Storm video "sudden stop" ends, another "revelation" of the Internet chasing the wind

Another memory of youth of many netizens is gone. On the evening of the 22nd, some netizens found that the mobile terminal and the PC side of the official website of Storm Video and Audio, as well as the APP, had problems and could not be opened normally, which seemed to be a "sudden stop".

As a must-have installed software for Chinese netizens in the PC era, the sudden paralysis of Storm Video in the winter night has made the industry sigh. Once the scenery is unlimited, known as "little LeTV", the first demon stock of the Internet, blindly chasing one hot outlet after another in the form of holding and participating in the shares, but lacking focus, resulting in a lack of innovation in the main business, and eventually the outlet dissipates, the bubble bursts, and falls violently, adding a "revelation" to the sustainable development of Internet companies.

It was the youth memory of a generation of netizens

The "overlord" of a generation of film and television players said that there was no. The moment Storm Video was eliminated, it was so silent that it didn't even say goodbye to the user. On the 25th, the official website of Storm Video appeared garbled typography, and the APP showed that the network was abnormal. A few days ago, a person who claimed to be a developer of Storm Video broke the news on social networks that he was currently left in the Storm Development Department, and he would be left unprotected by Storm. The storm's official Weibo has been stopped since July 1.

In early September, the Shanghai Municipal People's Procuratorate's website published a message that the Jing'an District Procuratorate approved the arrest of Feng Xin, the legal representative of the criminal suspect Storm Group Co., Ltd., on suspicion of bribery of non-state workers and embezzlement of office.

Creditors followed. On the evening of the 21st, Storm Group, the parent company of Storm Audio, said that it recently received the "Letter of Concern about Storm Group Co., Ltd." issued by the Beijing Securities Regulatory Bureau, requiring the company's board of directors, board of supervisors and on-the-job personnel to stick to their posts, perform their duties and fulfill their responsibilities, and make every effort to maintain the stability of the company's operation.

On the evening of the 22nd, Storm Group issued an announcement that it had recently received the "Ruling" and was ordered to pay the transfer price of 462 million yuan to Shanghai Gopher, and the company and Feng Xin should pay within 10 days from the date of delivery of the award. Late payments will be subject to double interest on debts incurred during the period of delay in performance in accordance with the law.

"Videos of classes at school are played in storm videos, and an era has passed." For the "sudden stop" of storm video, netizens have sighed that in that era of many multimedia formats, each encoding needs a corresponding decoder to play smoothly, and the emergence of storm video and audio "unified rivers and lakes" also carries many memories of youth dramas.

The capital game repeats the mistakes of LeTV

On March 24, 2015, Storm Group landed on the ChiNext board, pulled out 36 up and down boards in 40 days, and became the "stock king" of the ChiNext board, with the highest stock price rising to 327 yuan and a market value of nearly 45 billion yuan. This is the "highlight moment" of the Storm Group. With the arrest of the actual controller Feng Xin, the stock price of Storm Group fell all the way to a minimum of 3 yuan, and as of the close of trading on November 25, the market value was only 1.15 billion yuan, less than 3% at the high point.

In just 4 years, from a generation of "demon stocks" to negative net assets, what has Storm Group experienced? Standing at the high point of market capitalization in 2015, Storm decided to transform to the "global DT big entertainment" strategy, taking VR, sports and TELEVISION as the main direction of the future. In order to build an "ecology" as soon as possible, Storm began to acquire quickly. In March 2016, Storm announced that it planned to pay 3.1 billion yuan to acquire the equity and team of film and television company Straw Bear Pictures, game company Lidong Technology, and game distribution company Ganpu Technology through fixed increases.

Since then, Storm, which started with the player, has chosen the layout of software and hardware integration and simultaneous development of upstream and downstream ecology, just like LeTV in that year. In the case that the main business revenue cannot cover multiple fronts of investment, Storm has to rely on a large amount of external financing to support. From 2015 to 2019, a total of three private placement financing plans were proposed before and after the storm, but they were not approved.

Financing is unfavorable, hardware continues to burn money, software is chicken feathers, and every step of the strategy pushes the Storm Group to the abyss. Although Feng Xin does not like the outside world to compare Storm to the next LeTV, but the fatal coincidence is that in the early morning of April 26, LeTV, which lost 177 million yuan in the first quarter, officially announced that it would stop trading stocks since the opening of the market on the same day, and Storm also released a financial report with serious losses on the same day, and was issued a non-standard audit opinion that there will be a risk of suspension.

Another lesson of blindly "chasing the wind"

From nameless to brilliant, from brilliant to falling, Feng Xin, who compares A-share listing to "nuclear weapons", has chased VR, sports, television, shows, finance and even blockchain all the way, which have brought many ups and downs to the storm. However, in order to "chase the wind", Storm has repeatedly made mistakes in capital operation. The VR project Storm Magic Mirror was cold, so that CITIC Capital applied to freeze 3.27 million shares of Feng Xin in 2018, and Storm Sports's acquisition of MP& Silva (MPS for short) not only hit the water with 5 billion yuan, but also faced huge claims and lawsuits, becoming the biggest bomb that dragged down the Storm Group.

Actually, I'm in the hottest industry, but I'm just an, I don't know what I'm going to do, I just know what I don't want. Feng Xin once described himself in this way, and also reflected in the review, "You can't attribute the mistakes of the storm to anyone, 99.999% of the mistakes come from yourself, blame yourself for not having the ability to control capital, blame yourself for not having the ability to rigor in business, blame yourself for inflating when you are good, and fooling through when you are bad." ”

"It was too conservative before the listing, and too aggressive and hindsight after the listing, missing the financing opportunity of multiple stock price highs." When the stock price falls, it has to pay a high price for financing. Liu Cheng of the Investment Department of Storm Group has publicly made this evaluation.

The storm group that over-chased the wind has taught Internet companies a vivid lesson. After all, the so-called "outlet" is actually just a rapidly changing trend of thought, trend, preference, often short-lived, if you want to continue to develop, you should still return to the starting point of business - to create value.

Source Beijing Daily

Reporter Yuan Lu

Process Editor Wang Mengying