The platform economy will be deeply integrated with the real economy

Recently, farmers used live broadcasting to promote tomatoes in a melon and vegetable planting base in Qian'an City, Hebei Province. In recent years, Qian'an City, Hebei Province, has encouraged farmers to rely on the Internet for online sales of agricultural products, and at the same time carried out relevant training activities to enhance farmers' online sales capabilities. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Mou Yu

The "14th Five-Year Plan" and the 2035 Long-term Goal Outline "Accelerating Digital Development and Building a Digital China" section proposes to "promote the healthy development of the sharing economy and the platform economy".

In the past 2021, traffic has peaked, growth has slowed, regulation has become stricter, antitrust... The platform economy has entered a mature period of development, and the traffic dividend and business model dividend effects have weakened. Looking forward to 2022, high-quality development, interconnection and social responsibility will become the keywords of platform economic development.

The industry generally believes that the future growth space of the platform economy will shift to more solid value creation, deep integration with the real economy, give full play to digital advantages to empower traditional industries, improve production efficiency, and reduce the cost of circulation in the whole society, which is the only way for the platform economy to take off for the second time in the process of standardized development and build a new national competitive advantage.

Promote high-quality development

In the past period of time, major Internet platform companies have successively released the third quarter report of 2021, Tencent's revenue growth rate in the third quarter has dropped to the lowest level since its listing in 2004, and the revenue and net profit growth rates of Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo have also declined to varying degrees. Layoffs, welfare reductions, and not burning money have become the "combination fists" played by many enterprises.

Since 2021, relevant departments have intensively introduced a series of new regulatory measures, especially in the Internet, off-campus training and rectification. Under the regulatory requirements such as preventing disorderly expansion of capital, anti-monopoly, data security, and privacy protection, the Internet industry bid farewell to the barbaric growth stage.

At the same time, the platform economy has also touched the traffic ceiling. As of June 2021, china's Internet users reached 1.011 billion people, and the Internet penetration rate reached 71.6%, forming the world's largest and most vibrant digital society. The gradual disappearance of the demographic dividend can be described as a salary draw for Internet companies.

Under strong supervision, "pain" is inevitable, but more is an opportunity. Looking forward to 2022, platform companies will emphasize the quality of development. Not long ago, Alibaba announced that it has taken the initiative to adjust its revenue expectations in order to invest in the future and open up new space for development. Daniel Zhang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Alibaba Group, said: "Alibaba continues to invest firmly in the three major strategies of domestic demand, globalization and cloud computing, laying a solid foundation for the Group's long-term sustainable development. ”

Facing the future, Internet companies must jump out of the red sea of traffic, actively seek new ways of development, continuously improve innovation and research and development capabilities, and open the "second growth curve". "The future development trend of the platform economy will be different, and the differentiation within the industry will be obvious." Pan Helin, executive dean of the Digital Economy Research Institute of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, believes that the platform economy relies on platform traffic to drive growth in the early stage, and relies on efficiency to drive growth in the later stage, and the future is a new period of platform development, which will provide new growth momentum for the economy.

Connectivity adds dynamism

In order to seek high-quality development, the "network island" must be broken. Previously, the two major national applications of the Internet were isolated for a long time, Taobao shopping could not use WeChat payment, weChat could not share Taobao links, but could only share Tao passwords. Since the second half of 2021, there have been growing calls to break the isolation of the Internet.

In July 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology launched a six-month special rectification action for the Internet industry, and the issue of blocking URL links is also a key focus of this rectification action. In early September 2021, the Information and Communications Administration of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology organized an "Administrative Guidance Meeting on blocking URL Links", requiring all platforms to unblock URL links according to standards on September 17.

In the context of national policy support and transformation and development, connectivity has become an important starting point for new infrastructure to achieve fairness, convenience and inclusiveness. Jia Kang, vice president and secretary general of the China Society of Finance, said that finding feasible ways to dismantle barriers will benefit the majority of users: consumers can minimize the upload of various personal information, conveniently switch between different platforms to use different services; small and micro enterprises can integrate their resources on different platforms, comprehensively coordinate business, reduce costs and increase efficiency.

