From a loss of 3.2 billion yuan to a net profit of 10 billion yuan, she led Ctrip through the crisis

Chinese entrepreneur

2024-04-29 10:45Published on the official account of Anhui "China Entrepreneur" magazine

From a loss of 3.2 billion yuan to a net profit of 10 billion yuan, she led Ctrip through the crisis

Become an enterprise that is valuable to society, partners and employees.

Text: "Chinese Entrepreneur" reporter Zhao Dongshan

Editor|Li Wei

Header image source: Respondents

In the past year, Trip.com Group CEO Sun Jie has been busy again.

2023 is a big year for the travel industry. Sun Jie has traveled to many different countries and regions for work reasons, and what touches her the most is that the cultural tourism industry has fully recovered, and Chinese tourists have once again injected strong vitality and impetus into the global tourism market, promoting the vigorous development of the tourism industry.

What's more, Sun Jie once again saw a steady increase in Ctrip's performance. In the first quarter of 2023, after an extremely difficult three years in the travel industry, Ctrip achieved an operating income of 9.2 billion yuan, exceeding the 8.164 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2019, and the profit in the same period basically recovered to the level of 2019.

For the whole of 2023, Ctrip achieved a net operating income of 44.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 122%, and a net profit of 10 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of more than 614% compared with 1.4 billion yuan in 2022. Even in the fourth quarter of the traditional off-season, Ctrip's various businesses have grown significantly because of the "out of the circle" of ice and snow tourism and cultural tourism in various places.

challenge

Sun Jie is too eager to see such growth.

In 2019, Ctrip launched its "G2 Strategy" at its 20th anniversary, namely Great Quality and Globalization. However, in the second year, the domestic inbound and outbound tourism market pressed the pause button, and the international tourism market deployed by Ctrip was seriously affected.

At the most difficult time, in order to advance the payment of suppliers and refund users' orders, Sun Jie and Liang Jianzhang, the founder of Ctrip, made countless phone calls to the bank to borrow money. Ctrip has refunded more than 100 billion yuan of orders for passengers, suddenly slipping from profit to loss. In 2020, Ctrip's net loss was 3.2 billion yuan. The pressure of the business, the challenges of the organization, the limitations of innovation, and the confidence of investors all brought great challenges to Sun Jie, but fortunately, everything survived.

Sun Jie told China Entrepreneur: "In 2023, while tourism is recovering rapidly, it will also be accompanied by many challenges. For example, in terms of outbound travel, the infrastructure construction of overseas tourist destinations has yet to be restored, and the convenience of visa processing and flight capacity have not yet been fully recovered. ”

Therefore, helping the local tourism infrastructure to recover is a very important task for Sun Jie and her team in 2023. Since many receptionists in the industry have been transferred, the Ctrip team coordinates resources with suppliers, hotels, airlines, and local agencies, because their reception level determines how many tourists Ctrip can take on a trip.

In the past two years, in the face of these huge industry changes, Sun Jie hopes to experience all aspects of tourism as a tourist, to discover what domestic tourists need most and what foreign destinations lack most, and do her best to make up for these shortcomings with her team and partners.

Reboot

Starting from 2023, Sun Jie will once again restart the "G2 strategy". Up to now, Ctrip's international brand Trip has launched the "China Travel Guide", which includes hotel reservations, travel advice, popular destinations and other sections, and has served nearly 100,000 overseas tourists.

In view of the development plan for 2024, Sun Jie put forward "one core goal, three innovation points", that is, starting from 2024, in the next 3~5 years, all business lines will achieve comprehensive leadership, and Trip.com Group will become the most leading online travel platform in Asia and the world's leading online transportation ticketing platform. At the same time, it adheres to AI innovation, content innovation and ESG innovation to help the Group become a world-renowned tourism brand.

In terms of AI, in July 2023, Ctrip released the first vertical model of the travel industry. Based on about 20 billion travel data and 2 billion trip data, the Wendao model assists users in making travel destinations, hotels, and attractions reservations, as well as itinerary planning decisions. According to the financial report, by the end of 2023, with the help of intelligent customer service, the self-service resolution rate of user problems in Ctrip's air ticket and hotel business has reached more than 70%.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has strengthened Sun Jie's confidence in the travel market: "Travel is the softest piece of mountains and seas in everyone's heart, representing human beings' endless curiosity, thirst for knowledge and the right to pursue happiness. Tourism is an activity that satisfies the spiritual needs of human beings, and even in the age of automation and artificial intelligence, it is an experiential product that is not easily saturated and will maintain long-term growth. ”

In Sun Jie's view, tourism is an industry that promotes human exchange and innovation, and it is the best diplomacy for the people, and at the same time, there is also room for trillions of growth. In 2024, the proportion of international tourism in the industry will gradually expand, and the importance of inbound tourism to China's economic growth will become more prominent.

At present, with the increase in the popularity of international travel, all countries are rushing to resume inbound tourism, and the recovery progress of China's inbound tourism is also accelerating.

Source: Visual China

Sun Jie shared a set of data with "Chinese Entrepreneur": the proportion of inbound tourism revenue to GDP in the world's major economies is 1%~3%, while in China, even in 2019, the proportion of inbound tourism revenue to GDP is only 0.5%, if it is increased by one percentage point to 1.5%, it means that the contribution of this field to China's GDP will exceed one trillion yuan, which will have a positive impact on the national economy.

"While bringing foreign exchange, inbound tourism can increase jobs, enhance international status, spread a better China, and serve as a cultural bridge to promote exchanges between countries and world peace. Ctrip is taking active actions to help many provinces and cities in China build global super destinations. Sun Jie said.

balance

In addition to the company's economic benefits, Ctrip's social value is also an important indicator that Sun Jie has been paying attention to. "Becoming a valuable company to society, partners and employees is the goal that Ctrip has always focused on. Sun Jie said.

In her spare time, Sun Jie likes all kinds of sports, skiing, marathon, and mountaineering are all ways for her to constantly challenge herself. "They keep me energized, and I hope to go to every city in the world, exercise, work, and live in these cities, and then bring Chinese tourists to the world, and bring global tourists to China, this kind of life and work is the direction of my efforts." Sun Jie told "Chinese Entrepreneur".

She has always practiced a principle - work is to live a better life, and when you live an infinitely wonderful life, work will have unlimited motivation.

At the same time, as one of the few female executives of domestic listed companies, Sun Jie has also been actively advocating for women to have more equal career development opportunities.

Sun Jie has always believed that in the workplace, both men and women have their own unique values. For female employees, Ctrip also continues to provide them with better welfare protection and give women more equal opportunities for career development. In the past, she has promoted more than 30% of female executives within the company, which is much higher than the average 20% of female executives in domestic Internet companies.

Sun Jie is also actively promoting the continuous improvement of Ctrip's women's welfare. At present, female employees of Ctrip can enjoy more than 10 benefits, including transportation expenses during pregnancy, maternity gifts, maternity medical subsidies, and assisted reproduction. Sun Jie also promoted Trip.com Group's 1 billion yuan maternity subsidy policy at the end of June 2023 - every global employee who has been employed for 3 years can receive a maternity subsidy of 10,000 yuan per year for 5 consecutive years after giving birth to a new "Cheng second generation".

In addition, in the past two years, Ctrip has actively explored hybrid work and other measures, allowing employees to choose to work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays according to their work schedules, which has greatly improved employee job satisfaction and reduced turnover by 32%.

View original image 76K