Recently, Alibaba, which once fell into a low profile after experiencing the anti-monopoly fine storm, has re-entered the focus of public opinion because of two consecutive investments in the online ride-hailing industry.
On November 17, Volkswagen Travel, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Volkswagen Transportation, announced that it would introduce a total investment of 40 million yuan in alibaba's two phases. After the completion of this capital increase, Alibaba's shareholding ratio will also reach 10%, becoming the only foreign shareholder except for the relevant companies of the Volkswagen Group.
Just a few days ago, on November 9, Alibaba and Ant Group just invested $280 million in Halo Travel. Two consecutive investments in ride-hailing platforms in a month do not obscure Alibaba's imperative in the travel space, and seem to indicate that the capital market is rekindling confidence in the ride-hailing market.
This can't help but be reminiscent of Didi, which was silent for about 4 months after the APP was removed from the shelves in July, and as Ali drives major capital to re-enter the market, the online ride-hailing market will undoubtedly usher in a large-scale reshuffle. At a time when Didi's market share is constantly being diluted and platform registered drivers continue to lose, will Ali's arrival be replaced, or will it usher in the hope of breaking the game?
After encountering various changes, relying on a huge user base, Didi still occupies about 80% of the market share of online ride-hailing, and will still maintain a leading edge in a short period of time, and it is difficult to make major changes in the market pattern of online ride-hailing. Especially after experiencing a difficult low-key period, the leaderless online ride-hailing market has begun to have a call for "resurrecting" Didi.
But in fact, judging from the wind direction revealed by the current policy environment, the review and supervision of Didi is far from reaching the end of the time. Leaving aside the antitrust investigation, security-related business governance has only just begun.
Since the second half of this year, the regulatory authorities have begun to continuously implement the legal governance of online ride-hailing compliance, and the most obvious action is to put pressure on online ride-hailing platforms to clean up and ban unlicensed drivers and vehicles under each platform.
Among them, Didi can be described as the hardest hit area to be punished. Jinan and Shenzhen have successively taken strict investigation measures, and while punishing drivers of unlicensed online ride-hailing, the platform to which the driver belongs must also bear joint and several liability and receive fines with higher amounts.
In Shenzhen alone, e-hailing drivers who are examined to operate on the road without a license will be fined about 1,000 yuan, and the platform will also receive a fine of 10,000 yuan. If the relevant vehicle under review does not have a transport permit, the penalty for the platform will rise to 30,000 yuan.
In the past October, Didi received more than 40 fines. As Didi, which once had more than 30 million registered drivers, due to the insufficient review of online ride-hailing transportation qualifications in the early stage, the relevant loopholes generally existed, and if left unchecked, tickets like this would only increase.
In order to cooperate with the safety review and related governance work, Didi has re-examined the driver's certificate from many aspects, and opened the car license process for individual vehicles on October 15. At the same time, Didi also took the initiative to block a group of document drivers whose vehicles did not obtain taxi transportation certificates to improve the compliance rate.
Only in this way, Didi's driver reserves, which have begun to lose, have also been further reduced. After the anti-monopoly investigation and app removal, the number of active drivers on the Didi Chuxing platform has already been reduced by half, and the remaining 15 million driver users are also accelerating the rate of loss over time.
Although the Didi Chuxing APP has been removed from the shelves of major app stores, the apps that have been downloaded can still be used normally, and the taxi business has not stopped, but the large number of consumers caused by the cessation of registration by new users and the collapse of Didi's reputation has continued to decrease.
Moreover, as exposed this year, Didi's excessive commission on driver users, lack of platform protection, and various unfair treatment are seriously affecting the quality of terminal services. All kinds of signs show that Didi, which has already entered the cold winter period, is facing an even worse situation.
In such an environment, Alibaba has chosen to enter the online car, perhaps there is no lack of ambition to create another phenomenon-level product to replace Didi.
Volkswagen Travel, which Alibaba invested in this time, was first established in 2015, and its parent company, Volkswagen Transportation, was founded in 1988 as the predecessor of Shanghai Volkswagen Taxi Company. This also means that Volkswagen Travel is an Internet platform built by traditional taxi companies with nearly 33 years of experience.
Despite its impressive industry accumulation, VW Mobility has not achieved particularly remarkable results after its official operation in 2016. Even in the recently released financial statements, the total amount of liabilities has reached 16.172 million yuan, and the net loss in the first three quarters of this year was 12.5 million yuan.
This also means that Alibaba, which only temporarily owns 10% of the shares, may be difficult to reverse the failure of Volkswagen Travel to build an online platform in a short period of time. Even though in December last year, Alibaba and CATL jointly invested to win more than 300 million yuan of Series A financing for SAIC's mobility brand "Xiangdao Travel", for Alibaba, the real business focus may still be on Hello Travel.
In addition to the stunning huge financing of $280 million, Hello Travel has shown extremely strong combat effectiveness as early as the competition for the market share of shared bicycles. Not only did it beat Ofo and Mobike in the burning money marketing, but also to a new round of shared bicycle competition, and continued to confront Didi Qingju Bicycle and Meituan Bicycle, without falling behind.
