When ants no longer have the surname "horse"
The suspended listing process may be expected to get back on track.
Text: "Chinese Entrepreneur" reporter Deng Shuanglin
Editor|Li Wei
Image source: Visual China
Ant Group may be nearing good times.
Recently, the official website of the People's Bank of China released the "Information Announcement on the Permission for Major Changes in Major Matters of Non-bank Payment Institutions (as of December 2023)", according to the central bank issued the Bank Permit Decision [2023] No. 189, agreeing to the change of Alipay (China) Network Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Alipay") to no actual controller. In addition, Ant Group's subsidiaries, including Hang Seng Electronics and Cathay Pacific Property & Casualty, were simultaneously changed to no actual controller.
As a third-party payment company, Alipay (China) is subject to the daily supervision of the central bank. Hang Seng Electronics and Cathay Pacific Property & Casualty, on the other hand, need to meet the information disclosure requirements of listed companies and insurance companies, respectively.
Alipay's adjustment stems from Ant Group's adjustment of its voting rights structure at the beginning of 2023. At the beginning of 2023, Ant Group announced that in order to continuously improve corporate governance and achieve long-term sustainable development, Ant Group plans to take a series of adjustment measures at the board and shareholder level, including introducing more independent directors, adjusting the voting rights structure of major shareholders, and promoting more transparent and decentralized shareholder voting rights.
After the adjustment is completed, Ant Group will no longer have any direct or indirect shareholders who control Ant Group alone or jointly, and Jack Ma will no longer be the actual controller. However, on the surface, Ant Group no longer has the surname "Ma", but Alibaba's stake in Ant remains unchanged.
In July 2023, the financial management authorities People's Bank of China, the State Administration of Financial Supervision and Administration, and the China Securities Regulatory Commission imposed a fine of 7.123 billion yuan on Ant Group and its subsidiaries, including confiscation of illegal gains. At the same time, it was announced that most of the outstanding problems that Ant Group once had had have been rectified.
What is more meaningful is that half a month ago, the "Regulations on the Supervision and Administration of Non-bank Payment Institutions" (hereinafter referred to as the "Regulations") was just promulgated and will come into force on May 1, 2024. The general idea of the promulgation of the "Regulations" requires that non-bank payment institutions shall abide by the provisions of laws and administrative regulations, follow the principles of safety, efficiency, integrity and fair competition, and maintain national financial security for the purpose of providing small-amount and convenient payment services, and shall not harm the national interests, social public interests and the legitimate rights and interests of others.
At the beginning of 2023, Ant will not be able to list on A-shares and Hong Kong stocks in the short term due to the change of shareholding. According to the relevant regulations, if there is a change in the actual controller, an enterprise needs to wait three years to be listed on the main board of A-shares, and the waiting period for A-share STAR Market and Hong Kong stocks is two years and one year respectively.
At present, it seems that the reform has been changed, the penalty has been fined, and the living environment of non-bank payment institutions has also improved, and 2024 will be particularly friendly to Ant, and the suspended listing process may be expected to get back on track.
Rectification of financial business
In addition to the adjustment of the management and board of directors, Ant Group's rectification and improvement also has an important end - its formal withdrawal from the microfinance industry.
Since its IPO was suspended in November 2020, Ant Group has continued to slim down its business, isolating the brands of its credit products Huabei and Borrow, shutting down Hubao, reducing Yu'e Bao's business, and cutting off its business with MYbank.
Source: China Attempt Library
On December 11, 2023, Ant Huabei's original operating company "Chongqing Ant Small and Micro Loan Co., Ltd." was renamed "Chongqing Ant Small and Micro Information Technology Co., Ltd.", and its business scope was removed from "handling various loans, bill discounting, and asset transfer business nationwide", and advertising production, Internet sales, and hotel management were added.
Previously, in July 2023, the original operating entity of Boraobei, "Chongqing Ant Shangcheng Microfinance Co., Ltd.", also changed its name and business scope, and changed its name to "Chongqing Ant Shangcheng Information Technology Co., Ltd.", and its business scope was also removed from "carrying out various loans, bill discounting, and asset transfer business nationwide".
The renaming of the two microfinance companies and the change of business scope announced Ant Group's official withdrawal from the microcredit market.
According to Ant Group's rectification plan, it has transferred its Huabei and Borrowbei businesses to Ant Consumer Finance to undertake operations, and upon completion of the rectification, Huabei and Borrowbei will become the exclusive consumer credit products of Chongqing Ant Consumer Finance Co., Ltd. ("Ant Consumer Finance").
On June 4, 2021, Ant Consumer Finance officially completed the industrial and commercial registration with a registered capital of RMB 8 billion.
On October 25, 2023, the Chongqing Supervision Bureau of the State Financial Supervision and Administration approved the increase of Ant Consumer Finance's registered capital from 18.5 billion yuan to 23 billion yuan, and the number of shareholders of Ant Consumer Finance increased to 13.
As of the end of June 2023, Ant Consumer Finance's total assets have reached 197.104 billion yuan, ranking first in the industry. In the first half of 2023, Ant Consumer Finance's operating income was RMB3.816 billion, second only to IB Consumer Finance, ranking fourth in the industry, and its net profit was RMB445 million, ranking fifth in the industry.
