The article is focused
1. A seemingly counterintuitive fact is that under the epidemic situation of 2020-2021, the personnel of large factories are actually expanding rapidly. This may be an "unprecedented" organizational leap forward for the head players in the history of the Chinese Internet.
2. But under the surge in personnel is extremely homogeneous competition. The redundancy of personnel in the name of "ecology" has made human efficiency usher in a rare growth inflection point in history.
3. Compared with 5 years or even 10 years ago, despite investing a lot of resources and expressing countless determinations, the core business logic of the big factory has not really changed. None of them got rid of the "fate" they wanted to get rid of the most.
4. If the low-hanging peaches have been picked, the right attitude may be to find more peach trees.
It was a "spring graduation season" that caught off guard.
Since the end of last year, the wave of layoffs in Internet companies has begun to surge. At first, the focus was on some O2O star companies that were caught in the double dilemma of capital and business. Some Internet people secretly hope that the news of these layoffs will either be special offices of certain companies or just another routine layoff before the end of the year to optimize costs, "just slightly larger than in previous years."
But with the development of time, the "layoffs" are like a small car that stops on a slope without pulling on the handbrake, and has no intention of stopping. More and more, the largest factories that are considered to be the most competitive have joined the wave of layoffs.
Ali, Tencent, JD.com, Meituan, Kuaishou, iQiyi, B station, Pinduoduo, and even unlisted bytes, layoff rumors cover almost all the head of the Internet companies.
However, in response to the problem of large-scale Online layoffs, The China Internet Information Network recently released an article saying that it interviewed the employment and business development of 12 Internet companies such as Tencent, Alibaba, Meituan, and JD.com, showing that the number of employees of Internet companies has remained stable in the past six months.
If you carefully observe the layoff information of major Internet companies, in fact, the "hardest hit areas" of layoffs in major companies are actually other businesses other than the core business that the market generally recognizes.
In terms of Alibaba, the largest proportion of layoffs is the local life and community e-commerce business;
In terms of Tencent, the layoff rumors are mainly concentrated in PCG (platform and content business group) and CSCG (cloud and smart industry);
In terms of JD.com, the most affected are the new retail businesses aimed at sinking consumers such as Jingxi and Pinpin, followed by pharmaceutical health and the split V business unit;
In terms of Meituan, according to a number of recent media news, "fast buy excellent" (fast donkey, Meituan preferred, Meituan buy vegetables) is the hardest hit area of layoffs, and the overall layoff range is about 20%;
· In terms of Station B, the most miserable department in terms of layoffs is the e-sports business, and the proportion of layoffs is rumored to be as high as 90%;
In addition, business units such as iQiyi Games and Didi Orange Heart Preferred have also suffered almost "whole system" layoffs.
Image source: Hangtags of departing employees piled up by an Internet company | Source: Securities Times
However, corresponding to the "non-core" business retreat, the big factories still maintain a relatively stable flow of personnel in the core business.
Taking Alibaba as an example, it said that the core business has about 9,000 new employees, e-commerce, cloud and other business areas, there will still be sustained personnel growth in the future; and Tencent, although there are a number of business unit layoffs, but several internal ace studios standing at the top of the "despised chain", WeChat, Photon, Tianmei, etc., the staffing is also intact.
"Interns don't cut."
Turning to the financial report, although fewer and fewer Internet companies are still announcing the number of their employees, from the existing public information, at least the size of the head company remains at the highest level in history - Ali more than 250,000, Huawei nearly 200,000, Tencent, Byte more than 110,000. According to the above-mentioned China Network Information Network, from July last year to mid-March this year, 11 of the 12 large Internet companies recruited more than the number of departing employees, with a total net increase of 79,100 workers.
The big factory is still the big factory, but the big factory people are divided into different forest trails. The more core business in the core enterprise, the more stable the rice bowl, and even continue to recruit people; and the more marginal business of the marginal business, it may face the risk of "group annihilation".
Obviously, they all hold the same color badge, and even the same rank treatment, why is it that just because the business lines are different, they are summarized into different chains of contempt in the eyes of HR?
foam?
A fact that seems to be contrary to the intuition of many outsiders is that 2020-2021 in the era of the epidemic is actually a year of rapid expansion of large factory personnel.
Taking Tencent as an example, on December 31, 2019, the total number of employees in the company was only 62,900; but by the end of 2021, this number had become 112,800, a net increase of nearly 50,000 in two years, an increase of nearly 80%.
