In the past decade or so, a series of segmentation leaders have been born on the basis of the Internet, such as Meituan, which has delivered takeaways, Alibaba, which does e-commerce, and ByteDance, which does information flow.
These industry giants have become a super platform for trillion-level market capitalization/valuation in their respective fields, but at the moment of fierce competition in the industry, the industry overlap involved by the giants is getting higher and higher, so it is inevitable to form a competitive relationship.
For example, in the past two years, the competition of the community group buying track has been very fierce, Ali and Meituan have killed their eyes in this field, and some small community group buying companies have declared bankruptcy because of the giant fight.
However, when the giants are still busy with community group buying, the entrepreneurial giants have successively laid out another "trillion-level" market, which is local.
As early as 2020, Zhang Yiming mobilized 10,000 employees to set up a local direct business center, trying to use the Douyin short video as the entry point to carry out local service business, and in the same year, Meituan Wang Xing also added 2 million riders, with the same goal in the local area.
Why is the local market a trillion-level super outlet? From some changes in the past two years, it can be seen that now we can not only order food through the takeaway platform, but also place orders for mobile phones, buy clothes, etc. on the platform, which can fully meet the current needs of life.
More critically, shopping on local platforms is more reassuring than traditional e-commerce platforms, on the one hand, local merchants have physical stores, which is equivalent to the online and offline shopping experience is exactly the same, on the other hand, it can be quickly delivered to the door, which also enhances the online shopping experience.
Judging from this change, the Meituan takeaway platform will become an e-commerce platform serving the local market, and the takeaway rider will also replace the courier and become the new main force of transportation, which shows that Wang Xing is indeed a stable chess piece in the next step.
The unpredictable market also allowed Zhang Yiming to aim at business opportunities early, and earlier set up a local direct business center of tens of thousands of people, also in order to seize the local market that was about to take off.
With the Douyin platform as the content carrier, users can discover various local life services such as restaurants, attractions, and stores in the same city through the short video platform, and can directly consume online to create a coherent local content consumption ecology.
It can be seen that the local market will be a new turning point, and perhaps a new platform will appear, which will bring a new round of wealth-making opportunities to traditional enterprises and physical businesses. However, for platforms such as Meituan and Douyin, the local market is also facing three major challenges.
First of all, it is necessary to open a new traffic entrance, when the number of domestic netizens exceeds 1 billion, the platform wants to continue to obtain traffic, can no longer focus on the single line, offline is the best traffic access channel, need to focus on the sinking market.
Wang Xing and Zhang Yiming's layout of the local service platform is also to open up a new direction of traffic growth with the help of more physical stores, thereby increasing the user's residence time.
Secondly, it is necessary to find new breakthroughs, the current Internet dividend is gradually disappearing, and Internet companies want to make new breakthroughs, the best way is to provide digital empowerment for local businesses through technology, so that they can use the Internet to increase market development space.
Finally, mining the value of big data, the industry giant layout of the local service platform, not only can get new traffic, find a new outlet for enterprise development, but also continue to mine the big data of users and businesses, so as to better grasp the market demand and development trend.
In fact, the first two steps only bring revenue and profit growth to the platform, and big data, as an intangible asset, can make the market value/valuation of the platform higher, which is also the key reason why Wang Xing and Zhang Yiming have successively laid out the local market.
The author believes that as local e-commerce shopping becomes a new trend, physical stores and e-commerce sellers will change with the times in the future, and perhaps new business models will soon appear, and new giants will appear in the subdivision track. What do you think about this, welcome to comment, like, share.