Text: Internet Jianghu Author: Liu Zhicheng
In the great change of the times from the consumer Internet to the industrial Internet, China's technology giants have actually taken two completely different routes:
Some people, such as Baidu and Alibaba, have chosen hard technology routes such as cloud computing, cloud services and large models. However, others such as Meituan, Didi and Ctrip have chosen to carve out a path of enterprise services on the original consumption route.
Just recently, the Meituan Enterprise Edition Enterprise Consumption Panorama Solution Conference with the theme of "Jane" was held in Shenzhen. Although the relevant volume is not prominent, this does not prevent us from seeing the key strategic signal that Meituan's layout in the B-end market is still steadily advancing.
In fact, not only Meituan is engaged in the enterprise version, Didi, Ctrip, and even the previous Ele.me have also launched the enterprise version or business travel version, which also refers to corporate consumption and expense control reimbursement!
This can't help but make people more and more curious, why did Meituan and Didi choose this path? Where have the Meituan Enterprise Editions, which have changed from to C to B, gone now? Are there other deeper strategic implications hidden behind it?
Meituan and Didi Enterprise Edition: Do business with B and stabilize the market for C
The greatest value of B-end services lies in "reducing costs and increasing efficiency".
This is a point that many enterprises are eager to achieve under the current macroeconomic situation. It is also the fundamental development logic of Meituan's enterprise edition.
On the one hand, from an external perspective, the biggest difference with expense control and reimbursement SaaS is that Meituan Enterprise Edition can not only cut from the front-end of consumption, but also directly meet the complex and diverse, even fragmented business consumption needs. It can also comprehensively clarify the composition of consumption costs from the back end, so that enterprises can actively control and optimize consumption.
For example, Meituan Enterprise Edition can provide employees of cooperative enterprises with a variety of dining methods, such as welfare meals and hospitality group meals; DiDi Enterprise allows employees who need to travel for business to use their corporate accounts to book and transfer payments to achieve paperless reimbursement.
In addition, Meituan's enterprise version has also been connected with OA, IM, finance and taxation systems. Even before the Meituan Enterprise Edition was upgraded, enterprise employees could directly enter the Meituan Enterprise Edition by clicking on the link in Feishu, DingTalk and other office software, thus saving a lot of expense processes such as decision-making, reimbursement, and review.
In contrast, although the application scenarios of the SaaS players represented by Hesi and Decibel also cover business travel and dining, they are more to provide budget management, electronic archives and other fields for the back-end financial personnel to reduce costs and increase efficiency, as for the front-end complex consumption scenarios, as well as false transactions, illegal bills and other aspects are difficult to achieve effective management.
In short, Meituan Enterprise focuses on consumption scenarios and enterprise management, while finance and taxation SaaS focuses more on financial management. Although there is a partial "tail-chasing" in the consumption link between the two, the main body is misplaced, and there will basically be no "life-and-death" competition.
Therefore, even though the back-end financial control of enterprises such as Meituan may be slightly deficient due to the large differences in the organizational structure and financial processes of different industries and enterprises, from the perspective of enterprise customers, the two seem to be able to complement each other.
On the other hand, from an internal perspective, Meituan and Didi Enterprise also have their own competition and differences.
After all, the more and more complex consumption scenarios covered by the consumer SaaS Enterprise Edition, the more cost-effective and convenient it is for enterprise customers to manage expenses.
Then it is obvious that Meituan's enterprise version, which includes eating, drinking, traveling, accommodation and other scenarios, undoubtedly has a competitive advantage over Didi and Ctrip.
This can be seen from the positioning, and now Didi Enterprise and Ctrip Business Travel are focusing on "providing enterprises with one-stop car and business travel services", including car use, air ticket booking, hotel booking and other corporate service consumption scenarios.
In addition to the scenarios of wine travel and travel, Meituan has also launched solutions for enterprise employee welfare meals and hospitality meals by relying on the channel catering resources accumulated on the C-side, which is the most unique competitive advantage of Meituan among the current C-end cross-border players.
The only thing that can be compared is the Ele.me enterprise ordering business, which has long been out of operation and has been included in the Alipay system as a whole.
The reason for the suspension may be roughly similar to the dilemma faced by traditional group catering players such as government agencies and hospitals, represented by Qianxi Crane - the consumption scene is too simple, mainly catering, and there is a lack of integrated corporate services such as accommodation and cost control and reimbursement.
