The author | Xiaoman
Edited | Jiang Yue
WeChat public account: Chief Character View (ID: sxrenwuguan)
Last night, on an ordinary summer night in Beijing, most of the more than 20 million people living in the city paid attention to the weather. Thunder and lightning, hail like a ball, some people see it as a vision and worry, some people worry about whether the open-air parked car is okay, others rush to open the window, and then in the circle of friends to show the egg-sized hail, record this special situation.
The same thing, for different people, the meaning is inherently different.
For example, the live broadcast with goods at this moment has a completely different meaning for Luo Yonghao and Yu Minhong, two old colleagues. When Yu Minhong's "Oriental Selection" live broadcast room finally became popular because of the "New Oriental" feature of bilingual live broadcasting half a year after its opening, Luo Yonghao had basically completed his departure, and when it was close to zero o'clock last night, he announced in Weibo: Starting tomorrow, he quit Weibo and all social platforms and went to bury his head in entrepreneurship again.
The Douyin live broadcast room, which Yu Minhong regards as the "Promised Land" at this moment, has become a past worth not being nostalgic for Luo Yonghao. According to his personality, if this venture is successful, a few years later, he may still laugh at himself in public, who has tried to sell goods.
In the live broadcast room, Yu Minhong and Luo Yonghao passed by. In a sense, this is also the self-salvation of the "old idealists".
01
From 0 to 1 million fans, "Oriental Selection" took 6 months, while from 1 million to more than 2 million, it only took 3 days.
After half a year of entering the live streaming industry, Yu Minhong's "Oriental Selection" live broadcast room finally ushered in a turnaround. Dong Yuhui, a new oriental teacher who uses bilingual to bring goods, has also become an Internet celebrity for a while. Even in the live broadcast that made him out of the circle on June 10, when Yu Minhong appeared in the live broadcast room, netizens asked him to leave in the comment area and not to delay his learning of English.
"English live streaming with goods", this is very yu minhong, but when the building will fall, it really helped Yu Minhong.
Time back to September 2021, when Yu Minhong proposed at a senior management meeting in New Oriental: "Wei Ya can sell more than 10 billion yuan a year, I take dozens of teachers to do live broadcasting, is it possible to do tens of billions of dollars a year?" No one in the company thought that Lao Yu would really engage in live broadcasting, at most to encourage the low morale, but a month later, New Oriental's subsidiary "Oriental Preferred" was registered.
New Oriental Official Wei once mentioned that "when Teacher Yu decided to do live broadcast with goods, almost all around were voices of opposition", but in the end, Yu Minhong still tried to overcome public opinion and set up an agricultural platform to help farmers live broadcast.
In a way, this is also his ideal. He grew up in the countryside of Jiangyin, and in the words of Ai Qing's poem, "I love this land deeply."
This rural student who entered Peking University after failing the college entrance examination twice also hides an idealist's "self-confidence and arrogance". When the "double reduction" policy landed last year, the education and training industry entered the darkest moment, and he was optimistic to face:
"People keep sending me greeting messages, because the education field is undergoing changes, everyone is worried that I will be in a bad mood, in fact, I tell them that my mood is not bad at all, even in a sense in a state of peace of mind, the reason is very simple, because all these changes in the field of education will not affect my setting of the general direction of my life." 」
Without these sudden changes, Yu Minhong, who has reached the age of Hua Jia, may have the opportunity to retire. As early as March 2020, he revealed in a live broadcast that he had considered retirement, "I have not been too interested in doing business until now, if I am interested, New Oriental should be a little bigger than now, in the future I think New Oriental will be handed over to a younger generation to do." ”
But he was once again pushed to the cusp. When New Oriental, which he founded himself and has been running for more than 20 years, faced the most severe challenge in history, the founder, who did not think of himself as a businessman, carried the banner of battle.
He said in a short video after getting drunk: "I will do a lot of things for the development of New Oriental in the future, and I will try to maintain good health and continue to work hard for the development of New Oriental!" ”
Therefore, on December 28, 2021, in the live broadcast room of an office renovation in New Oriental, Yu Minhong opened the debut of live streaming of agricultural products. He worked very hard, and during the more than 3 hours of live broadcasting, whenever he introduced a product, he would take out historical materials or print a map to give a detailed background introduction to the product. Sometimes rising, I will also read a few poems: "The water of the Tarim River begins to flow, the rain is abundant, the taste of Jiangnan is stuffed, the scenery is magnificent, the desert is lonely, and the long river is full of sunset." ”
However, 15 flat stone apples for 128 yuan, 8 kilograms of rice and flowers for 268 yuan, and 960 yuan for Mega organic special granular powder, too expensive commodity prices make many netizens unacceptable. Even Yu Minhong himself could not help but remind: "Everyone be mentally prepared, there is a flour that is super expensive, which scares me", "Such an expensive cherry, you can secretly eat two every day."
