"Going Global Overseas Weekly" is a series of columns launched by Venture Capital, aiming to select major events, overseas companies, investment and financing news for entrepreneurs and investors in the field of going global, and this is the 231st report of the column.
Finish丨Zhao Xiaoxiao
This week's (2024.04.01-04.07) overseas events include: Shein's profit increased by more than two times last year, JD.com gave up the acquisition of British electrical retailer Currys, and YTO International Express: appointed Zhou Jian as executive director, The CEO of Temu, Temu set up an office in Seoul, Amazon came to China to sell large models, the US retail giant announced the closure of stores, Amazon closed the AI unmanned cash register system of offline fresh supermarkets, the wave of layoffs in the United States was surging, with more than 90,000 employees laid off in March, and Ultraman's mobile phone company negotiated financing.
Big event
Shein去年盈利增加快两倍
According to reports, Shein's sales in 2023 will be 45 billion US dollars, and the net profit will exceed 2 billion US dollars, with a year-on-year growth rate of 55%, higher than the previous year, and for the first time, it will exceed the sales of the entire group of Zara's parent company, Inditex, with a net profit growth rate of more than 180%.
Shein's goal is to achieve a net profit of $7.5 billion and a revenue of $58.5 billion in 2025, which are about 27% and 77% respectively as of last year. The company also expects its GMV to grow to $80.6 billion by 2025.
The sharp improvement in profits is partly due to the decline in logistics production costs after the end of the epidemic, and another important reason is Shein's intention to "protect profits". For example, last year, Shein deliberately controlled the launch of Black Friday, because the price of air freight was high during this time, and too many orders would depress profits. It also benefits from the supply chain system established by Shein for many years, which directly touches the production of factories and the procurement of fabrics.
In the past two years, after a fierce initial encounter with Temu, Shein's direction has become clearer, and it has become more and more determined to invest in fast fashion, and began to acquire fast fashion brands such as Forever 21 and Missguided in the middle of last year. Last month, it was reported that Shein has set a "supply chain-as-a-service" plan to provide supply chain and technology services to global brands.
JD.com abandons its acquisition of British electrical retailer Currys
JD.com has been exploring a takeover of British appliance retailer Currys, which had said Feb. 19 that it was evaluating possible offers. But the latest news is that JD.com has pulled out of the acquisition of Currys, saying that it will not make a takeover offer to Currys.
JD.com is considering using Currys' network of stores and warehouses to help it expand in the UK and Europe, though the company said in mid-March that it does not plan to make an acquisition "after careful consideration," the report said. After JD.com officially announced its exit, Currys' stock price fell 4.5%. When JD.com announced it was considering a takeover a month ago, Currys' share price soared more than 35 percent.
Founded in 1927 and acquired by Dixons in 1984, Currys is a retail giant with more than 820 stores and around 28,000 employees in eight countries, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. However, over the past few years, Currys has also experienced the shock of inflation and slowing economic growth.
YTO International Express: Zhou Jian was appointed as Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer
At the end of March, YTO International Express disclosed a personnel adjustment announcement, director and CEO Sun Jian resigned, and was succeeded by Zhou Jian from SF Express. According to industry insiders, Yu Weijiao, the head of YTO, attaches great importance to this appointment and has made it clear that YTO will accelerate the pace of internationalization.
Zhou Jian joined Best Group in 2008, in November 2010, after Best acquired the original Huitong Express to establish the express delivery division, Zhou Jian served as the general manager of Best Huitong (later renamed Best Express), in January 2017, Zhou Jian was appointed as the senior vice president of Best Group and the general manager of Best International Business Unit, in March 2020, Zhou Jian joined SF Express, and in September 2020, he served as the president (CEO) of Fengwang Express.
In the past year, YTO recorded operating income of HK$5.292 billion, down 21.1% year-on-year, gross profit of HK$481 million, down 11.4% year-on-year, and profit attributable to equity shareholders of the company of HK$96.775 million, down 29.23% year-on-year.
YTO International said that in 2024, it will accelerate the construction of supply chain capacity in the world through capital investment and business partnerships, and the key markets will be placed in key regions such as Central Asia, Europe and the United States, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, so as to form a new business development segment of the company and achieve further growth in revenue and profitability.
Temu opens an office in Seoul
According to local public information in South Korea, on February 23, Temu's parent company Pinduoduo officially registered a company called "Whale Co., Korea Limited" with a total registered capital of 100 million won (about 74,000 US dollars), which means the beginning of the Chinese platform's wider entry into the South Korean market.
However, the company's PR firm in South Korea said it was unaware of the existence of Whale Co., Korea Limited. Last month, the number of users of "Temu" in South Korea increased by more than 40%, almost overtaking Alibaba's AliExpress, with the number of users increasing by more than 2 million. According to IGAWorks, AliExpress had more than 6.941 million South Korean users in March.
Meanwhile, in early April, PayPay Co., Ltd., Japan's largest mobile payment service, announced a business partnership with Chinese e-commerce platform Temu Co., Ltd. This partnership is Temu's first collaboration with a local payment service provider and is expected to increase competition in the Japanese market.
