip's net revenue was 4.7 billion yuan, down 42% year-on-year and 43% month-on-month, and the operating loss was 1.5 billion yuan, with a net loss of 5.4 billion yuan.
Earlier, Sun Jie, CEO of Ctrip Group, admitted that this was the most difficult period in Ctrip's history. At the same time, the number of room nights at Meituan Hotels in 2019 has surpassed Ctrip, and Meituan and Fliggy have become very strong opponents of Ctrip.
In addition, the changes in information forms in the past two years, the rise of short videos and live broadcasts, may also form a cross-border robbery of the online travel market.
For Sun Jie, the CEO who has been in charge of Ctrip for 4 years, these internal and external troubles are indeed no small test. Along with the topic of Liang Jianzhang's three rescues of Ctrip, what makes the outside world question is whether Sun Jie is a qualified CEO?
1 Will Sun Jie become the next Fan Min?
The pandemic has hit the tourism industry hard, and all travel companies are not immune.
But in addition to the epidemic, the competition in the online travel market has been very fierce, and Ctrip has not had a stable life.
Meituan and Fliggy are rapidly growing and establishing their own advantages, while Ctrip, although still the well-deserved boss of online travel, has slowed down in the past two years, its profitability has deteriorated, and it has gradually become a traditional Internet company.
Judging from Ctrip's financial reports in recent years, revenue growth has slowed down, from an average growth rate of more than 40% before 2017 to only about 15% in the past two years.
In the past two years, Ctrip has almost monopolized and often drawn up to about 20% of the commission, making hotel practitioners miserable.
The iron law of the industry is that when transaction costs are too high, then it will bring opportunities to low-cost trading methods. Although the gross profit is far less than that of Ctrip's high-end hotels, for small and medium-sized hotels and even independent hotels, Meituan Hotels once reduced the commission to 3%, occupying a leading position in market share.
Looking back at the start-up history of meituan hotels and Fliggy, it is in the years around 2016.
If you look at it from the timeline, Sun Jie took the helm of Ctrip in 2016 - this year Ctrip acquired Qunar and eLong, the online travel market was unified again, and it became easier to increase the pursuit of profits under the relative monopoly.
In internet circles, people with financial backgrounds have always been a controversial topic. Similarly, Ctrip, under the leadership of Sun Jie, has also begun to face this question - the excessive pursuit of profits may hurt the foundation of the company.
Jie Sun worked for KPMG as an audit manager and as a certified public accountant at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, and before joining Ctrip, served as the head of the department where semiconductor companies applied materials to the U.S. Federal Securities and Exchange Commission and external reporting, typical of the financial background.
Sun Jie joined Ctrip in 2005, first taking over the position of shen Nanpeng, the former Ctrip cfo, and then taking over the position of Fan Min.
Sun Jie
Feng Dahui, a well-known blogger, once commented on Sun Jie, saying that he "does not understand the product, nor does he know much about the service, let alone the sense of innovation." "With a financial background and a knack for profits, it's no wonder that this company is very happy with the wool of users from top to bottom."
On October 10, 2017, star Han Xue said on Weibo that as a senior user of Ctrip, he had repeatedly found and manually canceled the {pre-selected insurance box} hidden under the booking information, but he was still secretly tricked. She said that she has complained to Ctrip more than once because of the resale of hotel orders and serious violations of laws and regulations overseas, rather than resorting to the public platform. But there is nothing but a word of apology.
Before that, Ctrip had already learned a lesson. When Fan Min was at the helm of Ctrip, Ctrip was eroded by Qunar, eLong, etc., and it was generally believed that Ctrip was too aggressive in profit, resulting in Ctrip losing its entrepreneurial spirit and not being sensitive to the market.
If you can't restrain yourself in the pursuit of profits, Sun Jie may also become the next Fan Min.
The other side of cutting profits is Ctrip's lack of innovation, such as its innovation laboratory. Unlike bat, bat will leave enough room for these companies to develop and explore new possibilities. Ctrip, on the other hand, prefers to come up with enough resources and funds to allow it to develop internally.
Sun Jie believes that the innovation lab has successes and failures, and "the possibility of success is far better than going out to pull a team to raise funds", which also reflects Sun Jie's conservative nature in finance.
2 Robbed by crossover
The fierce competition in the online travel industry also comes from the overall slowdown in market development.
The domestic online travel market is not as fast as previously thought, in 2018, China's online travel transaction scale reached 975.4 billion yuan, an increase of 9.3% year-on-year. Compared with 2017, the growth rate fell by 11.4 percentage points.
For Ctrip, on the basis of already occupying more than 60% of the market share, it is difficult to make a breakthrough.
Ctrip hopes for two growth points: internationalization and sinking. Since Sun Jie took office, Ctrip's internationalization has been continuously advancing, but the domestic sinking market has been ignored to a certain extent.
Meituan Hotels and Fliggy are rapidly rising from the sinking market.
Meituan Hotel was established in 2014 and developed rapidly through group buying; Ali Travel, as a travel business unit under Alibaba, intervened in the travel market in 2014 and changed its name to Fliggy in 2016 and began to exert its strength.
