In recent years, the "legendary strike worker" Xiang Hailong, who has attracted much attention, has found a new owner for himself.
On January 13, a number of media reported that Xiang Hailong, who had served as an executive in Baidu and Gome, had recently officially joined transsion holdings, a mobile phone manufacturer in shanghai, and he joined transsion with several subordinates who had followed him in Baidu before. In this regard, Transsion Holdings responded to the media and said that the situation of Xiang Hailong's employment is true, and its position in the group is the president of the mobile Internet business unit.
From the senior vice president of Baidu, the president of the search company, to the vice president of Gome Retail, the CEO of Gome Online, and then to the president of the mobile Internet business department of Transsion Holdings, the speed of the conversion to Hailong is really dazzling to observers, but to some extent, the departure and joining of such high-level personnel also reflects the rise and fall of the company and the development trend of the industry to some extent, whether it is Baidu, Gome, or the "King of African Mobile Phones" that Xiang Hailong joined this time.
Image from Yandex
From Baidu to Gome, why did Xiang Hailong continuously incarnate as a "bucket man"?
As Baidu's former "second in command", Xiang Hailong's personal ability is beyond doubt. Since leading Qilang Network to join Baidu in 2005, his promotion process has been quite stable, and eventually even took charge of Baidu's core search business. In terms of performance, whether it is his leadership of the sales team to maintain a growth rate of more than 200% for three consecutive years, or Baidu Super CCTV becoming the largest advertising service platform in China, or its promotion again and again, it reflects the veteran's strong strength in the field of Internet marketing.
However, Xiang Hailong's smooth sailing days on Baidu came to an abrupt end in 2019 , the year when Baidu released its first quarterly report on losses since its listing, along with the news of Xiang Hailong's departure and Baidu Search's strategic transformation into a mobile ecological business group. Obviously, in the face of Baidu's dilemma in the field of mobile Internet at that time, even if it is as strong as Xiang Hailong, it is powerless to return to heaven.
In the external claim, Xiang Hailong said that he left Baidu to make better investments, and after that, he was indeed active in the investment field, and in January 2020, he created the Longzhong Xinyi Fund in his personal name. But just like he ran away from Baidu, everyone did not expect that this former Baidu core figure who aspired to "make better investments" would accept Gome's invitation a year later and become a pawn of Huang Guangyu, the godfather of business.
After Xiang Hailong entered the Gome trading e-commerce business in August 2020, his first action was to rename the original Gome Mall to "True Happiness", according to him, the three words of True Happiness represent true selection, fast delivery, as well as entertainment buying and entertainment selling. It is not difficult to see that Gome seems to want to use entertainment marketing methods to cut into the e-commerce track and compete with rivals such as Ali and JD.com on the basis of social e-commerce.
However, judging from the data of the 618 and Double Eleven Shopping Festivals in 2021, the online reform of Gome does not seem to have shown much effect. The first sign is that Gome did not release the most critical GMV data for True Happiness, but only announced the year-on-year growth rate and new visitors - for example, during the Singles' Day period, its GMV transaction volume increased by 253% from 618 month-on-month, and the whole category increased by 152%. Compared with the hundreds of billions of GMVs of competitors such as Tmall and JD.com, the true happiness of lacking hardcore data is inevitably somewhat weak.
The lack of optimism about Gome's prospects may be the reason why Xiang Hailong finally chose to leave – in July this year, a report quoted gome insiders as saying that Xiang Hailong had earlier been in a "suspended position" of "out of work", retaining only the executive introduction and internal approval flow in the annual report, or had actually left the group.
It is worth noting that as early as May 2021, when he was interviewed by the media, Xiang Hailong emphasized his identity as an investor more, but did not talk about the more important CEO position of Gome Online. Perhaps, he had already been separated from the beauty of the country at that time.
Will the "King of African Mobile Phones" become the next transit station for Xiang Hailong?
Looking at the two companies that have been "abandoned" by Xiang Hailong, it is not difficult for us to find common ground between them: whether it is Baidu or Gome, they have missed the opportunity of the times in a sense. This is mobile Internet for Baidu, and e-commerce for Gome. What about TRANSSION Holdings? Will this mobile phone company become the next transit station for Xiang Hailong's career? Or the final station?
Before making a judgment, we may wish to take a look at this mobile phone manufacturer that is not well-known in China.
The name of transsion mobile phones has almost never been loud in China, but this is also related to the choice of its founder Zhu Zhaojiang. In 2005, when the once-popular Bird mobile phone was defeated by foreign brands such as Nokia, Zhu Zhaojiang, as the core of Bird's sales, saw the huge untapped opportunities in the African market from an overseas survey and was determined to break away from the waveguide self-reliance portal, and the company "Transsion" was established. In 2006, TRANSSION's first mobile phone, TECNO, was officially released in Nigeria, and in the following years, TRANSSION successively launched two major brands, it focuses on cost-effective ital and Infinix for young people.
Most of the domestic mobile phone brands that rose in that era had a distinctive feature: they were good at marketing. Whether it is OPPO, Vivo, or jin li and tianyu that have declined today, it is also true, and transliteration from China is naturally no exception. From TV drama slots to street poles, TRANSSION's advertising is almost pervasive in African countries.
