Reporter: Wang Ziwei Editor: Liu Xuemei
After a quiet period in 2023, on April 12, 2024, Feishu's City Summit once again came to Chengdu after a long absence.
In the past year, Feishu's "circle of friends" in Sichuan and Chongqing has been steadily expanding, not only harvesting large-scale traditional enterprises such as New Hope, but also entering well-known catering brands such as Haidilao, Tea Baidao, Baker, and Bawang Chaji, and at the same time penetrating into many industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and animal husbandry, medicine, and life services.
There is a hot pot in the Sichuan-Chongqing area, and the people here are straightforward and heroic, and the character of daring to fight is also a distinctive feature. At present, Sichuan Province is vigorously developing the industrial Internet, promoting intelligent manufacturing, exploring the transformation of the manufacturing industry, and opening up new space for industrial development by creating new quality productivity.
This may be the purpose of the Feishu City Summit: on the one hand, it is to deepen the local circle of friends and the local market, and on the other hand, to empower Sichuan and Chongqing enterprises from the region to the whole country and achieve a win-win situation with enterprises.
In the current collaborative office field, AI is a new and important growth factor. Some brokerage reports believe that office software with the blessing of AI will usher in systematic paradigm reconstruction and model upgrades, and reshape the valuation ceiling. Based on this, AI is a must for Feishu to gain deeper growth space.
Improve the efficiency of internal collaboration
The "circle of friends" is big and needs to be maintained more carefully. At the summit, companies that have already joined Feishu emphasized the complex process of Feishu, the digital construction of the enterprise customer service system, and the role of energy conservation and efficiency improvement in the human efficiency management of stores across the country. These capabilities can be summed up as what Feishu does best: improving collaboration efficiency.
Since its commercialization began in 2020, Feishu has successively released Feishu Office, Feishu People, etc., as well as the "Business Trio" consisting of "Bitform", "Feishu Application Engine" and "Feishu Integration Platform". Feishu is like a treasure chest of tools, bringing out the collaboration functions that were previously incubated and proven effective within Bytes, and facing the B-end market after productization.
In the process of organizational growth, business fragmentation is common. Feishu's entry into Sichuan and Chongqing is aimed at such enterprises: enterprises that are growing rapidly out of the region, as well as enterprises in large organizations whose business processes involve the collaboration of multiple departments.
Sichuan's catering industry is extremely competitive, and in order for enterprises to win, they must not only strike hard, but also rely on the introduction of external advanced tools to play the role of "management leverage". For example, after entering the rapid development period of store growth, one of the most popular catering companies in Chengdu, Baker uses Feishu to undertake most of the human efficiency management work, helping the store manager of each store sort out and complete the daily work, and visualize the results to the marketing leader.
Chen Feilong, head of human resources of Griller Spicy Grilled Fish, said that after switching to Feishu, the store manager's work efficiency increased by 33%, saving 6 million yuan in food safety risk costs.
For enterprises that value human resources, the synchronization and management of information is also the key to improving efficiency. Haidilao CTO Zhou Haoyun once said in an interview with a reporter from "Daily Economic News" that through the precipitation of the knowledge base of Feishu service desk and robot products, Haidilao has turned Haidilao's "people looking for information" and "people looking for people to obtain information" into "information looking for people". After that, more than 70% of the questions of the Haidilao service desk were automatically answered by robots based on the knowledge base.
SaaS赛道,更热闹也更卷了
In the SaaS industry, which is currently seriously involuted, Feishu is facing no weak opponents.
On the one hand, with the popularization of large models, "old friends" are upgrading one after another.
More than 400 businesses and scenarios within Tencent have been connected to Tencent's hybrid model for testing, and generative AI functions have been deployed on WeCom, Tencent Meeting, and Tencent Docs.
DingTalk has been connected to Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen model, providing more than 10 AI capabilities, covering group chats, documents, video conferencing, and low-code application development.
On the other hand, recently, the collaborative office field has squeezed in several new competitors.
On April 8, Zhou Hongyi, founder of 360 Group, said that the "360AI office" product will be launched soon, including more than 100 AI applications, using a membership subscription model, and planning to have a revenue of 100 million yuan in the first year.
Kingsoft, a veteran office software company, has also joined with WPS 365 and become a new force on the track.
This is destined to be an increasingly hot competition.
