Produced by Flower Financial Observation
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"Sir, do you need to issue invoices?"
Walking through the streets of the first-tier big cities, people can always hear this kind of street marketing rhetoric.
The wind of the times has stimulated the demand of many people who buy invoices to offset and record them in compliance with the accounts.
Catching up with a good era, a super Internet dark horse has also risen rapidly.
List big brother
Who is the fastest growing Internet company in China?
When answering this question, many people may think of Pinduoduo first.
From its establishment in 2015 to nearly 100 billion in revenue in 2021, with a revenue of 94 billion yuan, Pinduoduo took only 6 years, and it is not an exaggeration to describe it with the rise of "light speed".
But a company called "cloud accounts" has surpassed it.
Cloud accounts went live in 2016 and will reach a record revenue of 97.4 billion yuan by 2022. In just 6 years, it has reached the level of 94 billion yuan in revenue of Pinduoduo that year.
Starting from scratch, more than six years, all the way, is the key to the king of cloud accounts.
In 2017, it achieved sales revenue of 875 million yuan, 11.7 billion yuan in 2018, 35.2 billion yuan in 2019, 41.4 billion yuan in 2020, 52.5 billion yuan in 2021, and 97.4 billion yuan in 2022.
It's not just about impressive results.
On September 12, 2023, the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce and the People's Government of Shandong Province held the 2023 China Top 500 Private Enterprises Summit. The meeting released lists such as "2023 China's Top 500 Private Enterprises" and "2023 China's Top 100 Private Enterprises in the Service Industry".
Cloud accounts have been ranked 96th and 26th respectively among the top 500 private enterprises in China and top 100 private enterprises in China's service industry for four consecutive years, up 91 and 29 places from last year.
In 2021, the cloud account also ranked first among private enterprises in Tianjin with a tax payment of 3.366 billion yuan, becoming the "big brother" of the top 100 private enterprises in Tianjin.
By 2022, its tax payment will continue to grow to 6.255 billion yuan, and although its ranking has fallen, it still surpasses well-known companies such as Tianhong Fund and Tencent Digital.
In other words, cloud accounts not only perform well, but also become a big taxpayer.
To achieve such a huge volume in a short period of time, what does the cloud account rely on, and how did it make its fortune?
The first P2P in Tianjin
Behind the cloud account, stands a founder of Xueba.
In May 1986, Yang Hui, who was born in a military family in Tianjin, grew up listening to the revolutionary stories told by his grandparents.
Born in a military family, Yang Hui also studied very hard. In 2005, he went to Canada for further study, studying at the famous Carleton University in Canada.
During his study abroad, Yang Hui continued to upgrade and fight monsters all the way, obtaining a bachelor's degree with honors from Carleton University, an FRM financial risk manager license, a CFA Chartered Financial Analyst, and a Level 3 full scholarship in Canada.
With this performance, he was selected by Brookfield Renewable Energy Investment Corporation of Canada, the world's second largest energy fund with more than $10 billion under management.
And here, he found a big business opportunity.
Through the world's second largest energy fund company, Yang Hui has come into contact with many enterprises, inspecting enterprise sites, viewing audit reports, and understanding industry operation details.
He found that the financial system in the United States, Canada and other places has been very meticulously improved, for example, individuals or small and micro enterprises have generated consumption or short-term loan needs, there are many means to solve.
In contrast, in the domestic market, some potential high-quality customers are often rejected by traditional financial institutions due to various external factors, which also makes him see business opportunities.
After working for 3 years, Yang Hui decided to return to China to start a business.
In 2013, after returning to China at the age of 27, Yang Hui soon founded Simple Wealth Management Network in his hometown of Tianjin, the first P2P company in Tianjin.
Although everyone knows today that this is a "dead end", in those days, P2P was very popular. In 2015, the national P2P online loan turnover exceeded one trillion yuan, reaching 1,180.565 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 258.62%.
In the same year, Simple Wealth Management also received a pre-A round of financing of 50 million yuan, led by Tianchuang Capital, which has the background of Tianjin Science and Technology Commission and Finance Bureau.
After winning the state-owned endorsement financing, Simple Wealth Management Network ushered in vigorous development. According to public reports, as of May 2016, the total number of transactions on Simple Wealth Management Network has exceeded 600,000.
But this scale is still not enough to make Simple Wealth Management Network profitable.
