Original debut | Golden Horn Finance (ID:F-Jinjiao)
Author | Week Sledgehammer
The Ten Leagues ran.
On January 7, several suppliers who had been owed money went to the Changsha office building and found that it was empty. The same scene also appeared at the Beijing headquarters of the Shihui Group, where the office area of Nuoda was full of debris, and only a few people sat and played with mobile phones and chatted.
Every day, the security guard has to receive more than a dozen suppliers who come to collect debts, and the debts are more than a few million, and the less ones are tens of thousands. According to the security guard, the Ten Hui Regiment still owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to the security company to which he belongs.
There are early warnings of collapse.
On August 1, 2021, Chen Ying, founder of Shihui Group, released an internal open letter entitled "A Self-Innovation Focusing on the Long-term Value of Users", saying that "in some less efficient business areas, drastic reforms will be carried out".
As a result of the reform, the Ten HuiTuan closed a large number of outlets nationwide, from covering more than 2,000 counties and cities to retreating into 5 cities. The fierce layoff storm continues to sweep through, and the number of employees who once had tens of thousands of employees has less than 1,000 as of December 2021.
As one of the "old three groups" of community group buying, The Shihui Group is only the epitome of the cold winter of community group buying, and after experiencing the growth dividends brought by the epidemic, this golden track, which was once called "the last depression of the Internet" by capital, now has only withered away.
Looking back at the entire 2021, community group buying burned at least 100 billion yuan of funds, but the hot money did not continue the life of the industry - more than half of the community group buying enterprises have left the market.
Great low tide
The head players of the community group purchase will fold in 2021.
At three o'clock in the morning of July 6, He Pengyu, the founder of the veteran community group buying Tongcheng Life, released an open letter, saying that the company is facing the most difficult moment, and the community group buying industry has changed from the era of "fighting innovation and fighting execution" to the era of "fighting capital and fighting subsidies".
After sending this farewell letter, only one day later, Suzhou Fresh Orange Technology Co., Ltd., the parent company of Tongcheng Life, issued an announcement that the company decided to apply for bankruptcy due to poor management - according to the explanation of Tongcheng Life, the reason for bankruptcy is the centralized collection of partners, the company's capital chain is facing a rupture, and there is no room for transformation.
In other words, burning money is fierce, accidentally collapsing, they don't want to.
Community group buying burns money fiercely, which can be seen from the beginning of the industry. In 2018, the first money burning war of community group buying played a "result" of financing more than 4 billion yuan in half a year, and then in 2019 and 2020, the total financing of the whole industry went all the way up, 8.34 billion and 14.98 billion, respectively.
After a large amount of money poured in, it all became the "ammunition" for the platforms to fight the ground war. The direction of burning money is nothing more than gathering users, grabbing territory, and grabbing sources of goods:
To get enough users to join, group buying platforms need to continue to sprinkle subsidies, launch second-kill activities, carry forward the loss-making and profitable, hundreds of thousands of orders, and easily burn massive funds;
For the regimental leaders, the platforms will simply and rudely increase the income of the regimental leaders through order commissions, new rewards and single amount rewards, and circle the most grass-roots promotion channels;
Grabbing the source of goods is even simpler, raising the price to collect vegetables, choosing one of the two, sprinkling money to the root of the industrial chain, and scrambling to grab the lifeblood of peers.
He Pengyu's open letter
According to the past experience of takeaway platforms, shared bicycles, charging treasures and online ride-hailing vehicles, this model will quickly determine several giants through the amount of capital, and then the giants will swallow up small and medium-sized platforms to form a relatively stable scene of separation, and then earn back the money from consumers who have no more choices.
Unfortunately, things did not happen as the group buying platforms imagined.
Shortly after Tongcheng Life left the market with a debt of 300 million yuan, another community group purchase head enterprise Food Enjoyment Club quietly cancelled its 15 branches in Chengdu, Ningbo, Jiangxi, Handan, Hefei, Nanjing, Taizhou, Taizhou, Hangzhou, Xi'an, etc., and the founding team was all withdrawn.
The giants who took advantage of the popularity of community group buying under the epidemic, the Jingxi spelling supported by Jingdong, and the orange heart preferred incubated by Didi, almost synchronously began to cut business lines, shut down outlets, and adopt a tightening attitude.
Whether you want to admit it or not, the tide has receded.
Epidemic overdraft community group buying
When the tide is at its highest, everyone thinks it will be a sea of wealth.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed consumers' spending habits and information acquisition habits, and has also allowed community group buying to usher in explosive growth in 2020. According to the "2020 China Community Group Buying Market Data Report", the size of the community group buying market in this year was 75 billion yuan, up 120.58% year-on-year.