Alibaba, with a total of 101,900 employees in fiscal year 2018 (March 1, 2019); by fiscal year 2020 (March 1, 2021), the total number of employees was 251,000, a net increase of 149,000 in two years, of which 90% increased from 2021, and the overall growth rate in two years was as high as 140%;
JD.com, the total number of employees in fiscal 2019 was 227,000, and the total number of employees in fiscal 2020 was 314,900, a net increase of 86,000 in a single year, an increase of 37% (2021 financial report was not disclosed);
Meituan, 54,000 employees in fiscal 2019, 69,000 in 2020, a net increase of 15,000 in a single year, an increase of 27% (2021 financial report is not disclosed), once there were rumors that Meituan has plans to exceed 100,000 employees in 2022;
Byte, the total number of employees in 2019 is about 60,000, and in 2020, this number exceeded 100,000, and the growth rate of employees in a single year was close to double.
Xiaomi, the total number of employees in 2019 was 18,000, and this number reached 31,000 in 2021, with a net increase of 13,000 employees in two years, an increase of more than 70%.
Even huawei, which is still in trouble, after divesting a number of businesses including honor terminals and X86 servers, the total number of employees in 2021 is still basically the same as in 2019 and 2020, maintaining 195,000 people, and the number of R & D personnel has even increased.
According to the statement of Honor CEO Zhao Ming in March, the total number of employees of Honor has reached 11,000.
If you count the new forces of Internet car manufacturing such as "Wei Xiaoli", the talent competition in the past few years. This may be an "unprecedented" organizational leap forward for the head players in the history of the Chinese Internet.
It is conservatively estimated that during the peak period, the actual net increase in employees of the above large factories should be more than 450,000.
For many people, there should be more and more employees in large factories around them. The rapid expansion of personnel has in fact raised the salary level of some Internet people, especially the outstanding fresh graduates with strong general adaptation ability in some positions, and the salary package "volume" has a sky-high upside-down level.
Tencent, Pinduoduo and other research and development of fresh graduate salary packages, in the past two years rose to a maximum of nearly 600,000, some positions of treatment almost doubled, and even upside down three or four years of service, higher rank of old employees.
For many people, an intuitive feeling is that there are more and more "big factory people" around them, and some talents from different industries such as real estate, FMCG, consulting, investment, and media have also begun to get involved in the work of Internet big factories.
Source: Source: Ali school recruitment propaganda film "Classmates You are great"
If we compare the same type of business companies in China and the United States, we will find that the personnel scale of Chinese Internet companies is not a low number on a global scale.
In addition to Amazon's 1.6 million employees worldwide, several other Internet companies in FANNG have relatively stable numbers of employees. Facebook's parent company, Meta, has a total of about 70,000 employees worldwide, a growth rate of 22%; while Google and Apple each have 150,000 employees, with a growth rate of 15% and 4.7% respectively; Netflix has the least, with only 11,000 employees, a growth rate of 20%. In addition, Microsoft has 180,000 employees worldwide, an increase of 11%.
In contrast, the desire of China's large factories to expand their staffing during the epidemic is obviously more radical. But the increase in the number of people has not masked the embarrassment of the big manufacturers in terms of business and capital market performance. If you look at the company's financial report data, the company's human efficiency not only did not increase because of increased personnel investment, but ushered in a rare inflection point in the history of human efficiency growth.
Whether it is Tencent or Alibaba, while the personnel is rising, the human efficiency is facing different degrees of decline. This is also a relatively rare situation in the past several rounds of large factory personnel increase operations.
Image source: Play
Image source: Play
There are many reasons for the decline in human efficiency.
On the one hand, the growth rate of the company's main business has been affected by various aspects, and the growth rate has indeed slowed down compared with previous years. On the other hand, a large number of employee recruitment has actually been put into a large number of "new businesses", and the latter is easy to reduce the efficiency of employees in the entire large factory because it is in the initial stage or far from the original competitive advantage of the big factory.
If you carefully comb the business lines of these super enterprises, you will easily find that in the past two years, the competitive investment of big manufacturers in the new track is not small, and the pile is not dense.
For example, the most popular thing in society is naturally "community group buying".
The participating Internet giants include but are not limited to top players including Meituan, Ali, JD.com, Pinduoduo, Didi and Tencent Capital. "Community group buying" is a business with very strong local attributes, nothing is more "expensive" and "expensive" than this kind of business, each local market must build a corresponding business team, and each player has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in the scene of buying vegetables. At the height of the competition, it even prompted the "business consulting" business to obtain intelligence from large factories.
Some businesses with infrastructure are also competing for.
Taking "cloud services" as an example, this cake was first launched by Alibaba Cloud in China, and now Tencent, Huawei, Kingsoft, Baidu, JD.com, Byte, China Mobile, and Sina have launched corresponding cloud service businesses.
In terms of enterprise service ecology, a small enterprise IM service, in addition to the well-known DingTalk, Feishu, enterprise WeChat, Huawei, Baidu, mobile, Kingsoft, JD.com and other large factories actually have their own enterprise IM, and hope to make an ecological tool.
