Jack Ma reappeared
Jack Ma started his business again: selling agricultural goods
Ma Yun, who left Alibaba, started a new round of entrepreneurship.
With the arrival of the last big promotion of the year, the "Taobao New Year's Festival", merchants are busy stocking up on stores. One of the shops is particularly eye-catching, and that is the "1.8 Flagship Store".
Source: Taobao App
That's right, this "one meter eight" is a new brand founded by Jack Ma. Looking at the details of the store's qualifications, you can see that the registered company of the 1.8 flagship store is 1.8 Marine Technology (Zhejiang) Co., Ltd. Through Tianyan, it can be seen that the final equity of this company is owned by Ma Yun.
Source: Tianyancha
The brand "1.8m" was originally created in July last year. The reason why it is named "1.8 meters" is because of Ma Yun's original intention of participating in agriculture - "all mothers in the world hope that their children can grow up healthily and be more than 1.8 meters tall".
In November last year, the one-meter-eight "brother company" Hangzhou Majia Kitchen Food Co., Ltd. was established, because the registration information contained "pre-packaged food" business items, so that the outside world mistakenly thought that Ma Yun wanted to make prefabricated dishes, but soon Ma Yun's former assistant Chen Wei refuted the rumors, saying that Ma Yun once said: "Eating is the road of the world, not a track to invest and make a lot of money." ”
Source: WeChat Moments
On December 18 last year, Hu Xiaoming, former CEO of Ant Group, posted on Weibo that the 1.8 Agricultural Technology Company was officially established, with him as chairman and chief quality control officer. He said that the mission of 1.8 meters is to "make agriculture better because of technological innovation", and hopes to improve the efficiency of agriculture through technological innovation, provide consumers with better high-quality ingredients, and allow farmers to obtain higher incomes.
Source: Weibo
With the gradual development of the company's business of "one meter eight", the first batch of products were soon launched on Hema, namely mussels from Shengsi Islands in Zhoushan and large yellow croaker from Nanji Island in Wenzhou.
Entering the one-meter-eight Tmall flagship store, you can also see that there are five fresh products on sale, all of which are fish packaged in gift boxes, among which the sales volume of "one-meter-eight deep-sea large yellow croaker boutique gift box" exceeds 200+, and the sales of other products are less. Judging from the way they are packaged, these products are likely to be prepared for the New Year's Festival.
As the founder of Taobao, how did Ma Yun personally become the "shopkeeper" and start selling agricultural goods on Taobao?
Agriculture is a new increment for the Internet giants
Jack Ma's love for agricultural products is not a whim, but a long history.
At the 2015 National Taobao Village Conference, Ma Yun proposed: "Mr. Yuan Longping has achieved a yield of 1,000 catties per mu, and the Internet has made the yield per mu 1,000 US dollars. In 2019, the "yield of 1,000 US dollars per mu" was truly confirmed in Binzhou, Shandong, and then Ma Yun proposed to make the "yield per mu" 10,000 US dollars.
After leaving Alibaba, Ma Yun has also been concerned about agriculture, and his few public appearances have been related to agriculture.
In September 2021, Jack Ma and Wu Yongming, the current CEO of Alibaba, appeared in Pinghu, Jiaxing, Zhejiang, to visit a number of agricultural greenhouses and inspect Alibaba's digital agriculture base.
Ma Yun and Wu Yongming visit the agricultural greenhouse in Pinghu
On July 2, 2022, Jack Ma came to Wageningen University in the Netherlands. According to the university, Ma's trip will be to learn more about sustainable livestock and fisheries, especially agriculture in the Gobi Desert, and the sustainability of food production.
In the second half of 2022, during his stay in Japan, Jack Ma focused on studying Japan's fishery farming technology, including visiting Oshima Station of the Aquaculture Research Institute of University in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan.
At the beginning of 2023, Jack Ma flew to Thailand to meet with Xie Guomin, chairman of CP International Group. CP Group is Thailand's largest business conglomerate, which started as a trade in agricultural products, and is now the largest foreign lessee of agricultural land in China. Jack Ma's meeting must also be related to agriculture.
