Economic Observation Network reporter Qian Yujuan on March 31, Hong Kong stocks closed, Kuaishou (01024. HK) was quoted at HK$74.2 per share, up slightly from the previous day. The stock prices of platform companies, including Bilibili, Huya, Douyu and Momo, have not stopped falling.
A day earlier, on March 30, the official public account of the State Administration of Taxation issued a message saying that the State Internet Information Office, the State Administration of Taxation, and the State Administration for Market Regulation jointly issued the Opinions on Further Regulating the Profit-making Behavior of Online Live Broadcasting and Promoting the Healthy Development of the Industry.
The introduction of this opinion, in the view of Chen Duan, director of the Digital Economy Research Center of the Central University of Finance and Economics, is another round of follow-up measures for regulatory policies after some head anchors have been punished for tax evasion, "more detailed and more enforceable", she also added that the state's regulatory constraints on the live broadcasting industry have also shown more normalized characteristics.
Under the increase of supervision, the stock price trend of Kuaishou and others has attracted attention, and Kuaishou has just released its first annual report since its listing on March 29, and the financial report shows that the total revenue of Kuaishou in 2021 will reach 81.1 billion yuan, an increase of 37.9% year-on-year. Although the revenue performance was higher than the market expectations, the stock price did not rise sharply the next day, and on March 30, the Hong Kong stock market rose more than 8% in the early days of the opening, and the stock price took a sharp turn, all the way down, closing at 73.6 Hong Kong dollars / share on the day, a decline of 6.24%.
Live tip revenue accounted for 38.2% of total revenue
In response to the continuous increase in regulatory policies in the field of online live broadcasting, a brokerage analyst felt that Kuaishou's own ARPPU (average revenue per user) is relatively low, "far below the industry average".
Data from visible alpha shows that in 2021, the ARPPU value of the live broadcasting platform is 100 yuan / month for Bilibili, 140 yuan / month and about 100 yuan / month for Huya and Douyu, respectively, while the value of Kuaishou under this indicator is 54 yuan / month.
It is clear that the Kuaishou platform does not live by live streaming tips. Judging from Kuaishou's financial report data, in addition to its annual revenue exceeding expectations in 2021, another thing that exceeded expectations was that Kuaishou achieved a year-on-year positive year-on-year transformation of live tipping business for the first time in the fourth quarter.
From the financial report, live broadcast revenue is not the most important source of Kuaishou revenue, the annual report data shows that Kuaishou's live broadcast business revenue in 2021 reached 31 billion yuan, accounting for 38.2% of the total revenue from 56.5% in 2020.
According to the analysis team of Futu Securities Investment Research, Kuaishou is currently facing live broadcasting, video content review and monetization supervision. Supervision does put forward higher requirements for Kuaishou's governance work, and Kuaishou CEO Cheng Yixiao also highlighted some measures for platform governance at the conference call, especially "for anchors and businesses that operate and sell counterfeit and shoddy goods, false publicity, brushing orders and other improper behaviors in the live broadcast room, strictly implement punishment and crackdown measures." ”
From the perspective of Kuaishou's income structure, Zhuang Shuai, founder of Bailian Consulting, "Online marketing services are still its basic disk. "This business segment has a revenue of 42.7 billion yuan in 2021, an increase of 95.2% year-on-year, and has occupied half of Kuaishou's total revenue."
In the context of the slowdown in the growth of the entire Internet advertising market, Kuaishou's advertising business sector was able to grow against the trend, achieving revenue growth of 55.5% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of last year and 21.3% month-on-month.
The investment research team of Futu Securities saw that driven by factors such as the number of advertisers and the average expenditure of advertisers, the advertising revenue brought to Kuaishou increased, but the key behind this is still the high growth of platform users and traffic.
It is reported that the daily active (DAU) and monthly active (MAU) user scale of Kuaishou in the fourth quarter hit the highest value of the year, of which the DAU reached 323 million, an increase of nearly 20% year-on-year, and the 578 million MAU, not only increased by more than 20% year-on-year, but also made the annual growth directly exceed the 100 million mark.
"The short video industry is in the stage of pure incremental development and gradually switching to the stage of stock development." Cheng Yixiao feels that this change requires Kuaishou to create differentiated value for users and form a more unique user mind.
In addition to the user growth brought about by the two major stages of activity operations during the Spring Festival and the Winter Olympics, behind the efficiency improvement work, it is necessary to mention the positioning advantages of Kuaishou that distinguish it from other short video platforms - the community, in Cheng Yixiao's view, the underlying logic and traffic distribution of Kuaishou are difficult to be copied.
This year's e-commerce GMV set nearly a trillion "small targets"
For the current DAU level of Kuaishou, Zhuang Shuai feels that "there is still a lot of room for growth." In contrast, what attracted his attention even more was the user stay time data on the Kuaishou platform, and the average daily active time of a single DAU in the fourth quarter increased by 32% year-on-year to 118.9 minutes.
From the perspective of the entire e-commerce industry, Zhuang Shuai noticed that the industry has undergone changes in the past two years, and user pulling has long ceased to be an important data to measure whether a platform has developed, but instead retains users and allows users to repurchase has become a key indicator to test operations. ”
Based on traffic growth, Kuaishou E-commerce has optimized the matching accuracy and order conversion rate for merchants. In the past year, the repurchase rate of new users of Kuaishou e-commerce has increased by 10%, and the repurchase rate of stores with trust and rights protection has increased by 12%.
