Song Qinghui, a well-known economist, said that the current problems faced by Douyu are very serious, and it has repeatedly violated laws and regulations, and has repeatedly failed to change its reputation. "Under the strong entry of live broadcast platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, it is not difficult to see that in the second half of the game live broadcast, the chance of Douyu wanting to turn the tables against the wind may be relatively small. ”
Douyu's "falling from the altar": The phone call at the Wuhan headquarters has been unanswered, and the market value has evaporated by more than ninety percent in five years, and the number of employees has plummeted to 1,000
Also known as the "Thai Betta Fish", the male is a colorful fish, with full and flowing fins, and is very aggressive, when two males are kept in the same aquarium, they often fight to the death. Chen Shaojie, the founder of Douyu, once explained the origin of the company's name in a live broadcast, "This fish is fierce and aggressive, and it will be a fight when two males meet." ”
From the "Thousand Broadcast War" (usually describing the fierce competition in the domestic live broadcast industry in 2016) to the dominance of many head anchors, to the news that many head anchors have stopped broadcasting and even reported that they were involved in the case and were arrested, from the highest valuation of more than 4.5 billion US dollars (25.6 billion yuan) when it was listed on the US stock market in July 2019, to the current total market value of 265 million US dollars (1.9 billion yuan), more than ninety percent has evaporated in 5 years.
The number of employees has been reduced to more than 1,000, and Betta is still hiring
On the evening of November 21, 2023, Douyu Company announced that the company's CEO Chen Shaojie was arrested by the Chengdu police around November 16, 2023. At noon on November 22, 2023, the Chengdu Dujiangyan City Public Security Bureau issued a police notice, "After investigation, it was found that Chen Moujie (male, 39 years old) was suspected of opening a casino. At present, Chen Moujie has been arrested in accordance with the law. Further investigation is ongoing. ”
At that time, an employee told the visiting reporter that everyone is currently working normally and paying wages normally. There are fewer employees at the workstations in the office area, and they are all in normal office. Employees are wary of the arrest of the company's CEO and are reluctant to talk about it. The doorman of the office building of the New Development International Center said: "No one has come to the 8th floor (Douyu office area) for an interview for a long time. ”
It is reported that Chen Shaojie has been released on bail pending trial, and some legal sources have estimated that Chen Shaojie's specific sentence may be 5-7 years based on the circumstances of his case.
Douyu Network Technology Co., Ltd.'s office is mainly located in the new development international center of Wuhan Optics Valley Software Park, and on April 23, a reporter from upstream news (report mailbox [email protected]) called the company, but no one answered.
In April 2022, it was reported that Douyu Live laid off 30% of its staff as a whole, mainly for game business and live broadcast brokerage, and the layoffs were concentrated in teams in Shanghai and Beijing, and the Wuhan headquarters was also involved. Douyu's relevant staff said: "We have no large-scale layoffs, only some normal personnel adjustments. ”
On March 26 this year, Douyu released its 2023 financial report, which is the first annual report to turn losses into profits in the past three years, but it is not difficult to find that like most Internet platforms that have turned around losses, the improvement of Douyu's profitability does not come from the growth of revenue, but from cost control, and now the total number of Douyu employees has dropped from 2,000 at the peak to more than 1,000, and it is rumored that it will be further reduced to 800 people in the future.
The layoffs are jokingly called "getting on the bus" by the Douyu employees, and those who can get compensation for the internal "active onboarding" are regarded as the lucky ones.
But leaving Betta doesn't mean lucky. A criminal lawyer in Chengdu told upstream news reporters that since Chen Shaojie was arrested, he has received consultations from three former employees of Douyu, because he had previously communicated with some anchors or the former leaders were involved in the case, and he was being questioned by the police one after another.
However, upstream news reporters noticed that at present, Douyu Company is still publishing job requirements on major recruitment software, including game live broadcast operation interns, guild operations, audit and supervision, brand advertising sales, salary accounting, product managers, etc., most of which are in Wuhan, and some are in Shanghai.
A graduate student from a Wuhan university who has just joined Douyu for an internship through an interview said that his colleagues are very friendly and full every day, and the workload is not too large.
The first game live broadcast platform will be listed in five years
Chen Shaojie, who earned the first pot of gold in his life, bought the domestic "originator of the ACG website" ACFUN (Station A) in 2010, introduced the "barrage" function, attracted a large number of ACG players, and launched the "Shengbo" channel, focusing on the live broadcast of two popular competitive games "League of Legends" and "DOTA". In 2014, ACFUN's "Raw Broadcasting" live broadcast was officially renamed "Douyu TV", which opened the curtain of the game live broadcast.
By the end of 2015, Douyu's monthly active users had reached 10 million, ranking first among game live streaming platforms.
