Abstract: The future of Kuaishou and Douyin, who is better in the end (welcome to pay attention to the leverage game)
Written by | Zhang Yinyin
The recent Kuaishou storm has been continuous.
First of all, the structure has been greatly adjusted: from the previous dual-core form, it returns to the single-core model, and the process and structure are more concentrated, but it is interpreted as the CEO paying for the stock price plunge.
Then recently by the employees to carry out large-scale layoffs, although the official does not respond to the rumors, but as high as the "30% layoff ratio" rumors still let Kuaishou on the hot search.
The front foot iQiyi laid off employees, and the back foot fast hand was also exposed to "strategic contraction".
Everyone knows that iQiyi is bitter, only to find that Kuaishou's stock price is also "waist cut" compared to the highest point.
iQiyi's dilemma can be attributed to the fact that long videos are not optimistic about capital and that content costs remain high and difficult to make profits. But obviously, this is not the case with short videos.
Like iQiyi, behind the rumors of layoffs, Kuaishou also handed over a slightly worried three-quarter report. From this three-quarterly report, the leverage game read part of the anxiety of Kuaishou.
The good news is that daily active, monthly active, and average daily usage hours have all achieved good growth.
At the same time, the revenue in the third quarter was 20.493 billion yuan, an increase of 33.4% year-on-year, compared with the revenue of about 19.1 billion yuan in the second quarter (the adjusted net loss in the same period was 4.770 billion yuan), and the adjusted net loss in the third quarter was only slightly increased to 4.822 billion yuan, which is also reasonable.
The data looks at how to understand, what angle, the leverage game also found that if you look at the year-on-year, the expansion of the amount of loss is amazing, an increase of 401.1%.
Not only that, gross margin in the third quarter was down from the same period in 2020. That was 43.1 percent at the time, and now it's down to 41.5 percent.
From the perspective of revenue structure, the current revenue of Kuaishou is mainly composed of three major parts, namely live broadcasting, online marketing services and other businesses.
From Q1 to Q3 of 2021, its live broadcast business revenue was 22.14 billion yuan, down 12.66% year-on-year; from the perspective of the contribution of live broadcast business to corporate revenue, in 2018, Kuaishou live broadcast business revenue accounted for 80% of total revenue, while in the first three quarters of 2021, the proportion of live broadcast business to total revenue fell by 39%.
At present, Kuaishou's online marketing business is growing rapidly, with online marketing service revenue of 29.42 billion yuan in the first three quarters of 2021, an increase of 120.5% year-on-year, accounting for 52% of total revenue. That is to say, the online marketing business has become the most important source of revenue for Kuaishou.
Kuaishou's other businesses include e-commerce, online games and other value-added services, the most important of which is e-commerce business.
At present, the business maintains a strong growth trend, and the revenue of other businesses of Kuaishou in Q1~Q3 in 2021 is 5.09 billion yuan, an increase of 151.7% year-on-year, accounting for 9% of total revenue, mainly driven by the growth of e-commerce business.
At the earnings conference call, Kuaishou CEO Cheng Yixiao introduced that in the future, through refined operation management, it will reduce the cost of maintaining marketing for a single DAU, and with the increase in the proportion of advertising and e-commerce business revenue with high gross margin, the revenue of a single DAU will rise, and the proportion of marketing expenditure to total revenue will decline. In the third quarter, Kuaishou contributed an average of 34 yuan of online marketing service revenue per DAU.
One of the main reasons affecting the decrease in kuaishou's gross profit margin is the increase in various costs. In the third quarter of 2021, Kuaishou's cost of sales increased by 37.1% from 8.7 billion yuan in the same period of 2020 to 12 billion yuan this year, of which the more obvious increase included employee welfare expenses.
According to the financial report, in the third quarter of 2021, Kuaishou's employee welfare expenditure was 6.092 billion yuan, compared with 2.678 billion yuan in the same period last year; in the first three quarters of this year, employee welfare expenditure was 16.009 billion yuan, compared with 6.179 billion yuan last year. Overall, the increase in employee benefit spending this year has been a bit large.
After excluding the share payment of more than 6 billion yuan, the salary expense of Kuaishou in the first three quarters was also close to 10 billion yuan, accounting for 17.6% of the operating income, which was really high.
The news of kuaishou layoffs first appeared in the vein of the "big factory gossip position".
Netizens broke the news that the employees who were laid off this time were concentrated in a higher salary level, mainly those with an annual salary of more than 1 million yuan, with a proportion of about 30%.
Coincidentally, even before the news of the layoffs came to light, there were rumors in the market that it would dissuade a group of low-performing employees in December.
According to the "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet Network" released in February this year, the number of online video (including short videos) users in China reached 927 million, accounting for 93.7% of the total internet users. Among them, the scale of short video users reached 873 million, accounting for 88.3% of the total netizens. By comparing the data of the "Report" and the data of Kuaishou and Douyin, we can find that the user growth of both companies has encountered a bottleneck: a total of 873 million short video users have been divided up by the two companies, and if they still want to get user growth, they have to face the situation of grabbing users from their opponents.
The future of Kuaishou and Douyin, who is better?