Where is the road going?
Where will the future of ants go?
Clearly, the path of financial companies is no longer working.
In the three years since the rectification, Ant Group has been deliberately cutting ties with the "financial" label, including expanding other business revenues and reducing the proportion of financial business revenue. Jing Xiandong, chairman and CEO of Ant Group, also emphasized: "Ant has always been a technology company, not a financial company. ”
Ant's killer feature is indeed not only finance.
At present, Ant has five business segments: digital payment, digital interconnection, digital finance, digital technology and globalization. In the process of digging deeper into business value, Ant has explored a feasible strategic direction - using "Internet and technology" as the underlying capabilities to find a growth path other than finance.
For example, Alipay's content and traffic commercialization.
With 1 billion users and 800 million MAUs, Alipay is second only to WeChat and Douyin, as well as 80 million merchant resources, making it the second largest B2C ecosystem in China after Taobao. With a lot of resources, it would be a pity if you only made a tool APP.
Source: Visual China
Alipay has been exploring business models beyond payments. Since 2022, Alipay has made many attempts to develop life scenarios and various content forms, such as upgrading life accounts, building graphic short videos, and entering the field of live streaming.
The idea of Alipay's traffic operation is to rely on the life account, connect the content ecology such as short videos and live broadcasts, and connect the transaction function of the mini program on the other hand, which is similar to WeChat's idea of using the video account as the center.
However, WeChat itself has a huge traffic pool, which can naturally attract merchants with content, while Alipay faces the pain points of all tool platforms - users "run out and go, rarely stay", and it is difficult to retain and deepen the traffic.
Absorbing the experience of social failure in the past, Alipay began to exert its strength from the merchant side this time. The advantage of Alipay is that there are a large number of merchants, closer to money, closer to transactions, and users have a natural sense of trust.
Taking live streaming as an example, it is easier to gain the trust and purchase of users than other platforms by bringing gold and wealth management products on Alipay. According to the data, in the five days from August 4 ~ August 8, 2023, the cumulative sales of the live broadcast of the China Gold Alipay flagship store exceeded 8 million yuan.
First attract merchants, do a good job of suitable categories, and then gradually tap traffic, Alipay is trying to find a path opposite to WeChat and Douyin.
Alipay recently announced a series of upgrades to live streaming products: by opening the commodity investment promotion system for the first time, upgrading the talent selection center "Bringing Goods", and simplifying the live streaming entry process, etc., to further reduce the threshold for small and medium-sized merchants to live stream on the Alipay platform.
In terms of traffic commercialization, Alipay is also testing the waters in the advertising business. The first batch of advertisers such as Mercedes-Benz and Rio carried out different forms of advertising in multiple scenarios such as the homepage of Alipay application and the payment success page.
Make the plate bigger
"Chinese Entrepreneur" learned from Alipay insiders that Alipay's content and traffic commercialization have become a key internal strategic direction, and the goal is not to compete with content platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, but to "make the plate bigger and reduce the proportion of financial business revenue", as long as Ant seems to have a richer business ecology and revenue channels, it will be considered successful.
In addition, Ant Digital's business, which has been low-key, has also developed well in the transformation, such as TuGraph, a large-scale graph database, OceanBase, a distributed database, and AntChain, which has been widely used in supply chain, intellectual property and other fields.
By the end of 2022, Ant ranked first in the world in the number of patents in areas such as privacy computing and blockchain. As for the large model boom set off in 2023, Ant has not missed it, and has released a financial model on the self-developed basic model, and the Ant Bailing language model has also been recorded.
It's just that the "cash cow" of the financial business is in front, and the commercialization path has not yet been set out in the digital technology is much more low-key. However, with the blessing of the group's technological attributes, the importance of the future of digital technology business is self-evident.
International business is also seen as the future within Ant Group. Ant International's overall strategy, upgraded from the "wallet era" to the "solution" era in 2022, is internally described as walking on two legs:
On the one hand, it provides an innovative global cross-border mobile payment solution, Alipay+, which seamlessly connects millions of merchants around the world with 1 billion Asian consumers through one-point access to multiple digital payments, aiming to support the digital transformation of the entire cross-border payment and wallet merchants.
On the other hand, with WorldFirst as the core, it provides one-stop services for receipt, payment, management, redemption and loan to support the digital transformation of small, medium and micro enterprises in cross-border trade. Ant summarizes this strategy as "one account to buy the world" and "one account to sell the world".
In the past three years, the focus was on regulatory rectification, and Ant Group was reluctant to express itself too much in overseas business. However, if you continue to pay attention to Ant, you will find that its pace of overseas cultivation is getting faster and faster, and the proportion of international business in the overall revenue is also increasing faster than expected.
Ant insiders once told "China Entrepreneur" that since 2023, the independence between Ant's five major businesses has been higher, and the teams have cut each other and developed independently. It can be inferred that in the future, it is very likely that Ant will separate its financial and non-financial businesses from the public.
But in any case, after three years of dormancy, the ant has now learned to walk on multiple legs. In the past, Ant Financial may have been an extremely heavy "elephant", but today's Ant Group is more like a group of cheetahs, which can fight independently and have higher agility.