In 2016, the live broadcast track "Thousand Broadcast War" was staged, and live broadcast platforms such as Yingke, Huya, Huajiao, Panda, and Douyu sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, attracting a lot of capital injection.
In March 2016, Douyu received $100 million in Series B financing from Tencent, Sequoia Capital China, and Nanshan Capital. In August of the same year, Douyu completed the C round of financing of 1.5 billion yuan, led by Phoenix Investment and Tencent. On the eve of the IPO, Douyu received an exclusive investment of up to 4.3 billion yuan from Tencent, and as a result, Tencent became the largest shareholder of Douyu after its listing.
With the help of Tencent and other capitals, Douyu has successfully brought top anchors such as "Xuxu Baby", "Zhang Daxian", "PDD" and "Nuliu" under its command, and has become a popular game live broadcast platform. An operation of Douyu recalled: "Even if it is just a lowest-level operation, or even an intern, dozens of people come to WeChat every day, begging to cooperate with you." ”
In July 2019, Douyu successfully rang the bell on the NASDAQ, with a market value of nearly $4 billion on the day of listing, and in October 2019, Chen Shaojie ranked 1507th in the "2019 Hurun Report" with a net worth of 2.5 billion yuan, and in November 2020, Chen Shaojie's wealth increased to 5.5 billion yuan, ranking 34th in the "2020 Hurun Post-80s Self-Made Rich List".
In the live broadcast track, game live broadcast is just one of the vertical categories, and with the rise of short video platforms, the popularity has gradually decreased. In the first half of 2019, the number of unique users of short video reached 640 million, and the number of monthly active users exceeded 500 million, while Douyu, the live streaming platform with the most registered users, had 154 million monthly active users, less than one-third of Douyin.
The anchor's salary and high customer acquisition costs have brought huge financial pressure, and even the head company often faces a situation where there are huge losses, but they still dare not stop burning money. In the first quarter of 2019, Douyu's anchor share expenditure and content expenditure totaled 1.067 billion yuan, accounting for more than 8% of its total operating expenses, a year-on-year increase of 121.1%.
However, in the pre-IPO prospectus, Douyu's gross profit margin rose from 5% to 13%, turning losses into profits, Chen Shaojie explained: "The main reason for our growth is that more people are willing to pay, especially in the exclusive field of game live streaming." ”
Since then, a number of gambling-related cases have been publicly exposed, and the earliest timeline is just before Douyu goes public, among which the most famous "Ganggang Nine Outdoor" case is the first live broadcast platform gambling-related case in the country supervised and handled by the Ministry of Public Security. At the end of 2023, the Jinzhou police reported another gambling-related case. From February 1, 2019 to January 12, 2022, criminal suspects Zhou and Chen used a live broadcast platform to organize more than 5,000 gambling activities, with a total of more than 1,700 yuan in gambling funds and more than 2.66 million yuan in illegal profits. According to reports, Zhou is the anchor of Douyu's "Chicken Eater" "Whispering 619", and previously had more than 200,000 fans on the platform.
was fined for gambling and pornography, and the head anchor quickly lost
In addition to "gambling", betta fish is also involved in pornography.
At the beginning of 2023, the Cyberspace Administration of China released the 2022 inventory of the "Anti-Pornography and Anti-Illegal Publications", and Douyu has been jointly named with several other platforms. By the end of April of that year, Douyu was mentioned again in the summary of the "Qing Lang" series of special actions released by Netinfo China in the first quarter of 2023, saying that the platform was not fulfilling its responsibilities effectively and had interviewed the relevant person in charge. In May of the same year, the Hubei Provincial Cyberspace Administration also sent a special working group to Douyu to carry out a one-month centralized rectification and supervision.
Tianyancha APP shows that at present, Wuhan Douyu Network Technology Co., Ltd. has been administratively punished four times from 2019 to 2022, involving vulgar performances, providing Internet cultural products containing violent content, etc., with a total fine of 85,000 yuan.
In the wake of Chen's arrest in November 2023, Douyu's interim management committee has made compliance more important than ever.
According to public information, Douyu established a compliance management team in the fourth quarter of 2023 to report directly to the interim management committee, with members from different business and management departments of Douyu, to conduct comprehensive compliance management of all the company's business activities, workflows, live broadcast content and platform data, and ensure that the company's business and assets fully meet relevant laws, regulations and regulatory requirements.
Previously, a number of veteran employees who accompanied Douyu through the "Thousand Broadcast War" bluntly said that the current Douyu is not like a company compared to the past. Simple and rude, vigorous and resolute used to be the whole Douyu's style of doing things, the more "alone" and the more daring to "rush", the better the people will mix. But now, projects are subject to rigorous ROI (return on investment) measurements.