And beyond, there are some fine directions.
After the success of Pinduoduo, all traffic controllers have tried to do a round of "pinduo". E-commerce companies fight, social companies also fight; UGC video graphics are on fire, all platforms are moving towards the UGC ecology, video ecology; live e-commerce is on fire, everything can be live.
Behind the superposition of functions is the anxious and restless heart of the big factory, and the latter objectively makes the investment of the big factory in the ecology more and more heavy.
Shopping software will be a complex and huge content system; social software encourages users to upload videos; search software competes to be UGC graphic distributors. Or it's a software factory that will persevere in "redoing" all areas. Now, there is hardly a big player without a content team; almost no content team, no live broadcast team; almost no live broadcaster, not a blogger operation.
On the other hand, due to the continuous advancement of the business lines of the big factories and the competitive situation that can break out at any time behind them, the big factories also need more personnel redundancy. The reserves of employees in large factories are like an arms race, layer by layer.
And to quote a large factory employee,
"How fierce the recruitment was in the past, how miserable the cut was this year."
"Spring Chill"
"If there is no one on the battlefield, there is no point in the bullets still strafing."
A year ago, many people foresaw that the winter would not end immediately. But most of them may not have thought that a "cold spring" would be so predictable.
In March this year, Tencent Chairman Ma Huateng put forward the above "bullet wintering theory" to everyone present at the 2021 earnings report meeting. Ma Huateng clearly stated that at this stage, Tencent should reduce costs and increase efficiency, lose weight and increase muscle.
"Use bullets in critical battles."
For most companies, bullets are a luxury in themselves. Compared with Tencent, which has 1.3 billion users and 480 billion yuan in cash, the cold on the battlefield is not a good thing for more companies.
Didi took the lead in gradually withdrawing from the battlefield of community group buying, throwing away 20 billion tuition fees. According to a number of media reports, many giant group buying participants, including Pinduoduo, Meituan, and Ali, have not actually completed their own task indicators in 2021.
Streaming media business continued to integrate, Shrimp Rice withdrew from the market, and music entered the era of tencent and NetEase, two major oligarchs; Tencent, Ali, and iQiyi are all shrinking their investment in long videos. And some once-hot O2O battlefields, such as taxis, movies, takeaways, wine tours, and arrivals, have also entered the end of the battle.
In contrast, some of the otherwise sworn key breakthrough businesses are bearing bigger and bigger losses.
JD.com's new businesses such as Jingxi Pinpin lost 10.9 billion yuan last year; Meituan's "new businesses" such as grocery shopping and group buying lost 38.4 billion yuan; Alibaba, digital media and entertainment part of the goodwill impairment of 25.1 billion yuan, local life lost 24 billion yuan in three quarters.
Compared with these companies, the huge financial costs are perhaps heavier for the old manufacturers to lose the opportunity cost.
Compared with 5 or even 10 years ago, despite the investment of a lot of resources and countless determinations, the core business logic of these companies has not really changed. None of them got rid of the "fate" they wanted to get rid of the most.
Ali is still a core e-commerce + cloud + payment company, Jingdong is still a company doing business around the "Jingdong APP", Tencent can be roughly summarized as a "WeChat ecology" + game company, and byte "APP Factory" Last time in the media out of the circle of products, or was given high hopes of "fly chat".
Even some diversification that seems successful to the outside world is limited in terms of the ability of valuation to drive in terms of investors.
Hema is the most reputable business in Alibaba's new retail, with a recent valuation of $10 billion. For Hema, it is a milestone; for Ali, which has a market value of hundreds of billions, the benefits are limited. Similarly, Tencent has achieved great success in the field of streaming media, but if it benchmarks iQiyi's tragic market value of 3 billion US dollars, similar "success" will be difficult to bring warmth to investors.
Compared with those innovative businesses whose valuation cannot reach the "zero" of their own value, investors seem to be more concerned about the topic that Alibaba missed, and the Miha tour that Tencent missed...
And the reason why those things that have made the big factories are the reason why the big factories have become big factories.
Those cornerstone-level businesses, core competitiveness, and good services that consumers trust the most are the keys to gradually making big factories move from small factories to hundreds of billions of blue oceans.
Consumers never believe in ecology, and industry laws do not believe in speculative hot money. New business, is it equivalent to good innovation, the eyes of the masses are shining...
What we need is an efficient and cost-effective e-commerce service, a social tool that does not need to be disturbed too much, and a streaming service that continues to bring happiness. Hopefully, if possible, these services will be a little more durable. This is the common sense of Internet business.
If the low-hanging peaches have been picked, the right attitude may be to find more peach trees, or to move towards higher peaches; competing in smaller plates with more curls is by no means the ultimate way out of the Internet.