Edit | Yu Bin
Produced by | Chaoqi Network "Yu see column"
As one of the typical representatives of the sharing economy, shared bicycles have achieved extensive development in China with the advantages of sharing, convenience and speed, and many travel service enterprises with shared bicycles as their main business have taken advantage of the momentum.
Among them, Hello Travel is a representative enterprise, after its establishment in 2016, it borrowed Dongfeng to start from the shared bicycle business, and gradually became one of the leading enterprises in the shared bicycle industry, and stood on three feet with Meituan Bicycle and Green Orange Bicycle in the shared bicycle industry.
However, fierce fighting has always been the norm in the shared bicycle industry, and the blind investment of enterprises, vicious competition and other internal roll behaviors have gradually led to the entire industry running counter to its vision of vigorous development, and has also shown a scene of late development, in recent years, Haro Travel and other head companies are no exception, have fallen into difficulties.
Under the cold of the industry, Hello Travel, which occupies a leading position in the industry, has not been alone, but has fallen into the development dilemma of sharing business losses. Although in order to seek a breakthrough in the development of new enterprises, Hello Travel has carried out many explorations in new businesses, but from the results, It seems that Halo Travel's new business has not received good market feedback. The existing business is stuck in a bottleneck, the performance of the new business is also unsatisfactory, and where the future development of Hello Travel will go has become a common concern in the industry.
The listing plan has been shelved, and the profitability of Hello Travel has been questioned
From the perspective of the company's business structure, at present, Hello Travel is still mainly based on providing shared bicycle services. According to iResearch data, more than 90% of Haro Travel's revenue and costs in 2020 will come from two-wheeler sharing services for bicycles and electric bicycles.
However, the shared bicycle business, which accounts for a relatively high proportion of revenue, has not brought ideal profits to Hello Travel.
According to the prospectus data of Hello Travel, since 2018, the company has been in a state of loss, with the highest annual loss of more than 2 billion yuan, and the cumulative loss in the three years from 2018 to 2020 has been close to 5 billion yuan.
The continuous loss of the sharing business also shows the profitability of Hello Travel, and its operating conditions have also been questioned by the industry and beyond.
A large part of the reason for the difficulty of profitability of Haro's travel sharing business comes from the model and characteristics of the shared bicycle industry, resulting in the lack of hematopoietic function of Haro's own enterprises.
First of all, the operation of shared bicycles is an asset-heavy model, which needs to seize the market by achieving scale effects, and enterprises need to bear high resource investment costs under such a business model. Secondly, a large number of resources have brought higher facility and equipment management costs and research and development costs, which further compresses the profitability of enterprises.
36Kr reported that the sharing business model is single, and the difficulty of corporate profitability has become the consensus of the industry. At present, the shared bicycle industry has entered a twilight year, and enterprises that have relied on the development of emerging markets in the past will naturally be affected by the industry, and the overall development will slow down.
The main business of Haro Bicycle is affected by the cold wave of the industry and the growth is weak, on the basis of the company's own insufficient hematopoietic capacity, Once Haro Bicycle cannot retain more users, it will face more sustained financial pressure.
In addition to the fact that the losses of Haro Travel enterprises are difficult to stop, the current situation of Hello Travel in the capital market is not ideal. On July 2021, Halo Travel officially stated that Halo Travel had issued a statement to the U.S. Stock Exchange Board requesting the withdrawal of the IPO application.
Some investment bankers said that the current listing plans of many domestic companies do not rule out that the companies that originally planned to go public in the United States will turn to Hong Kong stocks due to urgent financing needs, and it is necessary to further verify whether the company's profitability meets the many requirements of listing. The failure of Haro Travel's listing plan has made the industry start to pay attention to The performance of Halo Travel in the capital market.
In fact, judging from the information of Tianyancha, the development of Hello Travel has always had capital wrapped up in it. According to Tianyancha information, from the end of December 2017 to November 2021, a total of 10 rounds of financing were carried out, and the total amount of financing disclosed exceeded $1.6 trillion. In the 10 rounds of financing, Ant Group participated in 7 rounds, and Fosun Group, Primavera Capital and Hengxu Capital successively entered the game.
From the financing situation of Hello Travel, at present, Ant Financial has become the largest shareholder of Hello Travel, holding 584 million shares, accounting for 36.3%, Halo Travel relies heavily on Ant Group's "blood transfusion" to move forward, and since 2017, the financing rhythm of Halo Travel has slowed down to a large extent. Whether it is a dominant financing pattern or a gradually slowing financing pace, the current situation of Hello Travel in the capital market is no longer optimistic.
The fall of the listing plan will attract the attention of capital, and some analysts believe that after Hello cancels its listing in the United States, it may urgently need to carry out new financing to fill the funding gap currently facing enterprises.
If there is a problem of poor financing, Hello Travel may also be forced to take measures to reduce the scale of the business. In the future, in the capital market, the development of Hello Travel is even more turbulent.