"There is no chance of entering the top few in the industry, and if it is not the top few, it is simply impossible to bear the high cost of customer acquisition." Therefore, either make a desperate bet and keep burning money to gamble on success; Either turn around and self-hematopoiesis. At that time, Yang Hui faced such worries.
One day in May, the company had more than 90 people and was laid off to 60 people in one night. Yang Hui stepped on the brakes and was frozen from this moment.
Adjustable direction, where is the direction?
Pay taxes on behalf of others
Later, Yang Hui set up a magical "cloud account".
But it's hard to get started. At first, Yang Hui hit a wall everywhere. At first, when he created a cloud account, Yang Hui's brain path was not clear.
He first tried to sell financial products such as funds and insurance. It turned out that this road did not work. Then, seeing that WeChat red envelopes were popular, he made an extremely niche "red packet SDK" to help various apps access the red packet function.
How much can this road, which is equivalent to wrestling with giants such as WeChat and Alipay, achieve? Even Yang Hui himself admitted: "Maybe this is a pseudo-demand."
It was not until Yang Hui later discovered that with the rapid development of the digital economy represented by the platform economy, providing a large number of flexible employment opportunities, he found his own good road.
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, there are currently about 200 million flexible employment personnel in the mainland. This includes video creators, takeaway brothers, cleaning aunts, maintenance masters, etc.
However, while providing diversified services for the society, they also urgently need to obtain services such as insurance payment, income settlement, tax declaration, etc.
Yang Hui, who found business opportunities, immediately used the cloud account to provide comprehensive services such as identity verification, business contracting and subcontracting, income settlement, intelligent tax filing, and insurance participation and payment for platform enterprises and flexible employment personnel nationwide.
To put it simply, what Yang Hui has done is to build a bridge between flexible workers and tax departments and platforms.
In fact, the issue of income distribution for flexible workers has been in a vague area until now. At that time, short video bloggers, Didi drivers, Meituan riders, etc., all faced the problem of how to comply with the problem of how to collect their accounts in compliance with the payment when they were drawn from the platform.
Therefore, when the management was not so strict before, it was mainly to buy invoices to offset the account. But as these internet platforms continue to grow, compliance becomes a focus.
Taking short video creators as an example, if the online celebrity anchor earns too much, exceeds a certain limit, and pays taxes for compliance, he must settle the public and withdraw to the company or self-employed account. Self-employed withdrawals are subject to income tax, value-added tax surcharge, social insurance, etc.
Based on this, for convenience, the cloud account provides platform enterprises and flexible employment groups with electronic business licenses for individual industrial and commercial enterprises that do not need to run once, do not wait for a day, and pass approval in one second, as well as services such as business subcontracting, income settlement, tax payment, and insurance protection.
Specifically, if the anchor wants to withdraw revenue, he can sign a contract with a cloud account first. The network platform will first send the revenue to the cloud account, and after accounting, collection, and payment, it will be distributed to the anchor.
There are reports that Douyin is the largest source of customers for cloud accounts. In 2019 alone, 22 million creators shared 41.7 billion yuan in revenue on Douyin. Payroll, taxes, and insurance payments for them become the most important source of revenue for cloud accounts.
In addition, the key customers of cloud account services include more than 300 central enterprises, listed companies and unicorn companies. These enterprises are involved in flexible employment groups, and how to pay income tax, value-added tax surcharge, social insurance, etc., cloud accounts play a key role in bridging them.
According to information from the tax preparation circle, in Tianjin, Shanghai, Sichuan, Hainan and other places, cloud accounts have obtained the qualification of entrusted collection by the tax authorities. In Shanghai, it is even the "first" in the country to obtain this qualification.
Today, cloud accounts have served 12,000 platform enterprises, covering 15 major industries such as video media, sharing communities, and local life, serving more than 88 million flexible employees and more than 1.2 billion settlements.
However, it is worth mentioning that paying taxes for others, such a model, may expand the scale of cloud account revenue, after removing moisture, the strength of cloud accounts may not be so strong.
Buying and selling at a loss
Small profits have always been the status quo of cloud accounts.
According to media reports, the charging model of cloud accounts is: monthly income is less than 30,000, and the service fee of cloud accounts is 6.2%; If it is higher than 30,000, the cloud account charges a service fee of 6.5%.
Don't look at this service fee is quite high, significantly higher than the WeChat withdrawal rate (0.1%), but in fact, this is a loss-making transaction.
