After Ma Yun and Liu Qiangdong, Ding Lei will also step down?
NetEase Ding Lei is also stepping down?
In the past two days, the news of "Ding Lei's resignation" has attracted the attention of netizens, as the head of NetEase, the old cannon of the Internet, Ding Lei is everyone's old acquaintance.
On the 26th, some media said that the Tianyancha APP showed that Ding Lei stepped down as the legal representative, general manager and director of NetEase Media, and was taken over by Li Li, CEO of NetEase Media.
As soon as this news came out, netizens were excited, and some people also ridiculed: "Ding Lei is preparing to raise pigs?" "Many people think that Ding Lei is also going to retreat behind the scenes."
In the past two years, the Internet has ushered in a new wave of retirement peaks. First Ma Yun, then Huang Zheng, Zhang Yiming, Pinduoduo, Liu Qiangdong, Su Hua, etc., have withdrawn from the front line, among them, there are old Internet people, and there are also emerging industry rookies in recent years.
According to statistics, in the past three years, 11 Internet bigwigs have left their jobs.
What most of them have in common is that they have not yet reached retirement age and have "retired early".
In the impression of many netizens, NetEase Ding Lei is the same as Ma Yun, Zhang Chaoyang, Lei Jun, Liu Qiangdong and other "same" old Internet people, Ding Lei stepped down, is it necessary to keep up with the pace of Ma Yun and Liu Qiangdong?
In fact, netizens have misunderstood a bit.
Ding Lei stepped down from his position as Beijing NetEase Media, and is now the executive director and general manager of NetEase (Hangzhou) Network Co., Ltd., which is only one of the companies in which Ding Lei participates.
NetEase insiders also responded, "This is a normal industrial and commercial change."
Stepping down is indeed stepping down, but Ding Lei has not yet reached the point of retreating to the second line.
On Tianyancha, although Ding Lei has withdrawn from NetEase Media, he is still the largest shareholder of the company, holding 99% of the shares and being the actual controller.
Therefore, Ding Lei stepped down only as a position in a main company under NetEase's "NetEase News", which belongs to normal high-level changes, and Ding Lei still sits firmly in the position of NetEase's top leader.
It is understood that NetEase was founded in 1997, as the founder of NetEase, Ding Lei is currently the legal representative of 25 companies, and his value has reached 16 billion US dollars. After the news of "Ding Lei's resignation" came out yesterday, NetEase Hong Kong stocks in the morning session rose by more than 8%.
NetEase's performance in the past two years has been remarkable.
At the end of February, NetEase released the fourth quarter and annual financial report of 2021, and the data showed that net income of NetEase in 2021 was 87.6 billion yuan, and the net profit attributable to the company's shareholders was about 19.8 billion yuan.
The game industry remains NetEase's largest profit pillar, with a net revenue of about 62.8 billion yuan in 2021. Series of products such as "Journey to the West" and "Yin and Yang Division" performed well, and last year's "Forever" and "Harry Potter: Magical Awakening" also became the popular games of the year.
In addition, last year, NetEase Cloud Music was also listed in Hong Kong, becoming the third listed company of NetEase, with a net income of about 7 billion yuan and a gross profit margin.
Affected by the new education policy, NetEase Youdao actively transformed; and NetEase Yanxuan also seems to have found a new direction from the fog, with omni-channel users increasing by more than 80% year-on-year last year.
Ding Lei continued to stumble on e-commerce
Since its establishment, NetEase has launched many successful products, which are quite popular with the public, such as NetEase Mailbox, NetEase News, NetEase Games, NetEase Cloud Music, etc.
From a business point of view, NetEase has been involved in websites, games, email, online education, online music, e-commerce and other fields in the past few decades, and has also come up with good products and achievements.
In the past thirty years of internet development, the wind direction of the industry has been changing, although the majority of NetEase's revenue is games, but after years of accumulation, NetEase's hands have also saved a lot of traffic.
What to do with traffic? To monetize, selling goods is an inevitable choice. Today, in these years, the end of traffic is e-commerce. In fact, many Internet giants have invariably rushed to this road.
The timing of NetEase's e-commerce is very early, which also shows that Ding Lei has long been obsessed with e-commerce.
In April 2016, NetEase Yanxuan was officially launched and squeezed into the boutique e-commerce track at that time. Although it came a little late, NetEase Yanxuan quickly came to the top, overtook in the corners, and jumped into a track leader.
In 2017, NetEase Yanxuan ushered in its most beautiful year, winning 8 billion GMV, standing out among its peers and raising its eyebrows.
