It's time for the annual corporate annual meeting to issue year-end bonuses, but recently there is a stalk of "strategic pregnancy" in the workplace circulating on the Internet.
The cause was a social media post by a friend who saw hundreds of pregnant women in the Tencent cafeteria, suspected of a strategic pregnancy caused by layoffs.
Following the recent layoffs of NetEase, which has caused a stir in the media, we inquired about the status of each company, and it can be said that we were shocked when we didn't know it.
In fact, this wave of layoffs has affected all walks of life, and there are almost no Internet companies that do not lay off employees.
1. Ctrip's Shanghai headquarters will lay off 30% of its employees, compensate N+1, and pay a year-end bonus at the end of February;
2. Baidu laid off 5,000 employees, and the unmanned driving department laid off a large number of employees, the proportion is unknown;
3. Tencent PCG will start large-scale personnel optimization, with a ratio of 30%, and the middle and senior executives will adopt an appointment system, signed once a year;
4. Alibaba laid off about 20,000 employees throughout the year, involving multiple business sectors;
5. NetEase laid off 1,600 employees and compensated N+3, with a total compensation of about 80 million;
6. ByteDance will lay off tens of thousands of employees in 2023, accounting for 10% of the total.
7. Didi's overall layoffs are 20%;
8. Lenovo laid off about 5,000 employees;
9. NIO laid off 10% of its workforce, and the payday adjustment was postponed by 8 days;
10. Sina Reading business line laid off 90% of employees, compensated N+1, settled on the spot, and dissolved on the spot;
11. Suning Beijing R&D Center layoffs, some departments have a layoff ratio of 70%, compensation N+1, and the year-end bonus for the remaining personnel is only 1 month;
12. Vipshop layoffs, the proportion is unknown, there are n+1, most of them do not have year-end bonuses;
13. Mafengwo laid off 40% of its staff, and there was no year-end bonus;
14. UCAR has begun to lay off employees, and HR directly reads out the dismissal notice at the workstation, emphasizing that the unilateral termination of the contract and the employee can go to arbitration if he is not satisfied
15. 30% of the layoffs in Guazi second-hand cars, and 50% of layoffs in individual departments such as car rental and car after-sales;
......
In order to keep their jobs and not be laid off, they forced all workers to get pregnant.
According to Article 42 of the Labor Contract Law, if a female employee is pregnant, giving birth or breastfeeding, the employer shall not terminate the labor contract in accordance with the provisions of Articles 40 and 41 of this Law.
In addition, Article 5 of the Special Provisions on the Labor Protection of Female Employees promulgated by the State Council stipulates that "an employer shall not reduce the wages of a female employee, dismiss her, or terminate her labor or employment contract because of her pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding." ”
If a pregnant woman is illegally dismissed by the company, she may file a complaint with the trade union or labor administrative department, or apply for arbitration or file a lawsuit in accordance with the law. According to the Labor Contract Law, if a female employee expires during pregnancy, the labor contract must be extended (not renewed) until the end of the lactation period, and the company must pay a certain amount of compensation if the labor contract is terminated.
No wonder some netizens jokingly said that this is simply a door-to-door confrontation between employees and Internet manufacturers.
Paradoxically, we all know that China has entered a stage of negative population growth, with a gradual decline in the number of new births, and young people are reluctant to have children.
Liang Jianzhang, the boss of Ctrip and a population expert, recently suggested that the state should give families cash subsidies according to the number of children: 1,000 yuan for one child, 3,000 yuan for two-child families, and 6,000 yuan for three-child families.
Mr. Liang's urging marriage and baby is also his usual tone for decades, and there has been a remark that "young people who can't find a job for the time being can get married and have children first".
In this regard, most netizens did not buy it, and some said that it was better to "arrange a job for me first" than to have a baby.
Indeed, while encouraging young people to have babies, their own companies have laid off 30% of their employees and delayed the year-end bonus.
Ctrip "not Internet".
In the past 2023, the tourism industry, which has been dormant for a long time, has finally recovered. As a leader in the industry, Ctrip's business is naturally rising.
In the first quarter of last year, Trip.com Group's operating income was 9.2 billion yuan, up 124% year-on-year and 83% quarter-on-quarter, and net profit was 3.4 billion yuan, up about 441% year-on-year and 62% quarter-on-quarter. In addition, Ctrip's gross profit margin in the first quarter of 2023 has exceeded that of the same period in 2019.
In the third quarter, although Ctrip still achieved significant growth in revenue and profit, the growth rate of key business indicators slowed.
