Momo, after all, couldn't sit still.
Following the change of name to Zhiwen Group, Momo may officially join the army of secondary listings in Hong Kong and become a part of the resurgence of Chinese stocks.
A few days ago, the market reported that Momo officially launched the secondary listing plan of Hong Kong stocks, and the sponsors were Goldman Sachs and CICC. However, Momo did not comment on this.
But behind this, Momo also has enough motivation to hope to achieve a change of life.
After all, Momo's current market value is indeed a bit shabby.
As of yesterday's close, Momo closed down 3.28%, with a market value of only about $1.9 billion, which has shrunk by 80% from the peak market value of $10 billion, and is also in the same range as the current emerging social app Soul and other valuations.
That is, it is underestimated by Wall Street and may be overtaken by latecomers at any time.
This is the dilemma that Momo is facing at the moment - the embarrassing dilemma of a "middle-aged" social APP.
If the social metaphor is life and the workplace, Momo's appearance with a new force at the beginning is extremely stunning, incomparably fierce, incomparably fresh, incomparably willful and angry, and it is hard to drive a spring water, and break out of its own acre and three points in the social track guarded by WeChat.
Momo founder Tang Yan
But in middle age, although Momo has made achievements, the achievements of this colleague of WeChat are more brilliant, firmly grasping the position of leader, making it difficult for Momo to be promoted.
On the other hand, new blood began to pour in, they are also full of vitality and energy, to tear the gap again in the mobile Internet user iteration opportunity, which is not much of a threat to the leader WeChat, but for Momo, it is an alternative impact.
Obviously, the current Momo has encountered a lot of mid-life crisis.
At this time, its or the second listing in Hong Kong is naturally to break the bottleneck. The question is, even if he returns, can Momo still be a teenager?
mid-life crisis
In October 2020, Tang Yan, the founder of The Soul Figure, stepped down, and the new CEO Wang Li took office in the first internal letter to describe Momo's present and future with the "tickets, body, and children" that mainstream middle-aged people pay attention to.
Wang Li said, "The lucky decade of mobile Internet growing on its own like teenagers has passed, and we have to face a new era that belongs to middle-aged people."
At this time, Momo, which was once a new entrepreneurial upstart, is already an old company that has been established for nearly 10 years.
That is, like most middle-aged professionals tending to seek stability, Momo in the Wang Li era pays more attention to financial indicators such as profit margins, cash flow, and debt ratios, hoping to use a set of financial data that continues to make money to win the favor of Wall Street.
But the results were not satisfactory.
On the one hand, Momo's hematopoietic ability stems from the past.
Whether it was born in 2011 under the east wind of the mobile Internet, or turned to live broadcasting in 2015, Momo has stepped on the point and inserted the wings of traffic dividends for itself.
But in building a continuous hematopoietic business model, Momo seems to be a little weak. This also makes Momo continue to make money, but its financial situation has shown a downward trend.
According to Momo's financial report, its net revenue in the third quarter of 2021 was $580 million, down 0.2% year-on-year, and its net profit was $62.6 million, down 11.8% year-on-year.
On the other hand, Momo's business barriers are not as high as imagined.
With the mobile Internet entering the stock market, whether it is facing the impact of short videos or the iteration of mobile Internet users, Momo has not been able to show enough defense capabilities.
Data is particularly straightforward.
In terms of user scale, as of September 2021, Momo's monthly active users were 115.5 million, a slight increase of 1.6% year-on-year. In the long run, Momo's user data growth has come to a standstill. It should be known that in 2018, Momo's monthly active life has exceeded 100 million.
In addition, the total number of paid users of Momo's live broadcasting services and value-added services in the quarter was 12.2 million (excluding repeat users), of which 2.9 million were tantan paid users, compared with 13.1 million and 4.1 million in the same period last year.
This means that as a probe for Momo's second growth curve, paid users are also constantly losing, declining for many consecutive quarters.
More critically, young users are abandoning Momo.
In 2015, data showed that the proportion of Momo users aged 19 to 32 was as high as 82%, and the user group under the age of 26 was the main force of Momo's profitability. But by October 2021, according to Analysys Qianfan data, about 16% of Momo users under the age of 24 and about 27% of the 24-30 years old in that month, adding up only 43%, less than half.
So that from time to time in the market, some users said that they wanted to find peers or people of similar age on Momo, chat and date, but they did not expect that many of the people who greeted themselves on Momo were middle-aged and elderly.
This naturally affects Wall Street's assessment of Momo's market capitalization.
The break was unsuccessful
Momo is not trying to break the game.
Take ZAO, for example. In August 2019, Momo's short video application ZAO was a fire. But it soon fell silent.
According to Qimai data, on the IOS side, ZAO directly brushed the list from the time it was launched in August of that year, and rushed to the first place in the free application list and the first place in the entertainment classification list. But for just a month, ZAO entered a downward trend after experiencing privacy controversies and declining freshness, and then gradually disappeared.
In 2018-2019, including ZAO, Momo has successively launched a number of social products such as Hertz, cue, voila, and Hayou, spanning the subdivisions of acquaintance social, stranger social, picture social, voice social, etc.; it has also invested in social software JOIN and other means through equity investment, and has built a large-scale product matrix in addition to the two pillars of Momo and Tantan.
This attempt will also continue in 2020-2021.
In 2020, Momo launched the main "click" to shoot chat, the main short video dating "eye" and the main real social "Momoduo", in 2021 to develop a photo as the medium of "MEET" and so on.
It is not difficult to see that Momo itself is also clearly aware of its own predicament, and has been trying to try to exert efforts in many fields such as short videos and social networking in order to bring new growth space to Momo, but these attempts have basically failed.
But even so, for Momo, whether it is to return to the mobile Internet jianghu or boost its own market value, it is still necessary to actively act.
First, the renamed Zhiwen Group is committed to continuously exploring and trying new development opportunities around the social business, and constantly expanding the business territory in the fields of science and technology and culture.
In addition, there is the exploration of the metaverse, Wang Li once expressed his interest in hardware and new technologies in an internal letter, saying that with the further development of virtual reality in the future, vr/AR devices continue to mature and popularize to the home, and the changes in human-computer interaction mode, we also need to actively explore and layout in the hardware field.
As well as the rumored or secondary listing in Hong Kong, Momo is definitely not satisfied with the status quo.
It depends on whether Momo can be fierce again.
(Source|.) AI Blue Media Collection Author |Ye II)