In fact, when Kuaishou proposed the strategy of "engaging in trust e-commerce" in 2021, Zhuang Shuai was questionable, after all, the earlier Kuaishou e-commerce system advocated users and merchants to trust the anchor, but under the pursuit of efficiency, due to the concentration of traffic, supply chain, organization, etc., the "four major families" were generated, the anchor was chaotic, and the platform suffered backlash.
Later, Zhuang Shuai saw that Kuaishou added an algorithm recommendation mechanism in terms of rules, technology, organization and even system architecture, balanced the entire content e-commerce ecology, and also increased the brand e-commerce live broadcast, forming a more complete and closed-loop e-commerce ecosystem.
Previously, Kuaishou made a "wide caliber" expectation for the total turnover (GMV) of e-commerce in 2021, with the original target of 650 billion yuan, and now the financial report shows that the e-commerce GMV reached 680 billion yuan, an increase of 78.4% year-on-year, higher than the outside world's expectations.
Competitor Douyin has set a sprint of trillion yuan for the 2021 e-commerce GMV, and the fast hand that has been suppressed by douyin in terms of scale and volume has not forgotten the "small goal" of sprinting trillion yuan, setting its total e-commerce transaction range in 2022 at 900 billion yuan to 970 billion yuan.
"In the long run, the GMV scale of the live e-commerce industry has the opportunity to reach 6 trillion yuan." Cheng Yixiao said on the conference call that in addition to the private domain trust e-commerce, the advantage of Kuaishou lies in the sinking market, as well as the precipitation of some emerging and Kuaishou as the main position of the "fast brand" in addition to well-known brands, to meet the needs of users at the same time, but also to obtain new buyers.
A series of data show that the Kuaishou e-commerce GMV continues to grow, but it also reflects its slowdown in growth. In order to prevent external third-party e-commerce platforms from dividing up their share and fully "circle" traffic resources in their own e-commerce closed-loop ecology, Zhuang Shuai saw that Kuaishou E-commerce announced changes in cooperation agreements with third-party e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com in March this year.
The measures to cut off the external chain of goods have their own considerations, and the data shows that the data of Kuaishou in the fourth quarter of 2021 shows that the transaction volume brought by the closed-loop e-commerce ecology created by Kuaishou Xiaodian accounts for 98.8%.
Under the huge losses, bet on overseas growth
Since its listing in 2021, Kuaishou, which has fallen from the highest trillion yuan market value, is now hovering at a market value of about 310 billion yuan, and behind this, the market's focus is on its commercialization ability and profitability.
Judging from Kuaishou's financial report data, the adjusted net loss in the fourth quarter of 2021 was 3.57 billion yuan, an increase of 677.1% year-on-year; contrary to the annual revenue growth, its adjusted net loss for the whole year reached 18.85 billion yuan, an increase of 139.7% year-on-year.
Where did Kuaishou spend all its money? Judging from the annual report, including the cost of sales of 47.051 billion yuan, coupled with 44.2 billion yuan of sales and marketing expenses, 3.4 billion yuan of administrative expenses and 15 billion yuan of research and development expenses, Kuaishou has accumulated more than 109.6 billion yuan in 2021, which directly led to its huge losses.
Talking about the topic of turning around losses, Kuaishou CFO Jin Bing said that Kuaishou is expected to achieve a positive net profit after quarterly domestic business adjustment in 2022, "The path is relatively clear." ”
For the control of cost expenditure, reflected in the data level, the proportion of Kuaishou's sales and marketing expenditure in the total input expense continued to drop from 68.5% in the first quarter of 2021 to 41.9% in the fourth quarter, and the investment trend narrowed significantly.
Judging from the financial report, Kuaishou not only sponsored the Spring Festival Gala in the first quarter of 2021, but also increased marketing expenses in order to increase overseas customer acquisition. The investment research team of Futu Securities saw that in order to continue to reduce costs and increase efficiency, improve operation and customer acquisition efficiency, Kuaishou carried out several rounds of organizational structure adjustments in 2021, not only from the past functional type to the business unit structure, but also completed the management adjustment work of the two founders.
Recently, Kuaishou has carried out optimization actions such as layoffs and welfare benefit adjustments based on efficiency improvements for a number of domestic business departments, and its overseas business sector has also completed an architectural adjustment on the eve of its annual report.
At that time, Cheng Yixiao announced through an internal letter that an international business department would be established within the international business department. For the overseas market, in fact, as early as August last year, Kuaishou closed its short video product Zynn developed in the US market, which was regarded by a brokerage analyst focusing on the media field, and Kuaishou began to control the overseas budget, "Which is more sensible." "Kuaishou's high overseas marketing investment, to its exchange for the MAU level, compared with the competitor TikTok for the market opened for Douyin, the gap is not small."
"Overseas business expansion and commercialization are less than expected." This is another risk warning given by the investment research team of Futu Securities based on Kuaishou's first annual report, in addition to the strict market supervision and the intensification of competition in the industry track.
According to Kuaishou's adjustment of overseas business sectors, the above-mentioned analysts of securities companies in the media field feel that after the general environment tends to stabilize, it can better replicate the user operation and commercialization experience accumulated in China to regions such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East. In his view, this may become a new growth line for Kuaishou in the future.
![Kuaishou internationalization and readjustment[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)