Unexpectedly, the outlet of boutique e-commerce comes and goes quickly.
Boutique e-commerce, is to sell boutique products, from NetEase strict selection can see its positioning, for consumption upgrades, the quality of aesthetic requirements of the young generation, its users are mostly from NetEase other products to draw over, such as NetEase Cloud Music.
This e-commerce model has the advantage of being cost-effective and creating its own brand, but to achieve high quality and low price, but also to endorse the products, it is necessary to upgrade the supply chain and reduce intermediate links.
NetEase has done many projects before, but in the e-commerce, supply chain, the foundation is weak, they can not produce, can only rely on "selection", in the quality control is more likely to have problems.
The highlight of NetEase's strict selection is very short-lived, and it did not complete the revenue target of 20 billion yuan in 2018, and in 2019, it exposed layoffs and a big change of blood at the top level.
Not only Is It Not only NetEase Strict Selection, the entire boutique e-commerce, the limelight has been overshadowed by other e-commerce new games, and soon forgotten by capital, while the private brands of other e-commerce companies are far less than NetEase Strict Selection Circle.
After NetEase Yanxuan also began to fall out of the ranks of mainstream e-commerce, Ding Lei still remembered it and vowed to toss it up again.
First of all, he took the Pinduoduo route and did the "9 Blocks 9 Value Zone"; then Ding Lei personally came out to broadcast live and bring goods for NetEase Yan selection; and then joined forces with Wang Xing to explore community group buying. None of this has allowed NetEase to return to the mainstream.
Ali and Xiaomi have retreated, and now NetEase is strictly elected, and it no longer discloses its performance separately, but this does not mean that Ding Lei is dead to it.
The recent financial report also mentioned that the innovation and other businesses where NetEase Yanxuan is located have developed steadily, and also emphasized that the strategic effect of netease Yanxuan brand has emerged, and omni-channel sales and paid members have increased steadily.
From this caliber, NetEase still attaches great importance to and is optimistic about the e-commerce business, which means that Ding Lei will continue to die of boutique e-commerce and its own brands, and slowly do it again.
Kill to the meta-universe, PK Tencent
In addition to e-commerce, NetEase is also very interested in the meta-universe.
Last year, the concept of "meta-universe" was very hot, and many domestic Internet manufacturers have set their sights on this unknown field, and Tencent, Huawei, Byte and other large manufacturers have successively laid out.
In the science fiction novel Avalanche, the author creates a network world parallel to the real world, Metaverse, or metaverse.
No one knows what the real metaverse looks like, and many people think that the big manufacturers are hyping up this concept, but after the heat of the metacosm has declined, many companies are still making efforts. Tencent and NetEase recognize the metacosm.
Ding Lei once mentioned in the conference call: "For the metaverse, at all levels of technology and planning, NetEase has been prepared, how to do the design of specifications, how to do technical reserves." With the sound of a gunshot, we may be running faster than anyone else. ”
It can be seen that he is full of confidence on the track of the meta-universe.
In the earnings report at the end of February, NetEase executives said that NetEase has two paths to layout the metaverse, one is to add metaverse factors to the existing game, and the other is to redevelop the large-scale metaverse world.
In NetEase's games, there is no shortage of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) that simulate the real world, which have their own metaversmic economic models.
Therefore, in the future, NetEase will start from game social networking, join the combination of offline, and then continue to develop a large meta-universe on the basis of game technology.
Tencent is also betting on metaversals.
Ma Huateng is very optimistic about the meta-universe, he believes: "The meta-universe is a topic worth exciting, I believe that Tencent has a lot of technology and capabilities to explore and develop the meta-universe, such as in the field of games, social media and artificial intelligence, we all have a lot of experience."
In the planning of this direction, Tencent mainly starts from its own social attributes and uses the perspective of user communities to build and promote the meta-universe.
At the same time, Tencent is also a big game manufacturer, and in the layout of the meta-universe, it also intends to integrate the game with the community to allow users to enhance their experience in the virtual world.
Ding Lei and Ma Huateng are very optimistic about the metaverse, and they are also very confident, and the planning route is similar, for example, they plan to build the metaverse through games and social networking.
However, NetEase has a smaller scope at the social level, while Tencent's layout is large and complete; Tencent has advantages in technology, and NetEase is stronger in the layout of content and IP. But in general, the overlap between the two ideas is very high, so the comparison and game between the two sides have become the focus of many people in the industry.
Ding Lei and Ma Huateng will compete in a brand new field, who can be better, for the melon-eating masses, it will also be a very wonderful drama.
Author: Pandora