Liu Qiangdong's return for a year has not been effective, and Jingdong is too anxious
For JD.com, this Double 11 also seems to be particularly important. After all, JD.com's performance and stock price have not stood up for a long time.
More importantly, it has been nearly a year since Liu Qiangdong returned to the front line of JD.com. To some extent, this year's Double 11 is also a final test of the effectiveness of Liu Qiangdong's reform.
Text: Yang Shufang
Original|Science and technology koala
Regarding this year's Double 11, I have recently heard several friends sigh, "Jingdong may be the company that held the most press conferences before Double 11", "Jingdong's sense of existence before Double 11 this year is even much stronger than when it was 618".
We have analyzed before that for Ali, this year's Double 11 has a different meaning. This is the first Double 11 after Taotian's independence, and it is also the first Double 11 after Cai Chongxin and Wu Yongming, the new pair who returned to take the helm of Ali.
For JD.com, this Double 11 also seems to be particularly important.
After all, JD.com's performance and stock price have not stood up for a long time. More importantly, it has been nearly a year since Liu Qiangdong returned to the front line of JD.com. To some extent, this year's Double 11 is also a final test of the effectiveness of Liu Qiangdong's reform.
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JD.com is eyeing the anchor's cake
JD.com seems to have made up its mind to get a wave of traffic from big anchors.
After the official start of Double 11, the official live broadcast rooms of Jingdong Clothing and Beauty, Jingdong Supermarket, Jingdong Home Appliances and Home Furnishings, and Jingdong 3C Digital uniformly played the logo of "pit fee, talent commission". As we all know, these two expenses are the source of income for anchors to bring goods.
A few days earlier, Jingdong's live broadcast room directly named Li Jiaqi, and there was a bright banner hanging in the camera, "Low price Li Jiaqi live broadcast room".
The grievances between JD and Li Jiaqi also include that on the first day of the double 11 pre-sale, JD.com reprimanded Li Jiaqi for asking merchants to sign a reserve price agreement and "choose one of the two", and called on relevant departments to intervene. Subsequently, the staff of the Anti-Monopoly Office of the Shanghai Municipal Administration for Market Regulation responded that they had paid attention to the matter and were investigating and verifying.
The latest development is that on November 3, #Hai's said that the Anti-Monopoly Bureau had accepted the report on JD.com# and then went on the hot search. Pang Xicun, chairman of Hai's Baking, responded to Jiupai Finance and Economics that the Anti-Monopoly Bureau had accepted their real-name report on JD.com, which was suspected of JD.com abusing its dominant market position and undermining the order of market competition; And asked JD.com to restore normal prices.
A public relations veteran shared the view that it is understandable that Crazy Brother Yang anchored Li Jiaqi, which is equivalent to competition between anchors, but Jingdong, as an e-commerce giant, went directly and grabbed Li Jiaqi, which inevitably seemed a bit small.
This year's Double 11, including the cats and dogs of the first team, the second team's Doukuai, and Xiaohongshu, which participated in the Double 11 for the first time, JD.com seems to be particularly anxious.
The same goes for JD.com and Hai's price Rashomon. JD.com said that the price change was "completely out of JD's own pocket"; Hai's claimed that JD.com blocked the back-end authority and changed the price of the oven to a 5% discount, while denying JD.com and subsidizing the price adjustment, saying that "the loss of each unit is borne by the Hai's brand".
This is very much the flavor of JD.com's early "price butcher". But for merchants, such JD may be a bit too "wolf-like". At the very least, the merchant should have the right to choose whether to roll or not.
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Liu Qiangdong returned this year
An important implicit background is that it has been nearly 1 year since Liu Qiangdong returned to the front line of JD.com.
At the Jingdong Retail internal conference at the end of last year, Liu Qiangdong repeatedly emphasized "low prices" to the more than 6,000 buyers and salesmen who participated in the meeting. Subsequently, Liu Qiangdong, who had been hidden behind the scenes for four years, returned to the front line of JD.com's management and became the de facto helmsman of JD.com.
"After Dongge came back, the huge organization of Jingdong is changing, changing the Wen Tun of the past few years, Jingdong has become wolf again", at the beginning of this year, Tencent's "Deep Web" article, such a quote from a middle-level manager of Jingdong.
In this year, the overall direction of Jingdong has changed significantly, including the launch of tens of billions of subsidies, opening up self-operation and POP, etc., behind the core actions are the low-price strategy that Liu Qiangdong has been emphasizing.
JD.com's second-quarter financial report shows that under a series of business support measures such as the Chunxiao Plan, the number of new merchants increased by 417% year-on-year. This year's Double 11, JD.com is still working hard to promote POP. "Helping new merchants increase the number of transaction orders by more than 5 times month-on-month" is one of the KPIs of JD.com's Double 11. Compared with the self-operated business with higher service costs, POP is more likely to help JD.com break through in the dimension of low price.
The second-quarter earnings report also exposed a number of problems.
Despite the inclusion of JD.com's home 618, JD.com's growth rate is not optimistic: revenue in the second quarter increased by 7.6% year-on-year, of which the core retail business revenue increased by 4.9% year-on-year; Revenue in the first half of the year increased by 4.66% year-on-year, of which retail revenue increased by 1.4% year-on-year.
What can be compared is the data of Ali and Pinduoduo for the same period. Alibaba's revenue in the quarter increased by 14% year-on-year, of which Taotian Group's revenue increased by 12% year-on-year; Pinduoduo's second-quarter revenue increased 66% year-on-year. Another data is that in the second quarter of this year, the online retail sales of physical goods in the country grew by 10.8% year-on-year.
JD.com's loss in market value is also very miserable. At present, JD.com's market capitalization is about $40.6 billion, compared with Alibaba's $212.1 billion and Pinduoduo's $134.6 billion, which are only 1/5 and 1/3 of the two, respectively. If JD.com can't reverse the decline, Kuaishou, which is currently worth about $30.5 billion, may even catch up in the next year or two.
At least in the first half of the year, the question that Liu Qiangdong once asked JD executives has not been effectively solved - "Where is the room for others to grow?" Why aren't we growing? ”
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It's not easy to be a "price butcher".
JD.com urgently needs to change that.
At present, the price paid by JD.com in terms of tens of billions of subsidies and POP merchant support does not seem to have received enough positive feedback on the user side.
On the one hand, JD.com is constantly rolling up low prices, but many categories and goods can't match the prices of other platforms - this may be one of the reasons why JD.com is particularly anxious about this year's Double 11.
At the launch conference of Double 11, Xin Lijun, CEO of JD Retail, redefined low price, "low price with quality and service guarantee is really low price", which he called "squeezing water in the supply chain".
There is no doubt that quality and service are the advantages of JD.com, but for users who are really price-sensitive, in the face of absolute low prices, everything else is a floating cloud. Otherwise, why did 1688, which has almost no service, become popular at the retail end, and why are so many people squatting in the live broadcast room of major anchors.