A few news from Ali overseas
Ali International Station recently launched the "AI Minimalist Overseas Plan", through AI for new merchants to greatly reduce the threshold of foreign trade, while the plan provides a series of business opportunity protection programs, every 2 months can get 50 high-quality business opportunities, and after the upgrade, all in March 1 - June 30 between the new merchants of Ali International Station, as long as the store goods on the shelves more than 50, if the guarantee is not up to standard, every 1 less active business opportunity will be 200 yuan through train 95% off the red envelope subsidy.
AliExpress's Business channel has launched the "Talent Exploration" column, which displays the source of goods for overseas purchasing consumers (small B buyers). The live broadcast of the factory visit will invite overseas Internet celebrities as official shopping guides to visit the source suppliers in Shenzhen on the spot, show the strength of the factory and the professionalism of the production line for the wholesale buyers before the live broadcast, and the foreign traders will interact and reply to the inquiry online in real time.
Alibaba's Southeast Asian e-commerce platform Lazada recently launched a new project called Global Plus, as long as merchants join Global Plus, there will be a new logistics pricing system, through the first mile logistics "subsidized price card" way, reduce the cost of cross-border logistics for merchants at the same time, to provide consumers with price discounts, bring order growth at the same time, and the gross profit of merchants will not change.
Large overseas companies
Amazon came to China to sell large models
In China's cloud computing market, because of the price war launched by Chinese cloud computing companies, Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure have been in a passive state for more than ten years since they entered China, and it is difficult for them to get orders from local Chinese companies, and the main customers are overseas companies with business in China or Chinese companies with overseas business.
After the big models became popular, their situation in China's cloud computing market began to change. As the only commercial cloud agent of OpenAI, Chinese customers can apply for the "Azure OpenAI Service" through Microsoft Azure, thereby invoking the GPT-4 model.
This week, Amazon Web Services held a generative AI communication conference in Beijing, focusing on the Claude 3 series of large models released a month ago. According to parent company Anthropic, Claude 3 Opus outscored GPT-4 on more than a dozen commonly used model capability assessment datasets.
A week before the meeting, Amazon announced another $2.75 billion investment in Anthropic, completing its previous investment commitment of $4 billion and becoming a core investor and "major cloud provider" in Anthropic.
An Amazon Web Services person said that AWS does not deploy Claude 3 on servers in China, and Chinese companies can apply to call the Claude 3 model deployed in other regions through the Bedrock service provided by AWS globally to complete the calculation. Bedrock is a product developed by AWS specifically for generative AI, allowing customers to call on multiple different large models to develop applications, such as large models developed by AI21, Cohere, and open source models such as Llama 2.
Currently, AWS only supports Claude 3's Sonnet and Haiku models, which are less performant than Opus, but are less expensive and more responsive. It is understood that the Opus model will also be launched on AWS in the near future. The above-mentioned Amazon Web Services person said that after the release of the Claude 3 series model, they received a large number of requests from Chinese companies for cooperation.
The U.S. retail giant has announced the closure of its stores
On April 5, 99 Cents, a U.S. discount retailer, announced that it would close all 371 stores and gradually cease operations. Effective that day, 99 Cent Stores announced that it had entered into an agreement with a financial services company to phase out all goods it owned, dispose of in-store equipment, and dispose of real estate owned or leased.
According to public information, "99 Cents Store" was founded in 1982 and is a well-known discount retailer in the United States with a history of 42 years. It is popular with customers for providing a wide variety of inexpensive and high-quality products, especially low- and middle-income people in the United States. For more than 40 years, 99 Cents has been operating in California, Texas, Arizona and Nevada. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1996, making founder Dave Gold a billionaire.
In recent years, due to the pressure brought about by factors such as rising costs and inflation, the prices of some goods in the store have risen significantly, and the store has encountered difficulties. The company said that the impact of the new crown epidemic, changes in consumer demand, persistent inflationary pressures and other factors have seriously affected the company's ability to operate.
Amazon closes the AI unmanned cash register system in offline fresh supermarkets
Because the algorithm plan is not as easy to use as expected, Amazon is withdrawing the AI unmanned checkout system of Amazon Fresh physical fresh supermarkets and changing to self-checkout for customers. The reason is that about 70% of orders still require manual intervention.
Amazon launched "Just Walk Out" in 2018, where customers walk into a store, pick up items on the shelves and leave, which is very natural. The store's system uses hundreds of cameras to automatically identify what each person has purchased and charge their Amazon account.
A survey of retailers in Europe and the United States showed that stores with self-checkout systems have a wastage rate of about 4%, more than double the industry average, due to customer errors or dishonest behavior at self-checkout. Cashiers can significantly reduce wastage.
The AI unmanned cashier will first withdraw from Amazon Fresh, a larger fresh food store. Amazon Go, a smaller convenience store, is still in place. The larger the store and the more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to visually identify.