Towards the end, Yu Minhong was obviously a little disappointed:
"Others can't move a live broadcast to break through 100 million, we only sell 5 million, or the unit price of agricultural products is too low."
Just over a year ago, luo Yonghao, a former teacher at New Oriental, made his debut on Douyin, and the final sales were 110 million yuan.
The Internet world prefers "eccentrics", compared to Luo Yonghao's freewheeling, Yu Minhong's stable live broadcast style, it is indeed difficult to gather people's hearts, and on the day after completing the live broadcast debut, New Oriental Online's stock price opened low and went low, closing down 21%.
This was the debut of Yu Minhong's live broadcast with goods, and it was also a peak that was difficult to overcome for a long time afterwards, and in the following months, the popularity of the "Oriental Selection" live broadcast room plummeted, and the sales volume was even more miserable.
Yu Minhong has the habit of recording life thinking, starting from the first tweet of this year, in order to promote the live streaming business, he hangs the promotion of Oriental Selection at the end of each article, and under the orange-yellow four big words "Advertising Time", is a brief introduction to Oriental Selection and a fixed publicity map.
In these gossipy life notes, Yu Minhong wrote down many emotions, such as "Now that the Oriental Selection has just begun, the daily sales are still pitifully small, only a few hundred thousand yuan" and so on.
In February this year, New Oriental announced its first loss-making financial report in 18 years. According to the financial data for the six months ended November 30, 2021, New Oriental's net loss for the reporting period was US$876 million, equivalent to approximately RMB5.7 billion, compared with a profit of US$229 million for the same period last year. According to Yu Minhong, New Oriental's market value fell by 90% in 2021, operating income decreased by 80%, employees dismissed 60,000 people, and cash expenses such as tuition refunds, employee dismissalS N+1, and teaching point rent withdrawals were nearly 20 billion.
The leak in the house coincided with overnight rain, just when the worst financial report was announced, the topic of "New Oriental Live Broadcasting only sold 4.5 million yuan in the past two months" was once on Weibo hot search. After Yu Minhong's live debut, in the 26 live broadcasts conducted by Oriental Selection within two months, the cumulative sales were only 4.5476 million yuan, which was not as good as Yu Minhong's debut night with goods, compared with the huge loss of 5.7 billion yuan of New Oriental Group.
February 1 this year is the Lunar New Year, during the Spring Festival, due to the supply chain and logistics of agricultural products can not keep up, the Oriental Selection Live Broadcast Room can only be stopped.
In the winter of three years ago, beijing new oriental water qingmuhua campus, a total of more than 2,000 students came to report, they all from north China, northeast China and other regions specially went to Beijing, to participate in the Beijing new oriental winter vacation accommodation class, the campus seemed crowded and lively.
Photo: In the lobby of New Oriental Shuiqingmuhua Campus in January 2019
Now after the policy landed, New Oriental's K9 business has also been completely stopped, Yu Minhong said, New Oriental has spent the quietest winter vacation since its inception.
02 Redemption
In the second half of 2021, the management of New Oriental launched an extremely fierce discussion on how to "rescue" the company. From the board of directors and the president's office meeting, to the national president's conference and the national senior management cadre meeting, the old employees who have worked for New Oriental for many years have expressed their opinions.
In the week after the release of the "double subtraction" document, the office of the president of the supreme decision-making organization of New Oriental even held a special meeting to interpret the "double subtraction" document word by word.
In the end, Yu Minhong set the direction on the "live streaming with goods" that many people were not optimistic about.
Yu Minhong's definition of New Oriental is to become an education company with education products as the core, in his view, "products need sales channels, and I found that the most effective sales channels are in addition to finding agents, that is, live streaming with goods." ”
In an article titled "New Oriental Should Not Copy Li Jiaqi", the author pointed out that New Oriental cannot "jump from one industry that makes quick money to another industry that makes fast money".
But it turns out that everyone overestimated Yu Minhong's ability to carry goods live.