Douyu and Huya, as the "twin stars" of the game live broadcast industry, merged under the mediation of Tencent in 2020, but were stopped by the State Administration for Market Regulation in 2021 due to suspected monopoly.
In 2021, Douyu announced "selective purchase of copyrights", and after giving up the copyright of the 2022 League of Legends Professional League LPL, users also lost rapidly.
Douyu's 2022 annual report shows that it achieved annual revenue of 7.108 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 22.44%. And ROE (return on equity) and ROA (return on total assets) are both negative, -1.17% and -0.92%, respectively. Profitability is weak and there may be operating pressure.
With the rise of platforms such as Kuaishou and Bilibili and aiming at game live broadcasts, vertical platforms such as Huya and Douyu are facing more pressure, and in August 2023, the popular Douyu anchor "Xuxu Baby", who has about 20 million followers, switched to Douyin after his contract expired. On August 12, Feng Timo, the former "first sister of betta", also started her first live broadcast on Douyin. On the Betta side, in addition to "a small group", the anchor "dog thief", known as "Hearthstone", was also rumored to be involved in the case and arrested, "PDD", "Da Sima" and others stopped broadcasting for several months, and the head anchor was quickly lost, and it was difficult to be filled in a short time.
Turning around for the first time in three years, but the outlook is not optimistic
On January 12, 2024, Douyu issued an internal email saying that it announced the adjustment of its internal organizational structure and personnel, and the establishment of a new content ecology department, which is responsible for the output of anchor content, manufacturer cooperation, and the construction of the event ecosystem, etc., which is responsible for Ren Simin, a member of the interim management committee and vice president of the company. At the same time, there are three secondary departments, namely the anchor operation department, the manufacturer project department and the event content department.
It is worth noting that this time, Douyu has adjusted the organizational structure of core businesses such as anchor operation and event content, and no longer follows the logic of partitioning and sub-projects, but has carried out unified integration of resources.
Some internal employees believe that the integration will be conducive to the company's overall evaluation and maintain a unified strategy. Some analysts believe that in addition to integrating resources, the establishment of the anchor product department and the manufacturer product department in the product department also sends a signal that the product department is turning to a service-oriented one, "In the past, it may emphasize the e-sports game community, and then it may be a live broadcast platform and a large MCN organization that serves game providers." ”
On March 26, Douyu released its financial report for the fourth quarter of 2023 and the whole year of 2023, which shows that in the fourth quarter of 2023, Douyu's total revenue was 1.296 billion yuan, live broadcast revenue was 1.021 billion yuan, advertising and other income was 275 million yuan, gross profit was 126 million yuan, gross profit margin was 9.7%, and adjusted net loss was 5 million yuan.
For the whole year of 2023, Douyu's total revenue will be 5.53 billion yuan, gross profit will be 684 million yuan, and adjusted net profit will be 154 million yuan, which is also the first time that Douyu has turned a profit in the past three years.
Since the end of November last year, Douyu CEO Chen Shaojie was arrested by the police on suspicion of opening a casino, Douyu set up a temporary management committee, and said on the phone call after the release of the third quarter financial report: "At present, Douyu is operating normally, and the investigation has not had a significant impact on the company's operations." However, its revenue continued to decline, with revenue of 9.6 billion yuan, 9.1 billion yuan, 7.1 billion yuan, and 5.53 billion yuan from 2020 to 2023 respectively.
In terms of performance, Douyu continued to lose paying users, with 51.7 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2023, down 5.7 million from the same period last year, and an average of 3.7 million paying users in the same period, a year-on-year decrease of 1.9 million.
On July 17, 2019, Betta was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The offering price ranged from US$11.5 to US$14, raising a maximum of US$1.085 billion (about RMB 7.47 billion), and at this valuation, its highest valuation was US$4.545 billion (about RMB 25.6 billion).
As of the close of the U.S. stock market on April 22, 2024, Douyu's share price is $8.29 per share, with a total market value of $265 million (about 1.9 billion yuan), and the market value has evaporated more than ninety percent in five years.
Famous economist Song Qinghui
Bedside economics ¥59.8 to buy
Song Qinghui, a well-known economist, said that the current problems faced by Douyu are very serious, and it has repeatedly violated laws and regulations, and has repeatedly failed to change its reputation. "Under the strong entry of live broadcast platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, it is not difficult to see that in the second half of the game live broadcast, the chance of Douyu wanting to turn the tables against the wind may be relatively small. Original title: Douyu "fell off the altar": The phone call at the Wuhan headquarters has been unanswered, and the market value has evaporated more than ninety percent in five years, and the number of employees has plummeted to 1,000
Upstream news reporter Tang Hao integrated daily economic news, people's e-sports, interface news, etc
Editor: Xu Yuanzhe Editor: Li Yang, Guan Yi Review: Feng Fei