This is another failure to replace blue-collar jobs in the last wave of AI. Attempts at unmanned taxis (Waymo, Uber, etc.), self-driving trucks (Tucson), automated procurement and marketing in convenience stores (Convenience Bee), and robotic arms in factories (Foxconn) have all stalled or ended.
The wave of layoffs in the United States is surging, with more than 90,000 workers laid off in March
Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a reemployment consultancy, recently reported that more than 90,000 layoffs were announced in the U.S. in March, the highest since January 2023, driven by layoffs in technology and government.
Apple laid off more than 600 employees in the United States due to the halt of the self-driving electric vehicle project. The employees were notified of the layoffs on March 28, and the layoffs will take effect on May 27. It is understood that Apple has invested billions of dollars to develop a fully self-driving car without a steering wheel and pedals. However, the company has never publicly acknowledged the existence of the project.
On April 3, Amazon officially confirmed that its cloud computing services division (AWS) will lay off the technical team of the physical store and the sales and marketing department, which is expected to affect hundreds of employees. The move is the latest step Amazon has taken to address growth bottlenecks in its cloud computing division.
In addition, Microsoft's gaming division, eBay, and global CXO leader Thermo Fisher Scientific have all laid off employees this year.
Carousell, a second-hand e-commerce company in Southeast Asia, acquired LuxLexicon, a luxury consignment platform
Recently, Carousell, a second-hand e-commerce company in Southeast Asia, announced the acquisition of LuxLexicon, a Singapore-based luxury bag distributor and consignment platform, to drive the growth of Carousell Group's luxury business, one of the largest categories of Carousell Group, adopt an omni-channel strategy and expand high-end luxury products.
Carousell是大东南亚地区多品类二手货平台,于2012年8月在新加坡成立,旗下有Carousell、Carousell Media Group、Cho Tot、Laku6、LuxLexicon、Mudah.my、OneShift、REFASH和Revo Financial七个品牌,月度活跃用户数超千万。
The luxury second-hand market in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan is expected to reach $7.5 billion by 2026, according to a statement released by Carousell Group on April 2. The Group has observed similar organic growth over the past few years, mainly driven by Caro bags.
Investment and financing
Wanda introduced new war investment, and investors such as Middle East Capital invested about 60 billion yuan
At the end of March, Dalian Wanda Commercial Management Group and PAG Investment Group, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Mubadala Investment Company, CITIC Capital and ARES formally signed an investment agreement in Dalian, under which the above five institutions will jointly invest about 60 billion yuan in Dalian Sundameng Commercial Management Co., Ltd., holding a total of 60% of the shares, and Dalian Wanda Commercial Management will hold 40% of the shares.
It is reported that this investment is the largest single investment in China's private equity market in the past five years. At the end of last year, Wanda successfully signed a new agreement with investors, temporarily resolving the debt crisis faced by Wanda Commercial Management due to the failure of the VAM listing. According to sources, there is no VAM clause in this agreement, and Middle Eastern capital may be optimistic about Wanda's stable return ability.
Wang Jianlin, chairman of Wanda Group, did not show up for the signing of this cooperation, but it is inseparable from his promotion behind it, and he is actively resolving corporate risks through various possibilities.
Altman talks with a mobile phone company founded by a former Apple designer to raise money
Recently, there was new funding news for the "iPhone of artificial intelligence" founded by former Apple designer Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The startup is in discussions with the Emerson Collective and Thrive Capital about its latest funding deal, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Emerson Foundation was founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, who was close to Ive and Ultraman. Another investment firm, Xingsheng Capital, is a major investor in OpenAI, and Thrive recently led the purchase of up to $1 billion worth of OpenAI shares. A year ago, Thrive bought a large amount of OpenAI shares for about $27 billion.
In this financing, Ive hopes to raise up to $1 billion. The "AI iPhone" may be the first product of Ive's old club Apple after it became its own portal.
Indonesian fintech unicorn Akulaku has secured a $100 million debt investment
Akulaku, a fintech unicorn based in Indonesia, has secured a debt financing commitment of up to US$100 million from HSBC. This fund is planned to be used to repay part of Akulaku's current debt.
Akulaku is an online consumer finance platform focused on the Indonesian and Southeast Asian markets, founded in 2016. Akulaku started as a virtual credit card service and then started building its own e-commerce platform. It is understood that its platform is dominated by 3C products, with self-operated mobile phones, home appliances, clothing, toys, beauty and other goods, as well as third-party suppliers, with more than 3 million SKUs.
Ailytics, a provider of video analytics solutions, closed a $2.7 million funding round
Ailytics, a Singapore-based B2B heavy industry software startup, recently announced that it has closed an oversubscribed $2.7 million Pre-A round led by local venture capital firm Tin Men Capital. According to the statement, Ailytics will use the financing to ramp up R&D efforts and expand its services to market regions such as Hong Kong, the Middle East, Japan and Oceania.
Founded in 2021, Ailytics aims to reduce accident rates by helping construction and industrial workers monitor their environment and operational behavior through its video analytics solutions. Specifically, Ailytics can leverage 2D video information from any single camera to generate 3D footage for complex deployments.