Held in Chongqing every August, the Expo is a stage for Chinese enterprises to showcase their scientific and technological strength and intelligence level. This year is the fifth session of the Wisdom Expo, compared with the previous four sessions, this year's exhibition, "digital and real integration" has become the new
At the highlight, various Internet companies have exposed their own "real content" to show the industrial exploration of the combination of digital technology and the real economy.
The exhibition area shows that in 2021, China's leading Internet companies are emphasizing the strategy or positioning of serving the real economy. Tencent's strategy is to "take root in the consumer Internet, embrace the industrial Internet, and promote sustainable social value innovation." Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang also said last year that Alibaba wants to become a company that combines consumer Internet and industrial Internet. Ant Group highlights its advantages in the integration of digital reality: focusing on small and micro enterprises.
The person in charge of the ant exhibition introduced to the media and visitors at the scene: the digital wave is moving from large enterprises to small and micro enterprises. The installation of ants is like a footnote to this sentence: from reducing fees and concessions for small and micro enterprises, serving small and micro digital operations, exploring small and micro supply chain finance, to supporting small and micro cross-border trade... It is understood that this is the first time that Ant Group has comprehensively demonstrated its actions and progress in helping the real economy and starting from small and micro enterprises.
A new inflection point in China's Internet development has arrived. Internet companies that habitually stand at the top of the tide and lead the way began to lean down and walk deep into the water.
One
This tide of the times that is moving towards "micro" is not only running to "reduce costs and increase efficiency", but also to solve the problem of "life and death".
Small and micro enterprises are the "capillaries" of national economic development and the main force for stable employment.
However, in this wave of digitization by the epidemic pressing the fast-forward button, the "capillaries" of the national economy have not kept up with the pace of the "major arteries".
The data shows that the total number of small and medium-sized enterprises in China in 2019 is about 120 million, of which the proportion of small and medium-sized enterprises with access to the O2O platform is less than 10%, and the number of small and medium-sized enterprises with smart devices will be halved. Removing small and micro enterprises, there are more than 40 million small and medium-sized enterprises left, and the proportion of digital transformation is only 25%, far lower than the 46% in Europe and the 54% in the United States.
What is blocking the digital transformation of small and micro enterprises is the willingness of small and micro enterprises to invest. The study shows that the vast majority of small and medium-sized enterprises are willing to invest about 10% of their equipment investment in digital upgrading, which leads to a failure rate of about 80% of the transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises. The reason why small and medium-sized micro enterprises resist digitalization is that they have no money, and second, they have not yet discovered that digital transformation can help enterprises earn money.
The epidemic has further inhibited the willingness of small and micro enterprises to invest in "non-rigid demand". In 2021, Tsinghua Wudaokou Institute of Finance released a research report showing that the epidemic has reduced the income of small and medium-sized enterprises by an average of 69%, and the income of small and medium-sized enterprises in serious areas has even dropped by 90%.
This makes small and medium-sized enterprises fall into a paradox: the digitization of the whole society and the whole industry is accelerating, and the probability of small and micro enterprises being eliminated is also increasing.
Another unfavorable factor is that for most digital service providers that do enterprise services, small and micro enterprises lack experience, complex business needs, and adapted digital technologies are often not general technologies, resulting in their greater willingness and motivation to serve large enterprises.
Li Yongjian, deputy director of the Platform Economy Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote in this regard: Under the influence of the epidemic, digitalization is no longer a multiple choice question for global small and medium-sized enterprises, but has become a mandatory question.
In the past, small and medium-sized micro enterprises came out of the predicament, mainly relying on policy support from the government, such as tax reduction and fee reduction, "decentralization service" reform, etc. Today, they have also ushered in a "support group" from society.
Two
It should be pointed out that helping small and medium-sized enterprises to digitally transform is not a public welfare undertaking, and the use of business logic and technical power can have motivation, sustainability and scale. Why do Internet companies help micro-enterprises to promote reality? At the 2022 Chongqing Wisdom Expo, the exhibitions of various Internet companies gave some answers.