Under the wave of this explosive growth, Didi, Suning, Pinduoduo, Alibaba and other enterprises have successively taken community group buying as the focus of expanding their business, and the news of self-construction, acquisition and investment has continued to appear, and Didi has even shouted out the slogan of "unlimited investment", which has the arrogance of not breaking Loulan and never returning. The influx of excessive funds has led to a further intensification of competition for community group buying, and the impact on the real economy has become more and more obvious.
Changsha's "Hundred Regiments War" is the epitome of this chaos.
On October 28, 2020, at more than 10:00 p.m., supplier Wang Cheng anxiously shouted in the "Changsha Meituan Preferred" group, "Procurement came out to preside over the work, and see what our suppliers want to do next, how to do it." ”
At that time, this group was established less than an hour ago, and there were only suppliers and meituan's preferred procurement personnel, and the suppliers were all scrambling to get on the car, even if they were underpriced, they had to squeeze this opportunity.
But they are still a step slower, as early as the day before, the "more to buy vegetables" development personnel have been parachuted into Changsha, without any recruitment process, directly from Jiangxi airlift to BD, began to quickly compete for the market, and earlier, Didi's "Orange Heart Preferred" has long begun large-scale recruitment, every day hundreds of people rushed into Changsha's interview site.
Image source: CCTV
Under the simultaneous attack of orange heart preferred, MEituan preferred, and more vegetables, Changsha's real economy suffered a violent impact at once.
Changsha Bayi Road, a total length of only two kilometers on the street, open any community group buying mini program, you can see the dense self-pick-up points. Whether it is convenience stores, print shops, flower shops, hotels, restaurants, barber shops, they have become the vassals of Meituan, Didi, Pinduoduo, Xingsheng Preferred and other enterprises. The shopkeepers are also the heads of multiple platforms and are responsible for distributing the platform's goods to users.
Hunan local chain convenience store brand Xinjiayi posted a poster of scanning the code to receive coupons in the store, next to the Meiyijia convenience store directly stacked preferential goods at the door to attract users, not far away, there has been a small supermarket can not pay the warehouse rent, was moved out by the community neighborhood committee for a limited time.
The wet market was in a slump, and the stall owners sat in their stalls, helpless.
Madness leads to destruction.
On December 22, 2020, the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Ministry of Commerce jointly held an administrative guidance meeting to regulate the order of community group buying, proposing a new "9 no" regulation, and firing the first shot at the anti-monopoly of community group buying.
Capital outcasts
The demise of community group buying cannot all be blamed on capital.
A large number of high-frequency fresh goods behind the group purchase model are essentially a competition for traffic such as cooking and buying vegetables, as well as a competition for the source of customers in the vegetable market and small stores, which is destined to become the key target of supervision. After the "9 no", the official media repeatedly voiced that the Internet giants should not only take care of the vegetable basket, and the municipal supervision bureaus across the country have become increasingly strict for the dumping and monopoly supervision of the group purchase platform.
The subsidy war with no end in sight has only accelerated the process of the industry's demise.
Back to the basic plate of community group buying, the low-price strategy and the head of the group are not enough to make this business "stable and profitable".
Relying on subsidies to smash low prices, the pricing imbalance caused by them, and even the phenomenon of suppliers buying goods from the head of the group, the supply and demand relationship has been inverted. On the other hand, the model of community group buying with the group leader as the core of traffic will also lead to the excessive dependence on the group leader in the community group purchase sales process, and the source of customers and orders will be controlled by the heads of the grass-roots leaders.
In the final analysis, this track has not really made any "changes" in consumption methods, but only satisfies the greed of capital for traffic by monopolizing the upstream and downstream methods.
Whether it is the employees of these platforms or the suppliers, they are just screws that can be discarded at any time under the huge system.
After the bankruptcy of Tongcheng Life, more than 6,000 employees faced layoffs, and the compensation standard given by the company was N, that is, their working years multiplied by the average salary of the 12 months before leaving.
Separation agreement received by Tongcheng Life employees
According to Tongcheng's internal employees, the notice did not indicate the specific time of compensation, and the agreement signed by the company, the supplier and the driver indicated the payment time. The notice in the hands of the employees is "a blank piece of paper, not as good as the supplier and the driver." ”
The thousands of employees laid off by the Ten Hui Group, some of whom were still working in the morning, were notified of layoffs in the afternoon, did not get the entry contract, and could not get n+1 compensation, and some were required to sign resignation letters of voluntary resignation.
A game of capital that shattered the dreams of countless people.