After the layoffs, iQIYI's membership fee will increase: the package will not change for the same year, and the monthly package will increase slightly

36Kr learned that iQIYI VIP member Weibo news will update the gold VIP member subscription price from 0:00 on December 16. At the same time, for users who have previously purchased and have not yet cancelled the aforementioned continuous monthly/quarterly/annual subscription services, we provide one-year maintenance of the original price service. iQIYI responded: "The subscription price of video platforms has always been low, and this phenomenon has affected the healthy development of the industry. In order to establish a more benign industrial ecology, let excellent content producers have a return, and ultimately provide members with more and better content, we decided to adjust the price of members. ”

Related reading: Behind iQIYI's layoffs: six years of financing of 50 billion, but the money is not enough

Recently, many reports show that iQiyi is undergoing a round of major layoffs, with a layoff ratio of about 20% to 40%. Among the layoffs, the middle level (director level) has been laid off more, and there are also employees with longer division age, older age and higher salaries, who are also laid off.

iQiyi has been in a state of loss almost since its inception. iQIYI's 2020 financial report shows that from 2018 to 2020, iQIYI lost 9.1 billion yuan, 10.3 billion yuan and 7 billion yuan respectively, and the third quarter of this year's financial report showed that the net loss in the first three quarters of this year was 4.4 billion yuan. In other words, in less than four years, iQiyi has lost nearly 30.8 billion yuan.

When the 2020 financial report was announced, iQiyi's cash flow from operating activities was already negative. In the third quarter of 2021, iQIYI's cash flow from operating activities was -2.081 billion yuan, once again expanding from the same period last year. To make matters worse, on November 30, iQIYI announced that it would repurchase a convertible bond originally scheduled to mature in 2023 in advance, and if the repurchase amount of the convertible bond was repaid in full, then iQIYI's current cash on the book was only about 2.5 billion yuan.

Compared with the operating expenses of 1.929 billion yuan announced in the third quarterly report, it means that iQiyi can only barely support its employees for one more quarter, and it will enter the cash exhaustion.