Taking the withdrawal of 100,000 yuan as an example, the cloud account issues a 6% VAT invoice for the customer, and the final rate after calculating the additional tax is 6.7%, and the VAT and additional tax need to be paid is about 6,700 yuan.
According to the 6.5% service rate, the customer only pays 106,500 yuan to the cloud account, and the cloud account has to pay at least 106,700 yuan, which is obviously a loss-making transaction.
Fortunately, a large number of users on the cloud account platform currently earn less than 30,000 yuan a month, and this part of the income will be exempted from some taxes, which makes the cloud account barely profitable. For example, according to the 6.2% service fee, after deducting 6% VAT, there is no additional tax, and the cloud account can still make a profit of 0.2%.
In this way, the cloud account is not much higher than the WeChat withdrawal rate (0.1%). Under the small profit, just like WeChat also has agency funds and other businesses, cloud accounts also have agency services.
Taking Douyin as an example, Douyin stipulates that the annual withdrawal limit is 490,000 yuan, and if it exceeds it, it must be changed to self-employed or public settlement. The cloud account will charge a service fee of about 3,000 yuan for business registration and tax processing for these users.
In addition, cloud accounts have another important source of revenue – incentives or tax refunds from local governments. However, the specific amount and proportion are corporate secrets and have not been publicly disclosed.
Standing on the vent, pigs can also fly into the sky, and flexible employment is the vent.
But why is it that the cloud account pays taxes to so many people, obtains the qualification entrusted by multiple local tax authorities, cooperates with so many platforms, and then almost wins such a big cake?
The public is still puzzled.
Larger than life
From the perspective of the industry in which cloud accounts are located, there is fierce competition and many competitors.
The most intuitive case is the "Payroll Society" platform under Yonyou Network, which was established in the same year as the cloud account.
The services it provides are similar to cloud accounts, providing natural persons with services including legal, settlement, cloud platform, tax-related and other services, collecting enterprise cooperation business expenses, and paying taxes and fees to individuals after accounting.
From the perspective of revenue scale, Yonyou Network Group, to which Payfu belongs to Xuanfu, will achieve revenue of 9.262 billion yuan in 2022, but there is a huge gap compared with the scale of 97.4 billion yuan in cloud accounts.
Yang Hui's personal background attracts attention at this time.
From the establishment of Simple Wealth Management Network to obtain state-owned asset endorsement financing, to the cloud account obtaining the entrusted collection qualification of multiple local tax authorities, and even the first company in China to obtain the entrusted collection qualification in Shanghai, it can be seen that the development of cloud accounts is inseparable from government support.
Yang Hui's identity as a military family also makes people suspect that he may have some special personal background.
At present, Yang Hui's social status is also getting higher and higher. In August 2022, Yang Hui was elected as the vice chairman of the 15th Executive Committee of Tianjin Federation of Industry and Commerce. In December of the same year, he was elected as a member of the Standing Committee of the 13th Executive Committee of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. In January 2023, Yang Hui served as a member of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
Yang Hui also attributed the success of cloud accounts mainly to external factors.
He once said, "Are we the hardest-working, smartest, best people in the industry? Apparently not necessarily. The main reason is that the country's business environment is good, and party committees and governments at all levels have promoted our growth. ”
Although there are doubts, it is worth mentioning that Yang Hui still has different views in the face of competition in the same industry.
Under his leadership, cloud accounts were formulated: peers criticized cloud accounts and were not allowed to fight back; If negative information is found by online public opinion, it is not allowed to be processed; Bidding on the same stage, it is not allowed to say that competitors are bad.
In his opinion, if you want to talk about competitors, you are likely to fall into vicious competition.
Bids for cloud accounts are strictly reviewed and are not allowed to be compared with peers. Yang Hui believes that when cloud accounts do this, a sense of boundaries is slowly formed in the industry and will not denigrate each other.
As a typical Internet company, the office environment of the cloud account is still very flexible, the open office has no single room, the workstations of employees and executives are next to each other, there are no partitions or walls, and the workstation of founder Yang Hui is in a corner.
The workstation is equipped with a lifting desk, a reclining chair, a rest area, and a coffee break. Flexible work, no involution. Young people come and go in office areas wearing loose T-shirts and hole shoes, and figures and dolls are everywhere.
Whether it is for peers or employees, Yang Hui is obviously very different.
(Article source: Flower Financial Observation)
*This article is based on publicly available information and is for informational purposes only and does not constitute any investment advice