In the spring of the fifth year of Song Shenzong Yuanfeng, Su Shi and his friends suddenly encountered heavy rain during a spring tour in Shahu Road, because there was no rain gear and they were drenched in cold. The friend was deeply embarrassed, but he calmly handled it, braved the rain and dashed forward and wrote the popular "Fixing the Storm".
Today, we may not have the opportunity to experience the embarrassment and open-mindedness experienced by Su Shi, in the context of various weather forecasting software flooding mobile phones, it is not difficult to check the weather in advance before traveling.
Nowadays, the help brought by meteorology has become more and more helpful, not only in daily life, but also in the field of business. According to the estimation of the China Meteorological Association, the scale of China's meteorological service industry will reach 300 billion yuan in the future 2025, and the meteorological service market has entered a dividend period.
The intensification of market competition has become an inevitable trend, who will become the hand that stirs up the market?
Insight into the opportunity, ink weather to seize the B and C markets
On the heat, although the meteorological service market has not been as hot as new consumption and AI in recent years, it has not lacked capital attention. Since the beginning of this year, commercial meteorological service providers such as Xiangji Technology and Jiufang Technology have completed financing, but when it comes to meteorological service providers that are most concerned by the market, it is ink weather.
Among the many meteorological service enterprises in China, ink weather is the earliest batch to enter the bureau. In 2009, Ink Weather released the first version of the app and officially entered the field of meteorological services.
In the following years, due to relevant policy restrictions, the meteorological service of ink weather has been developing for the C-end. At that time, ink weather mainly did two things: one was to use scientific and technological means to continuously improve the accuracy of weather forecasting, and the other was to take weather forecasting as the core, and successively launched functions such as real-life communities, information, and life services, and built the APP into a one-stop comprehensive service platform. In addition, it has also launched an "air fruit" in terms of meteorological hardware to try to deeply integrate into the lives of residents.
These actions have indeed accumulated a lot of C-end users for the ink weather, and its official website shows that as of 2019, the number of download users reached 700 million, and the number of monthly active users reached 150 million. This achievement gives Ink Weather the confidence to compete with the traffic platform for the market.
But then came the problem. If the user has it, how can it be monetized? As a meteorological software, the monetization direction of ink weather is not much, and the prospectus shows that in the past, its advertising revenue once accounted for more than 90% of revenue. However, users regard ink weather as a tool for predicting the weather, and do not want to view a large number of ads before checking the weather, which leads to the risk of user churn in ink weather.
Therefore, in order not to get yourself caught in this dilemma, ink weather opened the way to B.
In June 2015, the Meteorological Bureau officially issued an order to open up China's meteorological information, and in 2020, it will be completely liberalized, while encouraging private capital and the Meteorological Bureau to cooperate.
Under the favorable policy, ink weather quickly launched "ink red must" to cut into the B-end market. Due to the rich experience and massive data accumulated in the C-end market for many years, the ink weather can be smoothly rolled out in the B-end market.
By the end of 2020, Ink Weather has provided meteorological services to more than 100 industry customers. Compared with other commercial weather service providers, ink weather is already at the forefront. However, the data shows that the degree of commercialization of the meteorological service market as a whole is still low, public meteorological services account for 76.01% of the total market, and commercial meteorological leaders have not yet appeared.
In the face of the blue ocean of 100 billion commercial meteorological services, how to release the value of ink weather?
Meteorological services are deeply commercialized, can ink weather still "hit"?
Due to the late commercialization of meteorology in China, most people may not realize that meteorological services are very important to enterprises.
From the perspective of service objects, many industries such as agriculture, logistics, transportation, travel, catering and retail need meteorological services. The help brought by meteorology to the development of enterprises is not only "forecasting the weather", but also reflected in management upgrades, process reengineering, service innovation and industrial upgrading.
Taking the retail industry as an example, large retail enterprises generally have mature supply chains to achieve seamless procurement, logistics and transportation, sales and other links, and improve operational efficiency. But it also means that once one of the links goes wrong, the others will be affected.
In the actual operation of procurement, logistics and transportation and sales, it is often affected by the uncertainty of weather. At this time, professional meteorological services are needed to make scientific decisions in advance to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
In fact, foreign large retail companies such as Walmart, McDonald's, Starbucks, etc. have fixed weather service providers, and meteorological services have long been integrated into all aspects of their production.
In contrast, China's meteorological services are still in the early stages of development, and the awareness of meteorological services of enterprises is still forming. In such a market environment, how can ink weather release value?
As a meteorological service provider, the coverage and accuracy of meteorological forecasts are naturally the key to determining whether they can fire the first shot. Whether the coverage of meteorological forecast matches the commercial map of the serviced enterprise, and whether the accuracy of the forecast is almost the same as the real weather, these are the key issues that enterprises consider when introducing meteorological services.
Coverage and accuracy are essentially tests data acquisition capabilities. Compared with other meteorological service providers, in addition to collecting data from professional meteorological organizations at home and abroad, ink weather also uses a large number of real-time weather pictures in the scene community and crowdsourced data such as short-term feedback from background users to update and supplement weather information in real time, which is the main reason why the commercial value of ink weather is different from its peers.
The reason why the B-end and even G-end market needs commercial meteorological services is because compared with public meteorological services, commercial meteorological services are more professional, and data analysis and meteorological prediction can be accurate, which can help B-end and G-end avoid losses caused by meteorological changes in production activities. By improving the data collection capability, ink weather can issue different customized solutions for different industries, breaking the deadlock of "one solution and multiple industry applications" in the industry.
However, at the moment when the market value of meteorological services is gradually released, the strength of competitors who enter the game later should not be underestimated. For example, Xiangji Technology, which focuses on the B-end, has a good scientific research strength, and has independently developed more than 50 meteorological technologies, including big data development, meteorological identification, meteorological forecasting, etc., and has applied for patents. In contrast, there are only 33 patent information on the ink weather checked by the enterprise, which is slightly insufficient.
After all, the professional meteorological services for the B-end and the G-end are different from the public meteorological services for the C-end, and if you want to maximize the release of value in the 100 billion market, Ink Weather will continue to enhance its scientific research strength and market operation capabilities.
Author Vast