This social e-commerce company was recovered! Sequoia IDG Hillhouse and other investments

　　Zhongxin Jingwei client, August 12 (Zhang Yanzheng) "Where did our payment go?" When will I be able to get my money back? Mr. Ma, a beidian merchant from Wuhan, Hubei Province, told the client that the beidian should have settled the April payment bill for him in June this year, and now it has not received the payment for four months.

　　Mr. Ma said that recently, hundreds of merchants on the Beidian platform gathered at the headquarters of Hangzhou Beibei Group to collect payment. The amount of arrears recovered this time ranged from more than 100,000 yuan to millions of yuan. According to an online statistical form of real-name registration provided by him, as of 12:00 a.m. on August 11, more than 1,200 merchants had been owed a total of 120 million yuan in payment. Merchants involve household daily use, clothing, household appliances, food fresh, maternal and infant, beauty and personal care and other categories.

　　On the 11th, the client of Zhongxin Jingwei called the Beidian platform, and the customer service staff of the platform responded that "the company is actively handling and will not accept any form of interview and answer." Specific details are recommended to await official notification. The client also learned from a Beidian operation staff that the Beidian operation department is still working normally. In addition, the client also called Zhang Lianglun, chairman of Beibei Group, many times, but the other party did not answer the phone.

　　According to media reports, at the end of last year, many employees of Beidian and Beicang left, and the old business is currently only maintenance-oriented, and the activity strength and price advantage are getting weaker and weaker, resulting in many shopkeepers giving up.

　　Ma Kaiyue, deputy secretary general of the 315 E-commerce Guidance Office and founder of the Laoma e-commerce circle, analyzed the client of Zhongxin Jingwei and said that in 2019, there have been thunderstorms on the Taoji platform, and now there are similar incidents. It should be noted that there are hundreds of similar social e-commerce platforms. At the policy level, we must improve the regulatory mechanism as soon as possible, especially the payment reserve system should be put on the agenda as soon as possible, the platform operating fee belongs to the operating fee, the profit belongs to the profit, the merchant payment must not be moved, it is best to pay the third party.

　　How to deal with the arrears of the platform to suppliers?

　　According to public information, Beibei Group owns beibei network, beidian, beicang, bei province, bei loan, Ximei and other business platforms. According to the official website of Beidian, Beidian was founded in 2017 and is a free mobile phone store platform. By integrating the global supply chain, the platform provides store owners with a source of supply for tens of thousands of brands and factories. In addition, Beidian also provides a set of mobile phone store opening tools for store owners, including store management, merchandise management, membership management, order management, etc.

　　Mr. Ma said that in March 2020, he saw the investment information of Beidian in the WeChat group, so he paid a deposit of 10,000 yuan to settle in, and mainly sold bags and other products on the platform. Mr. Ma said that his company was able to get the settled payment normally last year, but at the beginning of this year, it became more and more difficult to withdraw the money.

　　"The collection date is different for different merchants. For example, our store is the 23rd of each month to settle the payment, the platform issued the last month's payment bill, you can withdraw cash on the same day. However, when applying for withdrawal at the beginning of this year, the platform showed that it arrived within 10 working days, and in April and May, the platform said that the payment date was extended to 20 working days. Mr. Ma said that after he applied for full settlement and withdrawal in June, he had not received the payment until now, and the docking shop Xiao Er did not give any reply, so Mr. Ma removed the goods sold from the Bei store.

　　Ms. Wu, a clothing merchant in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, also told the client of Zhongxin Jingwei, "After April this year, Beidian has not returned the payment, saying that it is a system problem. Later, I looked at the platform abnormal, I applied to return the store, originally promised to settle the refund within 30 working days, and now it seems that the refund is far away. ”

Beidian business adjustment notice Source: Courtesy of the interviewee

　　According to a screenshot of the background of the Beidian merchant provided by Mr. Ma, beidian will make business adjustments from August 10, 2021, and the original mall business will be upgraded to a shopping guide business and access to third-party supply chains such as Taobao. After the upgrade, merchants do not need to re-enter the store to promote products through the shell store.

　　Is the statement of the above two merchants that the arrears are true? The client of Zhongxin Jingwei intends to send an interview letter to Beidian to understand the situation, but after inquiring about Beibei, Beidian's official website and the national enterprise credit information publicity system, the company's external mailbox and fax were not found. On the 12th, the client of Zhongxin Jingwei called the customer service of Beidian again, and a customer service staff member said that "at present, Beidian has no external mailbox and will not accept interviews for the time being." ”

　　Zhao Zhanzhang, a lawyer at Beijing Yunjia Law Firm, told the client that the platform generally has the following solutions for defaulting on the payment of suppliers. The first is that the supplier negotiates with the platform, if the negotiation is fruitless, the supplier can sue the platform to the court, apply to the court for property preservation before or during the lawsuit, and seal and freeze the property of the platform.

　　"If the platform is insolvent, the supplier can apply to the court for bankruptcy, and after entering the bankruptcy procedure, it needs to pay off in accordance with the procedures stipulated in the bankruptcy law." Zhao zhanzhan said that according to the regulations, the platform must first repay the employees' wages, bonuses and state taxes. In terms of claims, it is necessary to distinguish whether there is a priority of claims.