New Oriental's anchor Yoyo once mentioned that he had experienced a situation where he did not sell a single order in the morning, "At that time, he knew too little about us, even if someone wanted to buy it, he did not dare to buy it." In Yoyo's live broadcast room, only her parents often visit, often asking her if she has eaten.
In the days when the East was the most struggling and the lowest fan, Yu Minhong was also constantly persuading himself, "From one field to another to another, it takes time to adapt, although I am also a farmer, but it has also passed a long time and needs to be re-adapted." ”
Yu Minhong, who should have retired honorably and lectured everywhere, now seems to have rekindled the fighting spirit of entrepreneurship, and in his body, he also carries the self-redemption of an idealist.
A child who came out of the countryside of Jiangyin and later became the chairman of the listed group, in Yu Minhong's philosophy of life, engraved the ideal law of "things are man-made, people are determined to win the day", and the live streaming under the outlet has also become a golden harbor that many business tycoons can temporarily breathe when they are facing setbacks.
One of the most representative is Luo Yonghao. The English teacher who had taught in New Oriental for six years turned around and "turned" to Douyin Live after the hammer subsidiary failed to start a business and had 600 million yuan in debt.
20 years ago, Luo Yonghao impressed Yu Minhong with a 10,000-word cover letter, who promised him three opportunities to try to speak, and after desperately memorizing words and learning grammar, Luo Yonghao got on the podium of New Oriental as he wished. But after Luo Yonghao left New Oriental, the relationship between the two was not as good as it had been, and Luo once publicly criticized New Oriental and Yu Minhong for "making money hypocritically in the guise of ideals, and later I found out that Yu Minhong was one of the most unprincipled people I had ever seen in my life." ”
Even if they have different understandings of "ideals", after experiencing the ups and downs of life, Yu Luo and Luo both chose to enter the live broadcast to complete their self-redemption.
Luo Yonghao, who was one step ahead, had already obtained the qualification to leave the market in advance. At the beginning of this year, judicial information has shown that Luo Yonghao is no longer restricted from high consumption, and news that he is going to enter the technology industry again has been frequently reported in recent months. Until last night, he officially began this new adventure with a declaration of withdrawal from social platforms.
Everyone wants to seize the wind, but not everyone can take advantage of the wind, in 2020, the hottest e-commerce live broadcast economy, financial writer Wu Xiaobo has also tried to live stream goods. In the live broadcast room, he exerted his writing accumulation and told the historical story of brand development, but the first live broadcast was exposed by the media to overturn, "A milk powder merchant paid 600,000 pit fees, and Wu Xiaobo brought only 15 cans of goods." ”
Afterwards, Wu Xiaobo posted "Fifteen Cans" for reflection, saying that "self-confidence killed me."
For that live broadcast, Wu Xiaobo's team prepared more than a month in advance, and he also carefully watched the live broadcast of Wei Ya, Li Jiaqi, Luo Yonghao, Wang Han and others, and even went to Sydney's company to observe the scene. Among the hundreds of brands pre-registered, Wu Xiaobo finally identified 26 merchants, all of which are the top three in the subdivision industry.
In order to enhance the visual scene of the live broadcast debut, Wu Xiaobo's team also invested millions to build a scene-based live broadcast space, and placed ground advertisements in airports, high-speed rail stations and office buildings in shanghai, Hangzhou and other seven places.
In the article, he wrote:
"In 2020, if you don't watch live broadcasts, if you don't do live broadcasts, that's white... Halfway through the broadcast, I realized that the people pouring into the room were more about buying things than coming to the class. Four hours later, I slumped in Yongyi's office chair and suddenly felt a huge feeling of discomfort and physical and mental exhaustion. ”
After 36 days, the reluctant Wu Xiaobo regrouped and opened the second Taobao live broadcast, but the result was overturned again, and the GMV was directly reduced from 22 million yuan in the first game to more than 5 million.
Since then, Wu Xiaobo has never opened an e-commerce live broadcast.