According to the financial report, Ctrip's accommodation bookings in the third quarter increased by 92.5% year-on-year, down from 215.8% in the second quarter and 140% in the first quarter, transportation ticketing increased by 104.6% year-on-year, down from 173.1% in the second quarter and 149.9% in the first quarter, tourism and vacation increased by 243.2% year-on-year, down from 491.8% in the second quarter and 211.3% in the first quarter, and business travel management increased by 59.7% year-on-year, down from 178.1% in the second quarter and 100.5% in the first quarter.
In addition to the unsustainable recovery of retaliatory tourism consumption, Ctrip's biggest problem is actually a lack of business innovation, and some media say that Ctrip can only fight a "tailwind battle", which seems quite reasonable.
As an Internet company, Ctrip is actually very "non-Internet".
Its revenue level is entirely due to its monopoly position in the industry, and the number of employees of more than 30,000 (45,000 at the peak) has only created the same revenue scale as Station B with 10,000 employees and iQiyi with 6,000 employees.
Considering that Ctrip has the largest number of employees in the workforce, 15,000 in technical support, 9,800 in customer service, and 4,300 in sales, the company looks like a labor-intensive company at all times.
Liang Jianzhang, who has a master's degree in computer science and a doctorate in economics, certainly can't tolerate this, so he proves Ctrip's value with revenue on the one hand, and keeps up with the world's technology trends on the other.
For example, in July last year, Ctrip released the first vertical model of the travel industry, "Ctrip Asks".
2023 can be described as the first year of AI on the global Internet, and with the east wind of ChatGPT, domestic AI large model products have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, and Ctrip, as one of the major manufacturers, will naturally not lag behind. It's just that unlike other companies that have a small iteration in a few weeks and a big update in more than a month, Ctrip has been asking for more than half a year.
Wang Qing, vice president of technology at Ctrip, shared some of Ctrip's ideas at an industry forum at the end of last year.
He said that Ctrip has summarized three characteristics of the tourism model: first, when users make travel plans, it combines industry data and real-time data to improve the efficiency of making travel plans and booking goods and services; second, after-sales service, the OTA industry is a service e-commerce, and after-sales service is relatively important, which can be based on improving the accuracy of the understanding of the large model and improving the user experience; third, in-transit service, which can provide travel information through intelligent tour guides and services on the way.
But Wang Qing's statement is similar to what CEO Sun Jie introduced when Ctrip Ask was released in July: "With the help of AI models, we have doubled the customer service self-service rate in three aspects, including the online self-service response rate in more than 20 languages around the world, the email self-service response rate, and the telephone voice self-service resolution rate." With the assistance of AI, Ctrip's customer service can save more than 10,000 hours of working time per day, which is equivalent to liberating more than 1,000 customer service manpower per day. "There is hardly any essential difference or promotion.
Let's summarize for the two of you: Ctrip's role is to replace Ctrip's customer service with an AI model (no wonder there are large-scale layoffs), and Ctrip's content training and algorithm are based on Ctrip's internal model, that is, a closed model.
Should the AI model be closed, and can it be called an AI model if it is closed? But it is true that Ctrip should be understood, after all, there are more than 64,000 complaints about Ctrip on the third-party platform Black Cat Complaint alone, and I really can't reply and don't know how to reply.
Ctrip's layoffs are the norm
Although the wave of layoffs in various companies in 2023 is related to the overall global economic downturn, it is undeniable that Ctrip's layoffs have been purposeful, planned and large-scale over the years.
In May 2016, Ctrip had just merged with Qunar to become an industry leader. Immediately, the news of the layoff of 1,000 people was exposed, although Ctrip officials vigorously denied it, but the black letters on a white background of countless employees pulling banners to defend their rights and protest under Ctrip's office building were particularly eye-catching.
In August 2017, some media broke the news that Ctrip launched a plan to "support old employees to return to their hometowns" in order to reduce labor costs. When it is said to be "support", it is actually a layoff, and the company will replace a large number of old employees with fresh graduates with lower salaries, and the proportion may be as high as 10% to 20%.
Although in 2018, the number of employees was as high as 45,000 due to the favorable momentum of business expansion and overseas expansion, but then it decreased to 44,000 in 2019, 33,000 in 2020, 32,000 in 2022, and below 30,000 in 2023.
Many of our employees have worked for Ctrip for many years, and some of them have moved to Shanghai with their families to better serve the company. There are also people who are over 35 years old, missing the best age to find a job, and facing a lot of challenges in finding a job.
For many years, Ctrip has been advocating youth within the company, and although this is not a wrong thing in Internet companies, it is not a warm and youthful dedication to the old employees, but a bloody purge, which inevitably runs counter to the demographic strategy advocated by the boss to worry about the country and the people.
