On December 22, some Mushroom Street employees broke out on a social platform that Mushroom Street was laying off employees on a large scale. According to the news, mushroom street layoffs, the proportion of layoffs in the technical department is as high as 80%, the overall layoff is about 30%, the operation and maintenance department is only 3 people, and the product post is only 2 people.
Founded 10 years ago, the continuous transformation has never been profitable, and the market value of the 3-year listing has plummeted by 98%, and it has been in a slump. As of Dec. 22, Mushroom Street had only $43 million left in its market capitalization.
According to incomplete statistics, other well-known Internet companies that have recently been exposed to layoffs include Suning, Ctrip, Mafengwo, Hello Travel, Shihui Tuan, Meicai.com, Guazi used cars, Plaything Dezhi, Tujia, Qunar, etc. In response to the large-scale layoffs of Mushroom Street, online business experts believe that it has not seized its own advantages and expanded.
Mushrooms are facing a test in live e-commerce
Mo Daiqing, director of the online retail department and senior analyst of the e-commerce research center of the network economic and social society, said that in recent years, the rapid rise of live e-commerce, Mushroom Street has comprehensively shifted the focus of live e-commerce, hoping to catch up with the ride. With the fines of tax evasion by Via, Sydney and Lin Shanshan, the supervision of live e-commerce has been further tightened. With the head anchor effect being dispersed, the live e-commerce industry has ushered in a wave of reshuffle, and there are still many unknowns in the future, so it is also a big test for Mushroom Street.
Cao Lei, director of the E-commerce Research Center of the Network Economic Society, said that the beauty of Mushroom Street, including the previous merger, is indeed dependent on the Taobao ecology to start as a shopping guide, the so-called "success and Taobao defeat also Taobao". However, he believes that the defeat is also Taobao, which may not be complete. First of all, at least it is still alive and has not yet been delisted. It is a public company, although the market value is only tens of millions of dollars. The second is that it has been trying to find directions, such as fashion e-commerce, live e-commerce, short broadcast, and a lot of exploration is still on the way. If you really want to talk about failure, you can only say that bankruptcy and bankruptcy is failure.
Cao Lei further pointed out that objectively speaking, it is indeed not bigger, and from a certain point of view, it is indeed a manifestation of enterprise operation.
Mushroom Street has good commercialization capabilities but loses its traffic capabilities
Cao Lei said that Mushroom Street's current business model choice is exactly what makes Mushroom Street have a good commercialization ability, but it has lost its traffic ability, which is exactly the opposite of Xiaohongshu. It can only be said that it is very difficult to scale in the track of e-commerce, and Mushroom Street is better at serving businesses and anchors, and it is doomed to fail to fight with platforms with huge capital blessings.
He further pointed out that the retreat of Mushroom Street is that it has always been good at toB service capabilities, so far the anchor of the Mushroom Street platform is still a group of anchors with the highest conversion efficiency of fans in the whole network, in such a small traffic plate, it can also make a single field of 100 million sales, indicating that Mushroom Street is very strong in the operation of toB, but it is a pity that this ability has not been amplified. Perhaps the recent layoffs are a signal that Mushroom Street will transform in the future, if they really do what they are better at, no longer go to the scale of traffic, and perhaps have the opportunity to turn over.
Upstream journalist Yang Ye intern Zhang Kezin