The first is to make full use of the power of digital technology and platform ecology to provide small and micro enterprises with easy-to-use digital tools and interfaces.
Ant's booth shows that so far, Alipay has accumulated 78 open platform generic products, more than 3 million online Mini Programs, and served nearly 700 million people every day, reducing the operational threshold of small and micro merchants. During the epidemic period, millions of merchants provided users with "cloud" shopping and "cloud" play services on Alipay, increasing customer acquisition while also precipitating private domain traffic.
How "inexpensive" is Mini Program development? It is understood that an Alipay mini program can now be developed in as little as three days, and the development cost is as low as 300 yuan. Behind this, it is not Alipay that is posting money backwards, but low-code development and more than 11,000 digital service providers on Alipay, which greatly reduces the technical cost and service cost of Mini Program development.
Secondly, through data elements, small and micro enterprises can be connected to the financial system and obtain more financial services.
According to research data, about 80% of small and micro enterprises in China do not have data assets. Without their own data assets, they cannot establish their own credit system, and they cannot prove their ability to repay to the bank.
The logic of Ant to solve this problem is to digitize every payment received by small and micro merchants, every transfer generated in the purchase and shipment links, and transform it into its digital credit profile, so as to replace the physical mortgage and allow it to obtain financial services such as loans and withdrawals
It can be seen that when ants serve ordinary users, payment is the end point of the transaction, and now serving small and micro merchants, payment has become the starting point of everything.
The three "birds" displayed in the ant exhibition area are the financial services provided by MYbank for small and micro merchants: "Big" uses satellite remote sensing technology to identify crop conditions: planting area, type and rising trend, as a reference for bank credit and digital collateral, and has so far obtained loans for more than 600,000 large growers; "Big Goose" helps core enterprises and upstream and downstream small and micro enterprises to increase the loan availability rate from 30% to 80%; "Lark" is an intelligent interactive risk control system that has helped more than 2 million small and micro merchants to increase their quota.
The "big" of the online business bank, the big grain grower circled his land on the mobile phone, and he could know whether he could get a loan and the credit line as soon as a few minutes later.
It is worth mentioning that the small and micro objects served by ants have quietly extended from the service industry to the primary and secondary industries. This is also the general trend of Internet enterprises' digital assistance.
The degree of digitization and penetration of China's three major industries is uneven. According to the data, by the end of 2020, the digital penetration rate of the first, second and third industries in the mainland was 8.9%, 21.0% and 40.7% respectively, and the visible lag of the first and second industries was lagging behind.
In the past two years, Internet companies have begun to "enter the village and enter the factory".
Take Huawei, for example. In 2021, Huawei set up a "coal mine army" and deployed hundreds of employees to give thousands of coal mines across the country a digital transformation plan.
Take Ali, for example. Ali built a new manufacturing plant called "Rhino Manufacturing" himself. All algorithm engineers need to go to the production line to be a team leader and eat and live with the workers for two months.
Another example is ants. Ant provides a solution for the trusted circulation of operational data for Huatie Emergency, the head enterprise of engineering equipment leasing, helping small, scattered, and even "mom-and-pop shop" small and micro leasing enterprises to obtain financing, as well as reducing the threshold and cost of insurance services.
Huatie emergency upstream and downstream high-machine leasing enterprises are mainly small, scattered, and even "mom-and-pop shops", the operation data management of these small and medium-sized and micro enterprises is relatively weak, and the high-tech equipment information is difficult to trace in real time, which brings great difficulties to the risk control of financial and insurance institutions.
In short, through the Tanying 2022 Chongqing Wisdom Expo, we see that the trend of China's Internet has reached a new inflection point. Internet companies that started with toC and have been very successful are now beginning to make brave progress in the direction of toB. Both enterprises and society have realized that the historical mission of the consumer Internet has come to an end, and the next star sea is the industrial Internet and the digital transformation of small and micro enterprises.
Compared with the consumer Internet, the speed of industrial Internet and small and micro digital transformation will not be so high. Internet companies should begin to get used to being friends of time, walking to the depths of the water, the flow of water is not competing, the contention is endless.