At present, the barriers between platforms are gradually opening, but unblocking URL links is only the first step to solve the problem of interconnection, and there is still a long way to go. In December 2021, Kuaishou and Meituan announced that they had reached a strategic cooperation on connectivity. Based on the Kuaishou open platform, the two sides will open up content scene marketing, online transactions and offline performance service capabilities, and jointly create a "one-stop" complete consumption link for users. The interconnection between the two sides brings a broader imagination space and market increment to the local life industry, and helps to achieve a virtuous circle of platforms, users, talents, merchants and business ecology.

At the 2021 Baidu Alliance Summit held recently, Shen Ji, executive vice president of Baidu Group, said that interconnection should not only be the interconnection between platform information and content, but also the interconnection of technology and ecology. In this way, we can truly enhance the vitality of Internet innovation, and then promote the upgrading of the entire industry and public life.

Interconnection will turn a closed "traffic pool" into an active river. Shen Ji said that interconnection will be a major opportunity for the entire mobile Internet to face the next decade, interconnection allows the Internet to return to the early open state, interconnection allows Internet enterprises, Internet companies and traditional enterprises to truly synergize, interoperability, technology empowerment, ecological support, jointly share digital, intelligent science and technology dividends, bring more multiplier effects, and make the overall cake bigger.

Fulfill social responsibilities

A small mobile phone screen that completely changed the fate of Grundrom. This Daocheng Tibetan girl, who had not been to the county town before the age of 18, has now become a well-known local leader of getting rich with the Kuaishou short video platform.

The "Happy Village Leader Program" initiated by Kuaishou is the first Internet corporate social responsibility project focusing on rural entrepreneurs in China, and has now developed into the first rural entrepreneur growth incubator and rural industry accelerator in China. According to the data, from January to October 2021, more than 420 million orders for agricultural products were sent from rural areas to all parts of the country through Kuaishou's live e-commerce. In the past three years, more than 20 million people have earned income in Kuaishou every year, many from remote areas.

Su Hua, founder and chairman of Kuaishou, said that since the development of the Internet, the short video live broadcast platform is deeply integrated with the real economy and all walks of life, on the one hand, it has improved the inclusiveness and convenience of the supply of online public cultural services; on the other hand, it has spawned new formats and new models, promoted the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries, and burst out greater economic potential and social value.

At the 2021 World Internet Conference, Daniel Zhang announced on alibaba's behalf two new strategies around social responsibility – ESG (environmental, social, corporate governance) and contributing to common prosperity. Daniel Zhang said: "The greatest value of the platform economy lies in the achievement of others while also achieving healthy growth. Only by being more inclusive, fairer, more standardized, more inclusive, and allowing more people and more small and medium-sized enterprises to participate in it, can the platform economy develop truly and sustainably. ”

To promote high-quality development, platform enterprises must fulfill their social responsibilities. Ma Huateng, chairman of the board and CEO of Tencent, believes that in the process of digital upgrading, traditional industries will bring about value chain restructuring, and once out of control, it may lead to the impact of capital and new business models on practitioners of the original format. Internet companies, especially platform enterprises, should uphold the concept of science and technology for good, practice the rules of technical ethics, and put development above the bottom line of security.

Shen Ji said that small and medium-sized enterprises to catch up with the digital express, in addition to the support of the state, enterprises themselves efforts, but also need to master the digital, intelligent leading technology of the Internet enterprise "help belt", by helping small and medium-sized enterprises to practice the basic skills of digitalization, intelligence, forging high-quality development of the unique skills, and finally form a large enterprise to stand on top of the sky, small enterprises overwhelming, large, medium, small and micro enterprises to develop the digital, intelligent ecology. (Economic Daily reporter Wang Yichen)