Although 58 Tongcheng has been privatized and delisted, Yao Jinbo's capital ambitions are still in place - just in 2020, when 58 was delisted, he asked his various business units to step up listing, and after that, Swan Home, Anjuke, and Fast Dog Taxi all threw out listing plans. Now, 46-year-old Yao Jinbo will finally harvest the third IPO in his life.
On February 6, according to the disclosure of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, 58's short-distance freight and trading service platform Fast Dog Taxi (GOGOX) passed the hearing of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, which means that Fast Dog Taxi is only one step away from the listing of Hong Kong stocks.
Since the brand upgrade in 2018, Fast Dog Taxi and Lalala, Didi Freight and other platforms have been fighting fiercely in the freight industry, and they all want to bet on the future of the freight market - there are statistics, the top 10 market share of China's same-city freight is only 3.5%, and about 96.5% of the space is to be developed.
Good industries sometimes don't prove to be good opportunities, as evidenced by the now-delisted 58.com in the information matching industry. Will the fast dog taxi, which Yao Jinbo has high hopes, break the curse of capital market weakness in 58 cities?
Can't catch up with C, lose B
In the Internet era, can traffic be eaten as a meal?
After embracing the Internet economy, the traditional offline industry will always get more voice. Taking the online ride-hailing platform Didi as an example, before it became the head of the industry, the public's attention to this circle was very limited, but with its victory in the subsidy war, a sentence of "called Didi" made the word Didi almost synonymous with online ride-hailing.
This Internet gene of thirst for traffic monetization is deeply imprinted in the DNA of fast dog taxi. In the prospectus, Fast Dog Taxi does not hide the purpose of seeking listing: "With the help of listing supplementary funds to increase user subsidies and advertising; to seek strategic cooperation, investment and acquisition, as well as technology research and development investment and daily operations." ”
It is indeed a lack of money. From 2018 to 2020, Fast Dog Taxi continued to lose money, 1.071 billion yuan, 184 million yuan and 658 million yuan respectively, and in the first three quarters of 2021, in the case of revenue growth of 27.2% year-on-year to 473 million yuan, its loss amount was even as high as 393 million yuan.
The reason behind this is the high marketing expenses, from 2018 to 2020, the marketing expenses of Fast Dog Taxi reached 524 million yuan at the highest, which was 115.7% of the revenue in the same period.
This is related to the C-end expansion of Fast Dog in recent years. The predecessor of Fast Dog Taxi is 58 Express, which was renamed "Fast Dog Taxi" in August 2018, and Chen Xiaohua, founder and chairman of Fast Dog Taxi, said in an interview with the media that the name change is strategically expanded from the B-end to the C-end.
The transformation of fast dogs is just in time. In 2018, Didi was blamed for safety accidents, and its market share and demand spilled over to other platforms; Lalala, which started from the C-end, developed rapidly, and the business volume in Zhengzhou exceeded five times that of the previous year. It was also in this year that Kuaigou obtained the largest investment before the listing, and introduced external investors such as Hongrun Capital and Cainiao Network in addition to 58.
The transformation effect is not satisfactory. According to the prospectus, B-side enterprise services are still the majority of fast dog taxi revenue sources, accounting for about 55%-60%; C-side platform service revenue once accounted for 43.4%, but fell back to 38.7% in the first four months of 2021.
It turns out that the transformation of fast dog taxi at that time was not a particularly wise choice. On the one hand, the B-end is the main battlefield of the same city freight, iResearch consulting data report shows that in the same city freight segment, the C and B-end express city distribution business share less than 10%, while the B-end business has a large proportion of more than 90%.
On the other hand, when the fast dog went from B to C, the cargo lala that started from the C end was moving towards B. Also in 2018, Lalala announced a strategic upgrade to launch an enterprise version of the product. Up to now, it has taken root deeply into the hinterland where fast dog taxi once went, and according to relevant sources, more than 70% of its orders come from the B-end.
Can't catch up with C, lose B, and become a true portrayal of fast dog taxis in the past few years.
From the former "58 Express" into the freight track, fast dog taxi has gone through 8 years, ByteDance has become an Internet giant with a valuation of hundreds of billions of dollars in 8 years, Baidu has joined the United Nations Global Compact in 8 years to fill the gap in China's Internet companies in this field, and fast dog taxi, in addition to getting older, has not made any fame.
Listing to find money is the last chance for fast dogs to turn around.
Orders are down, and profitability is difficult
B-end enterprises and C-end users, fast dog taxi did not hold a pinch.
On the one hand, the unit price of B-end orders for fast dog taxis has decreased.
In the early stage of brand upgrading, there were a number of shared bicycle companies on the list of large customers of fast dog taxi, at that time, it coincided with the intensive exchange of shared bicycles, but fast dogs benefited from it, and the three shared bicycles of small yellow cars, Mobike and xiaolan were all big customers of fast dogs, and one of them even brought 9.5% of the revenue of fast dog taxi in 2018.
But the good times were short-lived. With the capital chain of ofo small yellow car that is expected to become the first in the industry broken, and the Mobike bicycle that competes with it was acquired by Meituan, Didi announced the custody of small blue bicycles, and the sharing of bicycles has receded, and customer demand has declined. By April 30, 2021, there was only one shared bicycle company left in the list of fast dog taxi major customers TOP5.
Since then, community group buying has become a new B-end source of income for fast dog taxi, and He Song, president of fast dog taxi, has said that community group buying is developing rapidly and to achieve national coverage, has extremely high requirements for performance capacity and cost, and the ability of small companies is insufficient, but it is a good opportunity to cut into the planned car market for fast dog taxi. According to the prospectus, revenue from community group buying accounted for 2.4%.