　　"For ordinary claims, proportional liquidation is sufficient. Generally speaking, most of the claims of merchants are ordinary claims, but how much money a merchant can get through bankruptcy liquidation depends entirely on how many bankruptcy assets and how many outstanding claims the company has left. Zhao Zhanzhan said.

　　The first merchants: have made money, decay has traces to follow

　　According to industrial and commercial information, the main developer of the Beidian APP is Hangzhou Beijia E-commerce Co., Ltd., which is wholly owned by Hangzhou Beibei Information Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Beibei Network). Judging from the penetration of the equity structure of Beibei.com, Zhang Lianglun, executive director and general manager, holds 51.2% of the shares and is the actual controller. According to public information, Zhang Lianglun is the founder, chairman and CEO of Beibei Group, and was previously the co-founder of Mi folding network. Judging by his resume, after graduating from college in 2009, he worked as a product manager at Alibaba for more than two years. In 2011, he founded Beibei Group, and subsequently increased the e-commerce business of Beibei Network and Beidian.

　　According to Tianyan, from 2014 to 2020, Zhang Lianglun registered and established 13 companies such as Hangzhou Beibei Group, Hangzhou Beibei Brand Management, Hangzhou Beibei Information Technology, Hangzhou Beixing Investment, Xi'an Beirong Finance, etc. The most recently established is a biotechnology company - Hangzhou Aurli Biotechnology Co., Ltd., which was established on July 24, 2020, but the registered capital of most of the above companies has not been paid.

　　From the perspective of financing history, in 2013, Beibei network obtained millions of dollars of A round financing from IDG Capital; in 2014, it obtained 150 million yuan of B financing from IDG Capital and Gaorong Capital; from 2015 to 2016, it obtained more than 200 million US dollars of financing from Today Capital, New Sky Capital, Northern Light Venture Capital and other institutions. Most recently, in May 2019, Beibei.com received RMB 860 million in strategic financing from Hillhouse Capital, Xianghe Capital, Gaorong Capital, Today Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Innovation Factory, IDG Capital and other institutions.

　　"From the rice folding network in 2012, to the beibei in 2014, to the beidian in 2018, to the beicang in 2019, until 2021, a full 10 years, what a familiar model." Zhang Yanpeng, a merchant in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, told the client that when he was still doing Mi Folding Network, he came into contact with Zhang Lianglun's e-commerce platform in the e-commerce circle.

　　As the first batch of merchants of Mi Folding Network, BeiBei Network and Beidian, Zhang Yanpeng admitted that he had made money on these platforms and still had a lot of feelings for the platform, even if the traffic of Beidian was not good, he did not return to the store. "In January this year, I already noticed that the Operation of the Beidian platform was different, so I removed all the goods, which is to save the monthly payment of tens of millions of goods, and now the 10,000 yuan deposit does not matter even if it is not refunded."

　　Zhang Yanpeng introduced that in 2018, under the subsidy of the Beidian platform, the annual sales of his clothing store could reach more than 100 million yuan. "In 2018, the subsidy of the shell shop was too fierce, and in 2019, there was no subsidy. Probably in June and July 2019, Beidian diverted merchants to Beicang again. But after we moved in, we found that there was no traffic in the shell warehouse, so we withdrew. ”

　　According to a number of media reports last year, Beibei Group carried out large-scale layoffs since March 27, 2020, involving its Beibei network, Beidian, Beicang and other businesses, affecting nearly 200 people and accounting for 20% of the personnel. After the news of the layoffs was exposed, there were voices in the outside world questioning the capital chain of The Beibei Group.

　　In Zhang Yanpeng's view, there are many signs to follow before the decline of a platform, especially in terms of finance, once there is a difficult problem of payment collection, it needs to be withdrawn quickly. "First, there are missing and wrong bills on the bill; second, there are personnel adjustments, and many old employees leave; third, there are major changes in the rules of the platform; and fourth, the performance is declining."

　　In the field of e-commerce for more than ten years, Ma Kaiyue has experienced the era of Taobao mall, and has also been responsible for hosting pinduoduo's first global investment conference. Summarizing the changes in the e-commerce industry, he lamented that today's e-commerce track belongs to the "721 rule", that is, several e-commerce platforms at the head occupy 70% of the market, the subdivision track platform occupies 20%, and the remaining hundreds of small platforms only have 10% market share.

　　"Usually speaking, the commonly used business model of social e-commerce platforms is strategic loss, and after large-scale burning of money 'enclosure', take the financing and listing route." In Ma Kaiyue's view, in the early years of the traffic dividend period, the same type of Yunji and other platforms have been listed, but Beibei network has missed this period, in the current traffic dividend period bottomed out, the cost of customer acquisition is very high, membership system and S to B to C (supplier - community merchants - consumers) This money-burning model has not worked. ”

　　(At the request of the interviewee, Zhang Yanpeng is a pseudonym in the article)

　　(Zhongxin Jingwei APP)

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