In an article titled "Freedom and Ideals," Wu Xiaobo wrote:
"College graduated in 1990, and the country seems to have been pushed into the trend of commodification overnight. At the end of the year, talking about next year's work goals, it was the turn to speak, and I said that the goal for next year is to earn 5,000 yuan in writing fees and do 'half a million yuan household'. ”
In that era, people were keen to talk about ideals and the future, and in Wu Xiaobo's eyes, "ideals are the way a person's self-expectations and self-worth are presented." ”
With the passage of time, this group of old men who have crossed the peak and are more than half a hundred years old are still trying to re-verify the way to achieve an "ideal" in the blue ocean of e-commerce live broadcasting. But those days of making money by letting the teachers and pens stand are gone, and in the face of the strange and powerful enemies surrounded by live broadcast circles, the old intellectual posture of talking about feelings and being a teacher has long ceased to be used.
Recently, Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360 who participated in the forum activities, said that he also recently visited Yu Minhong, "He is very proud to say that he now recommends a book online, how many tens of thousands of copies can be sold, and he can make a lot of money in a year." ”
He continued: "I recently wanted to do live streaming with goods, but yesterday I tried it and found that it didn't work, I am too idealistic to erase my face." ”
03 Ideal
In 1987, Haizi wrote a famous poem "Dreaming of Horses":
"I will be a loyal son from afar, a materially ephemeral lover, and like all poets who dream as horses, I have to walk the same path as martyrs and clowns... I am willing to start from scratch, and like all poets who dream of horses, I am willing to sit on the bottom of the prison. ”
In that era of "dreaming as horses", Yu Minhong studied abroad and taught after graduating from Peking University, and in order to make up for the cost of studying in the United States, he and Wang Qiang and other students made money by running make-up classes outside the school.
"It takes at least a hundred thousand yuan to go to the United States, which is an astronomical amount at that time, and in order to save up the cost of study, I asked a few classmates to go out to substitute classes." The substitute class method is very effective, 30 yuan per class, 300 yuan for ten classes, and my personal income has grown quickly. ”
When Yu Minhong saved enough money to study in the United States, he did not want to go, "The more vulgar reason is that you can make more money, but the non-vulgar reason is that I feel that this matter is very meaningful in my heart, although I have not studied abroad, but the students trained by New Oriental have been admitted to famous universities in the United States one after another." ”
In the era of economic take-off, based on the classical economic principles of Adam Smith, individual ideals can be deeply bound to worldly success and enjoy both material and spiritual satisfaction. There is no doubt that Yu Minhong is a beneficiary of the process of social reform, and for him, the success of New Oriental is also a combination of ideals and reality - although he has repeatedly publicly expressed that he is not interested in doing business.
This does not prevent him from becoming a good businessman.
For the "old idealist" Yu Minhong, he can't understand why bringing goods in English suddenly becomes popular. Just like the huge loss he had when he looked at Luo Yonghao's 110 million GMV half a year ago. But he still entered the circle of the "Oriental Selection" live broadcast room in his own way after entering the market for half a year.
In the current social context, ideals have long been freed from the confines of practical empiricism, and for the new human beings, ideals are ethereal, deconstructed, and broken.
Compared with Yu Minhong's knowledge treasure house lecture hall, young people are more keen to listen to Lao Luo blow those insignificant cow X.
In fact, those netizens who follow the trend and squeeze into the "Oriental Selection" live broadcast room do not really want to learn English, just to feel the novelty of English live broadcasting, and the ideal afterglow of New Oriental education after its decline.
Whether it is Yu Minhong, who was forced to change careers, or Li Guoqing, who was swept out of the house, or Wu Xiaobo, who scribbled off... This group of "old idealists" are all "fighting" for their ideals in the live broadcast room while "groping" young people.
Talking about the future, Yu Minhong wrote in his personal public account "Old Yu Gossip":
"I call the live economy the third revolution in business. The first time was a hypermarket, the second time was e-commerce, and the third time was live streaming with goods. Last year, I led everyone to build the "Oriental Selection", and this week, I led everyone to form the "New Oriental Live Broadcast Room" team. I believe that in time, this platform will become a good platform for the sale of educational products. ”
In the gap between the company's business strategy analysis, Yu Minhong's writing always likes to carry some chicken soup for the soul: "I have always had a habit of doing things, called 'urgent things and slow to do', see the direction, slowly do things, do it steadily and firmly." The so-called flowing water does not compete for the first, but the contention is endless..."
In September this year, Yu Minhong will celebrate his 60th birthday, and he once said: "The ideal is the belief that you will continue to raise yourself throughout your life." Yu Minhong in the live broadcast room may struggle and may be happy, but there is no doubt that this entrepreneur with the label of idealism is doing his best to carry out this journey of "pulling up".
Compared with success, not giving up in this predicament is the real moving place.