In general, the company's main business has fallen into the dilemma of continuous losses, and the plan to go public in the United States to seek a turnaround has failed, and the road to the development of Hello Travel has become a thorny road. How to face the pain points of poor profitability is one of the problems that Haro Travel needs to solve urgently, and the future market expects Hello Travel to be able to dig deep into the potential of the enterprise and show new vitality.
The development of new business segments has been hindered, and the growth points of Hello Travel's business still need to be explored
Under the bottomless pit investment of shared bicycles, Hello Travel no longer blindly adheres to the main shared bicycle business and begins to actively lay out new businesses. It is understood that the existing business of Haro Travel includes two-wheeled travel business such as Haro bicycle, Haro moped, Haro electric vehicle, Xiaoha electric vehicle, Xiaoha power exchange, etc.; four-wheeled travel business such as Hello ride-hailing, full-network ride-hailing, and Haro taxi; and local life services such as Haro Hotel and in-store group buying. At present, the new business of The main layout of Hello Travel is mainly based on the two major businesses of hitchhiking business and local life services.
However, in the hitchhiking business, there are already leading companies such as Didi, Meituan and Ctrip occupying the hitchhiking market. After the removal of the Didi Chuxing APP, meituan, AutoNavi, Dida Travel, Shouqi Ride-hailing, Caocao Travel, T3 Travel and other multi-party enterprises began to rise, and Hello Travel faced more fierce market competition.
However, the fierce market competition has not spawned Hello's superb business, but the hitchhiking business of Hello Travel has received widespread complaints from users.
There are complaints on major complaint platforms about the lack of driver service or customer service inaction in the face of user problems. The Beijing News reported that it is difficult to match the people and cars of The Hello Hitchhiker, and many users find that the platform has very few vehicle sources and the success rate of the itinerary can be matched is very low, often facing the problem of no one taking orders. A certain user pointed out on the black cat complaint platform that the driver of the hitchhiker refused to communicate and forced the passengers to get out of the car and violently throw away their luggage.
In addition to being complained by many users, the owner of the hitchhiking car also pointed out on the platforms such as Zhihu that the unit price of the Hello hitchhiking order is very low, and the list is also small, if it is not a very small number of shunshi situations, the order is not profitable at all. Both the passengers and the owner of the car seem to have expressed their dissatisfaction with the Hello Ride, and in the long run, the platform users have gradually lost, the driver retention rate has plummeted, and the sustainable development of the Hello Ride is worrying.
In addition, the data shows that in December 2020, the Office of the Inter-ministerial Joint Conference on the Coordinated Supervision of New Transportation Formats organized a reminder interview with Hello and other hitchhiking platform companies, pointing out that these platforms were suspected of engaging in illegal online ride-hailing business in the name of hitchhiking, and there were hidden safety risks.
Users have not received the ideal service, the number of car owners is difficult to ensure profitability, safety risks are deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, Hello Travel's hitchhiking business still has a lot of room for optimization, in order to smoothly enter this competitive track, Hello Hitchhiker still needs to overcome many obstacles.
Another new business with an active layout is the Hello Local Life Services segment. Obviously, Hello is aiming at the high profits of local life services and wants to rely on the traffic support brought by Ali to seize the local life business. However, the local life service track is also a very crowded track, before there are two giants of Meituan and Ali, after the new local life team of the original core team of Douyin, the traffic war, Hello's exploration in the local life service sector can also be described as easier said than done.
In addition to the two major sections of hitchhiking and local life, Hello also laid out Xiaoha electric vehicles, Haro electric vehicles and Hello taxis
In the first half of 2021, on the basis of Hello Life, we further launched its own brand accommodation businesses "Hello Inn" and "Hello Hotel". However, the later performance of these new businesses across the country still needs to be further considered.
In summary, it can be seen that at present, the development of the two major new business sectors mainly launched by Hello Travel has been hindered, and how other new layout businesses will be in the future is not yet known, under the dilemma of weak development of the main business, Halo Travel's pursuit of new business growth points is still obstacle and long. In the future, it is expected that Hello Travel will continue to make efforts in the exploration of new business segments and bring new surprises to the industry.
epilogue
After the rapid rise of the emerging industry, Hello Travel has always occupied the leading position in the industry for the past five years. Today, the shared bicycle industry is cold, and Hello Travel is also facing a profit dilemma. In the case of a red sea of competition in the industry, Hello Travel did not sit still and actively explore new business segments. However, while this market is becoming more and more mature, how To explore a sustainable development path in the midst of many thorns will still be a big problem.
In any case, the current Hello Travel still occupies a leading position in China's travel service industry. Facing the pain points of enterprise development and comprehensively carrying out the layout of new business sectors will also be the future development direction of Halo Travel, and I believe that Halo can face difficulties and continue to maintain a high-spirited trend. And if the future Ofo Travel can turn the existing pressure into power, break out of the situation, and bring a new look to China's travel service industry, it will also be expected.