Meituan has entered from low-cost hotels and has become Ctrip's biggest rival in the hotel field, and trustdata data shows that in the whole of 2019, the number of room nights in Meituan hotels exceeded the sum of Ctrip.
Why in the online travel jianghu dominated by Ctrip, there are still opportunities for meituan hotels and the rise of Fliggy. In addition to the traffic and financial support of the two giants of Meituan and Ali, Ctrip itself also has problems.
Ctrip's blood pumping effect on the upstream and downstream of the industry is too serious, so that the entire hotel industry feels that it is working for Ctrip, and the contradiction between the hotel industry and Ctrip has also erupted many times. This has also led some small players to turn to the new platform of Meituan and Fliggy.
Wang Xing said that meituan adheres to low gross profit business in order to establish real barriers. When the transaction costs of an industry are too high, there will be gaps and opportunities, and the attacks of new forces on old forces will often occur.
The reason why Meituan Hotels can threaten Ctrip is because low-cost hotels are a gap in the market. In the sinking market, low-star hotels account for a large proportion, and this part of the hotel can not afford too high commissions, and Ctrip's hotel commission ratio has now reached 20%.
Starting from low-end hotels, although the gross profit as Ctrip said is not enough, but the market share is enough to threaten, and then force the high-end market after the market share has a certain right to speak, after all, even Ctrip itself started in the year, but also aimed at the fast hotel.
For example, Meituan is carrying out a hotel +x strategy to help hotels effectively increase transaction volume by connecting in-hotel catering, wedding banquets, fitness, leisure and entertainment businesses, so as to expand revenue in high-star hotels and occupy the market.
In the competition with Meituan and Fliggy, Ctrip has supply chain advantages and Ctrip products. However, Ctrip products are not a heart.
Ctrip's capital moves against Qunar, eLong, Tuniu, etc. in 2015 seem to be more to eliminate opponents, and it is difficult to achieve the effect of 1+1>2.
The obvious action is that in the areas of Advantages such as Tongcheng tickets and Tuniu's tourism products, Ctrip has developed its own products on Ctrip by opening up several back-end supplies. The consequence of this is that the living space of other products is seriously compressed.
Tuniu is a very obvious example, Tuniu, which started with tourism and vacation products, after being invested by Ctrip, Ctrip itself began to do this business, but Tuniu, the market is gradually shrinking, and now it is facing the danger of delisting. Ctrip's packaged travel has become a new growth point.
It has been reported that online travel companies that Ctrip has previously entered through capital will also find ways to get Ctrip to exit in subsequent financing.
Nowadays, in tickets, air tickets, hotels, car rentals and other business lines, there are enough powerful players to compete with Ctrip, and some people believe that Ctrip's advantage areas may be broken one by one.
3 Word of mouth is also afraid of traffic
In addition, Ctrip is also facing new competition.
In Liang Jianzhang's recent live streaming, he is more concerned about sales than sales, but about exploring how to make the sales of travel products online, which shows that it is a more urgent and important matter for Ctrip.
The changes in information patterns in the past two years, the rise of short videos and live broadcasts, may also form a cross-border robbery of the online travel market. In the past two years, internet celebrity attractions have been continuously created by short videos, and consumers have formed the habit of planting grass first and then consuming, which is exactly what trading platforms such as Ctrip lack.
Ctrip is not unaware of this lack of content, to its own possible crisis, from 2018, Ctrip began to build its own content platform, release hydrogen balloon tourism life content aggregation platform, but also tried to establish a travel master mcn. But from the current point of view, Ctrip's content road is not so smooth.
Ctrip's current threat is that the previous online travel, which was a "search model", is now threatened by information distribution, short videos and other information, and the online travel market has been significantly decentralized, coupled with Ctrip's ability to control the industry too strongly in recent years, resulting in resistance in the industry.
At the same time, traffic players enter the market.
Ctrip, the hegemon of the online travel industry, although it has full control over the industry, but more in the industrial chain, there is no entrance-level blessing, coupled with the industry's own low-frequency characteristics, the disadvantages in the cross-border confrontation of high-frequency products are also obvious.
In fact, in the past two years, internet celebrity attractions such as short videos have become the first contact point for people to contact tourism, which is of great value to the entrance. In particular, this high frequency corresponds to tourism, which is still a very low-frequency consumption behavior.
Liang Jianzhang once thought that the era of traffic may have passed, but Ctrip itself is also doing content to share its own traffic. However, the high frequency is not as good as the US group and Ali, and the content of the trading platform is not as good as that of Douyin and Kuaishou, and the trading platform itself does the content is always weird.
In fact, after the information goes to the center, Ctrip's traffic entrance has been difficult to compete with the high-frequency Meituan and Fliggy, and now it can only be said that the brand occupies a great advantage. Ctrip, which lacks traffic access, has been increasing its marketing expenses in recent years, with a total marketing expenditure of more than 9 billion yuan in 2019.
In the competition with traffic-based products, Ctrip's advantage is the brand, and can the brand reputation still be maintained?
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