In fact, not only Jack Ma, but other Internet bigwigs have shown a strong interest in agriculture. One of the most typical is NetEase's Ding Lei, who established NetEase Weiyang Modern Agricultural Industrial Park as early as 2016 and began to raise pigs with modern technology.
At the end of 2016, NetEase's black pigs began to be sold in NetEase, and for three consecutive years at the Internet conference, Ding Lei used his own black pork to entertain the bigwigs.
Also fond of agriculture is Huang Zheng of Pinduoduo. In 2021, when Huang Zheng stepped down as CEO of Pinduoduo, he said in an open letter: "What will I do after I retire? I want to do some research in the field of food science and life sciences. Pinduoduo started as an agricultural product, and in the past few years, Pinduoduo's contribution to the agricultural field has mainly been in the field of circulation. However, after all, the improvement of circulation efficiency cannot qualitatively increase the added value of agricultural products. What can we do about it?"
As for JD.com, Meituan and other companies, although they have not directly established agricultural brands, they have also supported the development of agriculture through investment. For example, Jingdong invested in Jutu.com and Dili Group, and Meituan invested in Lehe Food and adopted a cow.
Source: IT Orange
Why are the big Internet companies keen on agriculture? Because agriculture provides new increments for the big manufacturers.
When the Internet enters the stock era, subject to traffic, the growth space of the platform has been lackluster, and there are only two options left: either go to sea or do business.
Agriculture, on the other hand, is an industry that still has room for optimization. According to Ali's data, in the entire value chain of agricultural products, farmers' input is 55%, accounting for the most, but only 22% of the value-added links of agricultural products are obtained by farmers; in the middle of the sales end, the basic balance, about 20% of the input to obtain 20% of the value-added, extensive value-added is consumed by the circulation link, and the final presentation is that the real effective input of the circulation link is only about 20%.
To put it simply, for the big Internet companies with channel advantages, agriculture is the most "headed", and it can completely produce and sell itself, without worrying about having no place to sell.
In addition to the Internet giants, some live streaming companies also understand this truth, for example, more than 70% of the goods selected and sold by Dongfang are agricultural products, among which several products such as corn and prawns have also become explosive products. In February 2023, Dongfang Selection established a barbecued sausage factory to enter the upstream of the industrial chain.
The future of the Internet seems to have become the consensus of the top players in the field.
The big Internet factories are engaged in agriculture and rely on technology to speak
However, there is an essential difference between the way the Internet industry plays and agriculture. The core of the Internet is playing style and traffic, and there is almost no technical threshold. For example, there is no technical difficulty in implementing short videos, but only Douyin Kuaishou has really made it.
In contrast, technology is much more important for agriculture. The history of human civilization is a history of the development of agriculture, from iron plough and ox ploughing to mechanized production, every technological progress has brought earth-shaking changes to agriculture.
Therefore, the Internet giants are fighting for technology in the agricultural field. Taking Tencent as an example, last year, more than 10 students from Shenzhen University Tengban walked into the Guizhou Chishui black-bone chicken breeding base, and used Tencent's AI technology and cloud platform to develop the world's first black-bone chicken intelligent breeding system in 8 months.
Based on this system, the breeding base can identify the "stupid chicken" and "wood chicken" in time, and can also receive the alarm of wild dogs, weasels and other wild beasts in the first time, so as to effectively avoid the spread of epidemics and property losses. The system has been in operation for more than half a year, and the slaughter rate of black-bone chickens in the breeding base has increased by 30%, and the output has increased by more than 60,000.
On January 16, in order to celebrate the achievements of AI chicken raising, Shenzhen University and Tencent Cloud also invited all teachers and students to eat chicken for free, which was hot searched on Weibo.
Source: Weibo
There are many more cases like this in the Internet industry. With the rapid development of AI technology, the Internet industry will also create more sparks with agriculture to further improve production efficiency.
As Ma Yun said: "In the past, farmers relied on God to eat, and too much rain or drought in some areas would affect the harvest. If we rely on data to eat and judge by big data, then China's agriculture will have greater opportunities in the future. "The combination of the Internet and agriculture is both an opportunity and a challenge.
Whoever can maximize the technology empowerment production will be able to catch the "splashing wealth" brought by the new outlet.
Author | The wind is clear