After a long rumor, "Late Post" or with a "Didi almost all lines of business will be laid off" to confirm the industry's conjecture, "almost all lines of business" behind the six words, is the online car, two-wheeler, freight and other travel businesses have been affected, the only two survived, is still recruiting international departments and has been independent of Didi's automatic driving department.
As early as the end of December last year, the R-Lab business unit that had incubated Didi takeaways reported the news of layoffs, but at that time, many Didi employees were optimistic that this layoff was only a streamlining of the business line and would not hurt the bones. However, the figure of 20% clearly exceeded everyone's expectations. Coincidentally, this figure is also the proportion of the reduction in the daily order volume of Didi's online ride-hailing car in the past six months.
Previously, I have not agreed with the argument of "singing the decline of Didi", because the current online car is still a pattern of "one super and many strong", although it has been cut off the arm of "incorporating new users", but Didi relies on the moat accumulated by the algorithm is still there, and the number of drivers and users in hand is also difficult to reach.
Only this time, the situation seems to be a little different.
How long can the crutches last?
First of all, the stock price, Didi's current market value has fallen below the 20 billion mark, leaving only 18.84 billion US dollars, compared with the peak of 80 billion US dollars, Didi stock price has evaporated 400 billion yuan in less than a year.
Previously, the news of "Tencent increasing its holding of 1.8 million shares of Didi A common stocks" in the capital market really made Didi's supporters excited, and everyone speculated whether Tencent was still unwilling to give up this important puzzle in the field of travel, so it decided to go down personally, and Didi's stock price rose for 4 consecutive days, up nearly 9%.
But Tencent quickly poured cold water on Didi, and Tencent Holdings said the additional shares circulating in the market were subscribed by the company during Didi's IPO, but had not been disclosed before. Since Didi's listing, Tencent has not subscribed for more Didi shares.
As soon as this news came out, the share of stocks that had previously risen sharply was also in vain in an instant. It has always been difficult for the capital market to regain confidence in Didi, which is a more headache than the stock price.
Since 2012, Didi has experienced a total of 22 rounds of financing, with more than 40 investment institutions, basically covering all the famous investment institutions today, and is also one of the few companies on the market that has received investment from Tencent and Ali at the same time, and the total financing of more than 79 billion yuan has also made other startups envious.
But on the back of the glossy is a road to burning money with no end in sight.
14.979 billion yuan, 9.733 billion yuan, 10.608 billion yuan, which is the amount of Didi's loss in the three years from 2018 to 2020, Didi's first profit is enough for investors to wait until the first quarter of 2021, and the net profit of 5.483 billion yuan is also thanks to the substantial increase in investment income. Moreover, this is also in the case of the divestiture of the business entity of community group buying, confirming the unrealized income of 9.1 billion yuan and the investment disposal income of 3.3 billion yuan.
You know, these are not Didi's main business, which also shows from the side that Didi's online ride-hailing business has never really thrown away crutches and walked alone.
Of course, this is not the heart disease of the Didi family, and the entire online ride-hailing market is facing the problem of extremely low gross profit margin and small profit margin.
On the one hand, this is because Didi's investment in operation, sales, research and development, and management is very huge, on the other hand, with the continuous entry of new players, the cost of customer acquisition is also rising, and it is difficult for Didi to cancel the subsidies for drivers and passengers in the absence of new user registration, and give this part of the market share to others.
However, half a year after the takedown, the reality of "reducing daily orders for online ride-hailing vehicles by about 20%" still prompted Didi to finally press the layoff button.
Water can carry boats, but it can also cover boats
For ride-hailing, there is a very famous "network effect", that is, the more drivers the platform has, the faster the passengers can hit the car, and the better the experience. More and more passengers, in turn, will attract drivers to join, and this win-win situation is naturally the most desirable for all ride-hailing platforms.
But on the other hand, online ride-hailing is a very special platform, it is very poor network in the local travel market, between the city and the city, between the driver and the driver, between the user and the user almost no connection, according to the Didi staff I interviewed clearly said that Didi's algorithm in each city is not the same, and the difference is very large, this workload and data volume are very scary.
According to the data released by Didi, Didi had 30 million drivers at its peak, which made Didi's response speed always the fastest and fastest in the travel platform.
In December 2021, the compliance rate ranking of online ride-hailing, Didi's Flower Pig ranked first, Didi Chuxing ranked second to last, at the end of January this year, the Ministry of Transport criticized 8 online ride-hailing platforms by name, and Didi was on the list again.
Is It That Didi has repeatedly taught and ignored it?
Of course not, if you want to change this situation, Didi only needs to deal with illegal drivers, and raising the entry threshold of drivers can be easily solved. However, The current number of drivers in Didi is only half of its peak, and the departure of 15 million drivers has also taken away the transportation capacity that Didi relies on for a living, and Didi in the "driver protection" period has been unable to bear a series of reactions brought about by the dismissal of drivers.
Even if the algorithm is accurate and the operation is hard, without a driver, Didi has no basic lifeline. After all, in the online ride-hailing market, the driver is always the core competitiveness of the platform, the coverage, responsiveness, the length of user waiting time... These important indicators are based on a huge capacity system.
Especially the value of the marginal effect is diminishing, so that the importance of "waiting time" gradually decreases, just like you usually take a taxi, 3 minutes of waiting time and 6 minutes of waiting time will not be much different, nothing more than the effort of brushing a few short videos, but the optimization cost paid by Didi is huge.
From the perspective of drivers, Didi's high commission rate is also an important reason for their loss. Although Didi officially said that the minimum commission is 20%, in fact, according to the feedback of the driver master, the express car and special car are mostly about 25%, and the farther the road, the higher the percentage, or even more than 30%.
I think this is also the reason why Didi attaches so much importance to "automatic driving", only by unshackling this layer of shackles, Didi has the possibility of real profitability.
Write at the end
In this winter, there are too many familiar Internet companies to spread the news of layoffs, Didi is not one of the most critical ones, after all, travel is just needed, the cash flow on the book is sufficient, Didi is far from the "autumn of life and death". After the layoffs, Didi, who is lightly armed, may be able to give it a go in the main business.
It's just that drivers complain about making less money, passengers complain about not being able to hit cars, companies complain about not making money, and in this three-way game that doesn't seem to have a winner, it seems that everyone is telling the truth, and everyone seems to have reservations.
But how much time can be left in the travel market?