Summary: Can you break through (welcome to pay attention to the leverage game)
Written by | Zhang Yinyin
Kuaishou and the US group "hold hands"!
After a brief cooperation with Douyin a year ago, on December 27, 2021, Meituan announced a strategic interconnection cooperation with Kuaishou on its WeChat official account. Meituan said that it will launch the Meituan Mini Program on the Kuaishou Open Platform, providing Meituan merchants with complete service capabilities such as packages, vouchers, reservations and other commodity displays, online transactions and after-sales service, and Kuaishou users will be able to directly access through the Meituan Mini Program.
Meituan has always been the king of local life business, but with the intervention of Douyin, Meituan also seems to feel threatened. Starting from 2020, Douyin released the Heartbeat Restaurant, also trial-run the Heartbeat Takeaway, and announced its entry into the catering field in a high-profile manner.
Since entering the second half of 2021, Douyin has begun to try to accurately push nearby restaurants to various Douyin users based on the combination of positioning + content + interest with an accurate algorithm push mode, which is simply like the "short video" version of Dianping.
The short board of the supply side has always been a problem that Douyin and Kuaishou have to face when entering the local life industry, and Douyin's move has undoubtedly sounded an alarm bell for Kuaishou. If Douyin makes up for the shortcomings, will Kuaishou still have a chance to live in the local battlefield? Can the basic disk of the US group still be stabilized?
In the third quarterly report of 2021, behind some eye-catching indicators, leverage games also saw some hidden worries of the two Internet giants.
For example, Meituan lost nearly 10 billion yuan in the third quarter, compared with a profit of 6.321 billion yuan in the same period of 2020. Previously, the State Administration for Market Regulation imposed an administrative penalty on Meituan, requiring a full refund of the exclusive cooperation deposit of 1.289 billion yuan and imposing a fine of 3% of its sales of 114.748 billion yuan in China in 2020, totaling 3.442 billion yuan. Even if the amount of the fine is removed, the net profit is still a loss.
Moreover, in terms of the main business "catering takeaway", the growth rate of meituan is low, at 28%. Previously, the first quarterly report of 2021 showed that the revenue of Meituan's catering takeaway business in the quarter was 20.575 billion yuan, an increase of 116.8% year-on-year, and the net profit was 1.115 billion yuan. It can be seen that there is not much room for growth in this area.
It is worth mentioning the arrivals, hotels and tours. In the third quarter, meituan's segment grew by 33.1% year-on-year, which was not outstanding, but the operating profit increased by 35.8% year-on-year to 3.784 billion yuan, far exceeding the operating profit of its main business catering takeaway.
It is foreseeable that the local life-related business will be a big growth engine.
In terms of Kuaishou, The third quarter revenue of Kuaishou 2021 was 20.493 billion yuan, an increase of 33.4% year-on-year, which is not bad, and the same good data is DAU and MAU stop falling sharply.
On the other hand, compared with the revenue of about 19.1 billion yuan in the second quarter (adjusted net loss of 4.770 billion yuan in the same period), the adjusted net loss in the third quarter was slightly increased to 4.822 billion yuan. If you look at the year-on-year, the expansion of the loss amount is somewhat amazing, 401.1%.
In the first three quarters, the loss of Kuaishou was as high as 21.9 billion yuan. In addition, in the third quarter, Kuaishou's gross margin decreased year-on-year, from 43.1% in the same period of 2020 to 41.5%.
In 2021, Kuaishou's stock price has retreated sharply, evaporating trillions of Hong Kong dollars during the year... At the end of the year, there was even news that Kuaishou was going to lay off employees for the winter. According to First Finance, a Kuaishou business personnel confirmed the authenticity of the rumors, and a large number of directly operated businesses in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen were either transferred or resigned.
For meituan, the advantages accumulated by Dianping in the era of graphics and text have gradually been deconstructed by the era of short videos. As early as 2017, Dianping has begun to try to use short video elements to transform into a content platform, helplessly, the cognitive solidification of the Dianping scene, users will only open it when they need it, so the content is always its weakness, and meituan urgently needs to enrich its own content ecology.
Secondly, whether it is meituan preferred, meituan buying vegetables or meituan flash buying are all grabbing traffic in the sinking market, coupled with the 2021 anti-monopoly investigation, rider social security and other events on cash flow, meituan must find a huge pool of traffic to alleviate growth anxiety.
For Kuaishou, when the short video user dividend is almost at the top, how to find a better way to realize on the basis of 300 million daily active users seems to have become the road that can still work.
After more than two decades of development, there are fewer and fewer new opportunities in the model, and the difficulty of innovation at the bottom is very high, which makes the big and small giants fall into business anxiety. Even Didi is doing community group buying, which is a true portrayal of this situation.
The cooperation between meituan and Kuaishou is a possibility of a breakthrough in the cold winter, between bottlenecks, but how likely is this? It is not yet known.