According to the "2023-2029 Research Report on the Competition Status and Investment Strategy of China's Collaborative Office Industry" released by Zhiyan Consulting, with the commercial application of big data, IoT, and artificial intelligence, collaborative office can effectively simplify business processes and meet a variety of office scenarios, and the demand for collaborative office market in mainland China is growing year by year.
In 2020, catalyzed by the demand for remote work due to the epidemic, the size of the collaborative office market in mainland China increased from RMB 12.86 billion in 2016 to RMB 27.93 billion, and the output value increased from RMB 10.87 billion in 2016 to RMB 25 billion, and it is expected that the scale of the mainland collaborative office market will grow to RMB 50.409 billion and the output value will increase to RMB 45.469 billion in 2023.
The size of China's collaborative office market has grown steadily, but at a slower pace. Image source: iResearch
iResearch's "2023 China Collaborative Office Industry Research Report" also shows that collaborative office has completed the market education on the concept, and the track as a whole has entered a mature period, and the growth rate is slowing down year by year. But the competition between products is far from final.
The city summit in the Sichuan-Chongqing region can certainly help Feishu connect with more local enterprises, understand their needs and challenges, provide customized solutions, increase Feishu's visibility and influence in the region, and is expected to lay the foundation for future business development.
Some enterprises in Sichuan and Chongqing are growing into national enterprises. In this process of growing up, enterprises are facing the challenge of digital transformation, which contains huge opportunities for collaborative office software such as Feishu with digital management. As one of the BU of Bytes, Feishu has experience in serving large organizations, whether it is from digital management tools or collaborative efficiency improvement, Feishu's experience is useful for the development of enterprises.
Feishu, which was born out of byte experience Image source: Photo by reporter Wang Ziwei
What is Feishu's growth space?
When Feishu first started commercializing in 2020, its customers were mainly concentrated in the pan-Internet field. Since 2021, Feishu has successfully won three "Wei Xiaoli" companies and expanded to the field of new energy vehicles. In the years that followed, Feishu also developed clients in the real estate manufacturing, new energy vehicles, retail and finance, as well as insurance industries such as Taikang Insurance and Pacific Insurance, which belong to the financial industry, and real estate agencies such as I Love My Home.
Feishu's commercialization performance is remarkable. In 2022, Feishu's annual ARR (annual recurring revenue) reached $100 million. In the industry, $100 million in ARR is an important threshold for SaaS products, and there are probably no more than 10 companies in the Chinese market that can achieve $100 million in ARR. In 2023, Feishu's ARR will double.
However, Feishu has a large team member, and in terms of cost and output, this speed of making money is still not enough, and Feishu either has a higher per capita output or a larger revenue scale.
In the current collaborative office field, a new growth factor has emerged: AI. Minsheng Securities Research Report believes that office software with the blessing of AI will usher in systematic paradigm reconstruction and model upgrading, and reshape the valuation ceiling.
The report points out that whether it is streaming software, typography software, conferencing systems, or project collaboration tools, AI can significantly improve user work efficiency and achieve multiplier productivity improvements, which is expected to drive the resonance increase in the number of users, payment rate, and ARPU value.
AI has not only raised the ceiling of the industry, but also has a clear profit model. Zhuang Shuai, an expert in the e-commerce industry, once said in an interview with a reporter from the "Daily Economic News" that in terms of business model, the profit model of AI products is nothing more than charging by time, person, and traffic, and the profit model of AI is relatively clear.
AI is a variable that can disrupt the existing landscape of the field by helping these software products become extremely powerful tools and help them become the new top players in the collaborative office space. Therefore, enterprises in the field of smart office are embracing AI, and this field has become a new place for players to meet each other.
In April 2023, Feishu's official account released a new product "My AI". In November of that year, Feishu officially launched a series of AI products such as "Feishu Smart Partner", which can be used in business scenarios such as content creation, content summarization, data analysis, scenario construction, and system construction. DingTalk and Kingsoft Office are also trying to strengthen their moats with AI+.
According to the forecast of the insight research report, the scale of China's smart office market will continue to grow at a growth rate of 15.58%, and it is expected that the size of the mainland smart office market will reach 176.816 billion yuan in 2025. Driven by AI, the pattern of the collaborative office market may be about to change.
National Business Daily