After all, Liang Jianzhang also warmly mentioned in a video interview with the reporter of "21st Century Business Herald" last week that "the best way to invest is to invest in future children." Ctrip's internal initiatives on maternity benefits are replicable, and the childbirth-friendly atmosphere is worth promoting. Being an enterprise is a long-distance run, and an enterprise cannot exhaust its employees. ”
It is not only its own old employees who have been "laid off" by Ctrip, but also suppliers.
Previously, a hotel owner in Chengde, Hebei Province, blew up the circle of friends with a "Breakup Letter to Ctrip". The letter complained that after the merger of Ctrip and Qunar, Ctrip, its subsidiaries eLong and Qunar collectively raised the commission to 15%, which was a domineering behavior after gaining a monopoly position in the industry. In his letter, he wrote: "We are not fellow travelers...... It's better to separate early. ”
Whether it's layoffs or expansions, Ctrip has only one purpose, and that is beautiful financial numbers.
In Liang Jianzhang's view, if it weren't for the epidemic, Ctrip would have become a giant with a trillion-dollar transaction volume.
But in the three years of the epidemic, the industry is still the same industry, but the situation is no longer the same. Not to mention that it is difficult to acquire young users, but in terms of core businesses such as machine wine, not to mention weak growth and low profits, Meituan and Byte's entry into the market to eat away at their own basic market is simply adding fuel to the fire.
The era of online traffic dividends has ended, and it is difficult to attract new users with low frequency and high customer unit price. If you want to rely on financial services to win a game, you don't dare to bet heavily or guarantee the quality of service.
In August last year, Wei Xingguo, a former Alibaba executive and founder of Mo'an Technology, posted on Weibo angrily accusing himself of being checked for loan services by default when booking tickets with Ctrip, so that now he was suddenly told that a loan of 1,000 yuan was overdue. The reason for this situation is that Ctrip is a loan service that is secretly bound without the consumer's knowledge. attracted a group of melon-eating people and the media to watch.
Investing in new business requires the support of real money, and there is no possibility of hematopoietic feedback for a long time. Maintaining old business is struggling, and layoffs may be the best option for listed companies for the sake of financial data.
There was an ambush in front and a pursuer in the back
Microsoft founder Bill Gates once said that Microsoft is only 18 months away from bankruptcy.
Liang Jianzhang may not be so pessimistic, after all, the travel industry will recover in 2023, and Ctrip's data is positive. However, for enterprises, if they do not advance, they will retreat, and today's Ctrip can no longer sit back and relax.
During the epidemic, Liang Jianzhang's Douyin, which kept shuttling through live broadcasts, seemed to see the sweetness of traffic in the tourism industry, and quickly established Chengdu Haikuo Sky Travel Service Co., Ltd. after the end of the epidemic in 2023, which is 100% owned by Douyin Group (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd.
Coincidentally, relying on the strong traffic of Oriental Selection, New Oriental also announced its entry into the cultural tourism industry, and spent 1 billion yuan to establish the New Oriental Cultural Tourism Company, and Yu Minhong personally "took charge" to bring traffic.
Earlier, Xiaohongshu also set up a travel company. In fact, both Douyin and Kuaishou have already entered the "tourism + live broadcast" game, laying the foundation for the layout of offline.
Not to mention Ctrip's long-standing rival Meituan. According to Meituan's financial report for the third quarter of 2023, Meituan achieved revenue of 76.47 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 22.1%, a net profit of 3.59 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 195.3%, and an adjusted net profit of 5.727 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 62.4%. Thanks to the increase in the volume of instant delivery transactions and the transaction value of in-store wine and tourism, the revenue of catering takeaway, Meituan flash sale, and in-store wine and tourism reached 57.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 24.5%.
For today's Ctrip, although it has survived the epidemic, the current situation is really "there is an ambush in front and a chasing soldier in the back".
Compared with Meituan, which has a bright financial report but the capital market does not buy it, we have more reason to be optimistic about live streaming e-commerce entering the tourism industry as a rising star.
According to the "2023 Douyin Travel Industry White Paper", in 2023, the average growth rate of the number of accounts of various tourism enterprises such as attractions, hotel accommodation, airlines, OTAs (online travel), and travel agencies on Douyin will exceed 20%, of which the growth rate of the number of accounts for hotel accommodation and business travel ticketing will be as high as 61.5% and 46.0%. More than 400 million users with travel interests watch travel content on Douyin.
Just as Pinduoduo replaced Alibaba as China's largest e-commerce company by market capitalization, netizens are also looking forward to the emergence of a travel industry "Pinduoduo".
Liang Jianzhang's "population strategy" may be reasonable, but instead of worrying about the country and the people, the boss's focus should be on the healthy development of his own enterprise. And for young people, as Luo Yonghao said, "Enterprises don't want to be a father when they come out for public relations."
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