Especially after Didi fell into a crisis, Green Orange Bicycle gradually lacked financial support, and meituan, which entered the game of sharing bicycles through the acquisition of Mobike, it is difficult to defeat Hello, which is backed by Ant Group and Alipay. After obtaining the investment and investment of Alibaba this time, Hello Bicycle already has the potential to become the first.
However, Hello Travel, which survived the shared bicycle war, did not achieve profitability. 90% of the revenue comes from the bicycle business Hello, in 2018-2020, the net loss accumulated as high as 4.85 billion yuan, even with the financing support of industry giants, the next stage will gradually begin to rise in price, but shared bicycles are ultimately a low gross profit business, want to make a profit, or find a new source of revenue.
Therefore, as early as 2018, Haro, which has tested the water network ride-hailing business by accessing Dida Travel, officially launched "Haro Taxi" on March 26 this year. Now with the endorsement of Alibaba, there is real hope to become a strong enemy that can replace Didi.
In addition to cultivating the next Didi, for Alibaba, taking this opportunity to improve the product ecology built by AutoNavi Map may also be a top priority.
In 2014, when Alibaba wholly acquired AutoNavi Map, it was only to expand Ali's business segment, but in 2019, Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang publicly stated that AutoNavi Map was of great significance to Ali's future development. This step of the "idle chess" that was under the hand has now grown into a closed-loop ecology involving LBS location services, business displays, travel guidance, etc., carrying more Ali product applications in the 5G and IOT era.
Especially for the next stage of intelligent service field with automatic driving as the core, the fit between taxi business and map navigation is undoubtedly the most basic scenario construction. Although the AutoNavi taxi business has long been launched, from the ambition shown by Ali at this stage, Hello Travel may become a comprehensive universal platform, and AutoNavi Taxi may focus more on the official car business of B-end enterprise users in the future.
Alibaba is not only seizing the market gap of Didi's removal to promote the online ride-hailing business, but also focuses more on the level of corporate operations. And this, for Didi, is also an opportunity to get back on its feet.
In July, when Didi fell silent, large and small ride-hailing platforms emerged one after another, and overnight it seemed to return to the crazy money-burning taxi race many years ago. And the capital that gradually returned to rationality after Didi dominated has also become restless again in the near future.
In the second half of this year, in addition to Alibaba's first investment in Hello Travel, T3 Travel completed a strategic financing of 5 billion yuan in September, and Cao Cao Travel also raised 3.8 billion yuan in series B in the same month. If you add the METUAN, which restarted the online ride-hailing business after a gap of two years, and the Gaode taxi that Ali has cultivated for a long time, the entire second echelon of online ride-hailing is already crowded.
Although the ride-hailing market seems to have returned to the situation where capital gathered many years ago, with the lessons of Didi's predecessors, today's online ride-hailing competition is no longer driven by burning money subsidies. In the next stage of the online ride-hailing market, the core of competition will focus on more refined operational aspects such as quality, safety, and user experience.
For example, on August 21 this year, the enterprise version of AutoNavi Taxi entered DingTalk, not only to classify DingTalk into the local life map, but also to pull the tepid Gaode taxi in the C-end online ride-hailing market to the road of ToB. Similarly, Cao Cao and T3 Mobility are also continuously enhancing their ToB business, focusing more resources on vertical segmentation of customized services for corporate vehicles.
Relatively speaking, the demand for enterprise cars for B-end users still has a large number of market gaps at this stage, and corporate cars will inevitably pursue higher quality services, which is very promising to become the next direction for major platforms. How to expand the online ride-hailing business at the same time, open up the membership system of catering, travel, shopping and other scenarios, and bring better user experience, will also become the core area of competition.
For Didi, although it can only be difficult to maintain after the storm of market transformation, while many brands divide the market and rekindle the war with various capitals, Didi still has the possibility of reversing the situation. In the database of Tianyancha, it can be found that although Didi has fallen silent, it has not stopped recruiting, and the number of recruitment in November has gradually returned to the level before July.
As the capital that once continued to be depressed in the field of online ride-hailing began to flow back, Didi, which still occupies the first echelon of the industry with a huge volume, undoubtedly still has great investment value. As long as Didi can survive antitrust investigations and increasingly stringent regulations, regaining confidence in the capital market will be easy.
Moreover, after the removal of the Didi APP, the chaos in the online car industry did not end there. Only in July, when Didi left the market, the number of complaints from ride-hailing platforms such as AutoNavi, Meituan, and T3 began to skyrocket, and according to statistics, the monthly order compliance rate of online ride-hailing platforms plummeted after July, user satisfaction fluctuated greatly, and the security risks caused by the proliferation of platforms became more and more chaotic.
Especially for the platforms that have newly joined the track, it is difficult to get the recognition of users and the market in the face of the market and management system that Didi has cultivated for many years. Even for mature companies like Alibaba, it is a long-term process to grasp the market, which gives Didi the opportunity to come back.
In any case, until the end of the baptism of the new round of capital and policy, everything is still unknown. But no matter what the outcome of Ali and Didi is, they are constantly expanding the width of the online car track and improving the pattern of the entire industry, which is beneficial and harmless in the long run.