This industry change of large customers reveals the difficulty of the B-end market layout of fast dog taxi - although the capacity of the freight market in the same city is huge, there are few large upstream enterprises, the demand is scattered, and the downstream express delivery, express transportation and other participants are numerous, and the competition is fierce.
It turns out that the competitiveness of fast dog taxis is not strong. According to the prospectus data, the average transaction volume of a single order in China has fallen from 501.3 yuan in 2018 to only 326.0 yuan in 2021.
On the other hand, the number of monthly active users on the C-end of fast dog taxi is gradually decreasing.
From 2018 to the first three quarters of 2021, the average number of monthly active users of the service sector of the fast dog taxi platform was 869,000, 844,600, 644,600 and 594,500, respectively, which did not increase but decreased - for comparison, according to the data released by Lalala, in November 2020, its monthly active users have reached 7.2 million.
At the same time, the average monthly consignment order of fast dog taxi is also decreasing, and in the first three quarters of 2018-2021, it was 2.611 million, 2.6754 million, 2.1548 million and 2.1271 million, respectively, which not only continued to decline, but also fell much higher than that of monthly active users. Obviously, Fast Dog is not good at user management.
According to media reports, there are situations such as driver detours, starting prices on the ground, false orders, and damage to consigned items. User Xiao H in the process of moving the driver has a bad attitude, and the full-length mirror and other personal belongings are damaged, after contacting the fast dog taxi customer service to explain the situation, the other party only gave ten yuan of platform red envelopes as compensation, dissatisfied she can only complain about the platform again, seeking compensation for items.
In the context of consumption upgrading, user experience has become a sensitive point for C-end users, in the case of user experience can not be guaranteed, fast dog taxi naturally can not wait for users to repurchase, there is no pre-sale after-sales stocking model, which not only hurts the user's heart, but also makes the platform reputation lost.
In the case of order failure at both ends, the "taxi" advertised by Fast Dog is being virtualized, and it is urgent to establish a new competitive difference point.
Where is the capacity of the commission upwards?
"I also have old people and children in my family, and I want to survive."
On the back of the freight platform are truck drivers who need to support their families, but many platform drivers have questioned the dispatch mode of fast dog taxis. On the black cat complaint, a fast dog taxi registered driver was very puzzled: "When the old customer places an order, I will face the customer face to face, and my platform does not ring a single, but the platform is sent to the driver master five kilometers away." ”
Some drivers also said that since joining the fast dog taxi in September 2021, a single order has not been received: "(In the fast dog) a dime income is not, but also deduct my money, to refund the deposit, push three blocks." ”
With the loss of users and the decline in order volume, it seems inevitable that drivers will not receive orders. What makes them even angrier is the series of "operations" that fast dogs make to drivers, such as commissioning. According to the prospectus, the income from a 100 yuan order to the driver's pocket was 94.2 yuan in 2018 fashion, and only 88.3 yuan was left in 2021, and the commission rate soared from 5.8% to 11.7%, doubling.
In the field of shared travel, Didi's approach is to first do users, expand the market, and then increase the commission and profit. The same city freight did not give the fast dog taxi a long time to do subsidies, the opportunity to be a user, because of the listing, revenue pressure and other reasons began to increase the commission, improve profits. The problem is that there are orders that are fine, but when there are no orders, the draw is increased, and the anger of the drivers can be imagined.
Data from the Prospective Industry Research Institute shows that in 2020, the top 5 domestic co-city freight platforms accounted for 67.5% of the total size of the market platform, of which the proportion of a dusty cargo Lala accounted for 54.7%, while the second fast dog taxi scale accounted for only 5.5%, almost a fraction of the cargo Lala.
The innate inadequacy of one end (order volume) determines the weak foundation of the fast dog taxi at the other end (the driver).
As of April 30, 2021, there were 24.8 million registered users and 4.5 million registered drivers on The Fast Dog Taxi platform. Among them, nearly 70% of drivers are part-time. Fast Dog also understands its own lack of capacity, so it is building a more stable team of full-time drivers, from part-time drivers and single-order-grabbing models to full-time drivers and dispatch models.
The battle of transportation capacity is becoming the focus of competition for freight in the same city, but in this war, the important thing is not only "grab", but also the matching of supply and demand, if the front end does not have enough orders, no matter how much capacity is grabbed, it cannot be retained.
Lalala once created a precedent for the payment membership system, drivers can grab orders after paying for membership, and the higher the membership level, the greater the number of orders without commission, which in a sense greatly improves the platform loyalty of the driver group. In 2019, the fast dog taxi that intends to emulate began to pilot the membership system and the draw system one after another, but with little effect.
In the face of the decline in the unit price of B-end enterprises and the sharp decline in the order volume of C-end users, fast dog taxi urgently needs to give priority to balancing the balance of transportation capacity and orders, only by retaining and attracting more drivers will the capital market give fast dog taxi more imagination.
epilogue
The decline in the number of users, the small size of the market hard injury, so that the already bleeding listing of the fast dog taxi worse, relying on several rounds of financing to hold on to the present is not easy, under the squeeze of the goods Lala, its exploration space is further reduced, the future is not clear.
One end is that the B end is not strong, and the other end is the C end is weak; one end is less orders, and the other end is less capacity: fast dog taxi, congenital shortage. Listing does not become its safe haven.