On the other hand, the product tone of this overseas brand is also extremely grounded, from the initial dual CARD dual standby to "four cards and four standbys", "intelligent tanning", heat-proof and drop-proof, super battery life and high-power speakers, TRANSSION has completely conquered the hearts of African consumers with its localized product strategy, leaving Samsung and other international manufacturers behind. Judging from the list of "Top 100 Brands Most Loved by African Consumers in 2016" released by African Business Magazine African Business, TRANSSION's TECNO, itel and Infinix not only won the top ranks, ranking 6, 21 and 25 respectively.
As of its listing in 2019, TRANSSION Holdings' shipments have accounted for 50% of the entire African market, and it not only maintains its advantage in the field of mobile phones through offline channels accumulated over a long period of time, but also expands its territory to other tracks, such as home appliances, smart accessories, and mobile Internet - TRANSSION tries to take off the hat of "pure hardware company" with the action of powering software business. At the same time, it also hopes to use Internet revenue to make up for the gross profit loss caused by the long-term cost-effective strategy.
However, for now, although TRANSSION's mobile Internet business is huge, it is not satisfactory in terms of revenue generation. According to the 2021 semi-annual report, the total sales revenue of its main business smartphones accounted for 21.677 billion yuan, accounting for nearly 95% of the company's total revenue, and the proportion of smart accessories and mobile Internet-related revenue was extremely small. This time, Xiang Hailong, who is good at Internet marketing, will be recruited into the army, and may also be holding the opportunity to enhance the commercialization ability of the mobile Internet.
Can Transsion's "soft version of the ecological chain" replicate Xiaomi's glory?
From a macro perspective, the African mobile Internet market still has huge growth potential. According to the GSMA (Global Association of Mobile Communication Systems) statistical report, by 2025. The average monthly traffic consumption of Internet users in Africa may reach 7.1GB, which is very close to the level of China in 2019. In addition, the penetration rate of mobile Internet infrastructure such as e-commerce and mobile payment is gradually deepening, which is expected to further increase the overall market size.
At present, TRANSSION controls the most important traffic entrance in Africa, "TRANSSION OS", and imports traffic for its own apps (such as Boomplay) through system pre-installed applications and other ways. However, because TRANSSION does not accumulate deeply in software, it cooperates more with domestic Internet companies to develop software. For example, in September 2017, it jointly established Transsion Internet Technology Co., Ltd. with Hong Kong NetEase Interactive Entertainment, and in the first half of 2020, TRANSSION also cooperated with Tencent's subsidiaries to establish Cloudview Technology to provide browser services.
Because of this, many people in the industry will compare the model of TRANSSION software with the intelligent hardware ecological chain created by Xiaomi through investment, and believe that TRANSSION is bound to have great expectations. However, things may not be so simple.
It should be noted that the software ecological chain and the hardware ecological chain are fundamentally different - in the "software ecological chain" created by TRANSSION, the Internet giants have their own Apps, technologies and influence as participants, and what they need is only the traffic entrance provided by transsion, the "alliance owner"; while most of the participants in the xiaomi-style hardware ecological chain are at the bottom of the smile curve, although there is a brand but the independent influence is not strong, it needs the "alliance owner" to provide all-round blessing in online and offline channels, consumer recognition and brand power. Because of this, only a few industry leaders in the Xiaomi ecological chain have successfully "de-milletized", and most ecological chain enterprises are still deeply bound to Xiaomi. For the Internet giants that cooperate with TRANSSION, transsion itself is not so attractive.
The difference between software and hardware is on the one hand, and on the other hand, perhaps based on the lack of confidence caused by the gap in software technology, Transsion has not sought dominance in cooperation with Internet giants, which can be seen from its general shareholding ratio of no more than 50% of joint ventures. This means that if TRANSSION loses its traffic entry position in the African market for some reason, giants may leave TRANSSION at any time to find more potential partners, such as mobile phone manufacturers such as Samsung and Xiaomi, which are looking forward to expansion.
Even today, Transsion does not seem to have plans to invest more in research and development on Internet software. Flipping through the financial report, it can be seen that in the first half of 2021, the proportion of TRANSSION R&D investment in operating income was only 2.8%, a decrease of 0.27% compared with the same period in 2020. If TRANSSION is unable to build its own leading software ecosystem, then the advantages it has established in the African mobile Internet market may not be translated into its actual competitiveness.
BOOM PLAY, image from Yandex
At present, whether the newly added Xiang Hailong can lead transsion mobile Internet business to glory is still unknown, but one thing that can be determined is that the time left for this "African mobile phone king" is running out - in the African mobile phone market, in addition to the concentrated efforts of mobile phone brands such as Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, etc., local mobile phone brands such as Mara Phones, which have obtained government resources, are also competing for market share; looking at Latin America, Southeast Asia, more complex market environment, more competitors, These elements have hindered the way of transsion to replicate the "African legend".
For TRANSSION, software autonomy is a high wall in front of it, and the wall of eroded hardware market share is behind it and is constantly approaching. Will TRANSSION choose to break one of the walls, or will it sit in its comfort zone and watch its own development space shrink? In any case, it is bound to make key choices in the near future.