Of course, Meituan Enterprise covers many diversified consumption scenarios, which has both advantages and "disadvantages".
In this regard, Xie Jia, an investor in the B field of China Growth Capital, has previously said that the gross profit of the services in the enterprise service is usually not too high, but it can indeed help customers solve problems. However, this type of company is not a typical target of VC.
Fundamentally, the more consumption scenarios covered by the enterprise edition, the more they need to understand and meet the personalized needs of more different industries and enterprises, which will undoubtedly increase the overall input cost, so it is necessary to balance the operational and organizational capabilities of individual needs and common needs. When it comes to finances, it naturally manifests itself in a reduction in profit margins.
But even so, now Meituan Enterprise and Ctrip Business Travel have to continue to increase the weight:
The first is to "attack", to grow to the B-side. As early as 2020, data showed that the scale of expenditure for the five major scenarios of business travel, travel, group meals, procurement and welfare alone has reached the trillion level. At present, the scale of the enterprise expense management market has already exceeded 100 billion.
This is no less than a timely rain for the traditional Internet giants who are currently facing the end of the demographic dividend and traffic dividend, as well as the comprehensive impact of barbarians such as Douyin and Kuaishou.
For example, Ctrip, Tianyancha APP shows that in 2023, its business travel management business segment will achieve revenue of 2.3 billion yuan, compared with 1.3 billion yuan in 2021, it has almost doubled in two years......
The second is "defense", consolidating the advantages of the C-end market and resisting the competition for local life by Douyin.
Taking Meituan as an example, as a leader in the local life service market, it is now facing invasion and confrontation from Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu and Video Accounts from multiple angles.
Because in the era of content, Meituan can't fight for user traffic; Relying on burning money to subsidize business users is not a long-term solution. It can even be said that as long as the existing C-end traffic standard rules are used, it will be difficult for Meituan to completely withstand the competition of Doukuai.
Therefore, Meituan is now starting from the B-side, starting from the main scenarios such as food, housing, transportation, shopping, and entertainment, and relying on the binding of corporate consumption management, so as to indirectly bind the local life needs of some employees and users to brand merchants.
Because they are facing a value relationship chain centered on the enterprise, this part of white-collar users is almost not affected by any C-end of Douyin. Because the user's local consumption demand is limited, the competitive pressure of Meituan's local life has been eliminated to a certain extent.
In fact, until now, Douyin has not launched an enterprise version for the B-side. So for Meituan, "I have it, you don't" means a moat and a successful counterattack......
Low price and sinking, who is the final winner?
In essence, Meituan is still innovating and extending around local life and trying to find growth in a new way of opening.
The reason why this is so is because the main battlefield of local life has now entered the white-hot competition stage of "hand-to-hand combat".
To this end, Meituan has even begun to increase content to improve user retention and attractiveness to users. For example, from the full launch of the short video entrance in the bottom center tab of the Meituan App, to the addition of a theater channel this year. For example, in 2023, Meituan's sales and marketing expenses will increase by 47.5%, although there is no specific breakdown of expenses, but two points are highlighted in the financial report:
First, it has enhanced the ability to display content, and launched multi-form content production methods such as pictures, text, videos and live broadcasts; The second is to upgrade and simplify the takeaway membership system.
Obviously, the main marketing capital investment is content and subsidizing C-end consumers.
However, the layout of content takes time, and the construction of a content ecology cannot be achieved overnight. And even if Meituan invests in it for a long time, it may not be successful in the future. After all, Meituan's universal tool attribute is too strong, and users will only swipe content when they need it, and it is difficult to retain people based on interest content like Douyin, and then achieve consumption conversion......
So in the second half of local life, Meituan was still dragged into the quagmire of low prices and sinking markets by Douyin.
The first is low price, and the adherence to the low-price strategy is the secret of Douyin's rapid growth since it entered the local life service field, and it is also a label that is still being strengthened.
In order to cope with the battle, in the past year, Meituan has also launched a "low-price" counterattack against Douyin life services in a variety of ways, including phased subsidies, live broadcasts, etc.
Although in terms of performance, they did have some positive effects. For the full year of 2023, Meituan's core local commercial segment revenue increased by 28.7% year-on-year to RMB206.9 billion.
But unfortunately, from a macro perspective, these actions are passive and limited, which is neither in line with the company's development needs under the profit cycle, nor long-term, nor enough to meet the new needs of the cost-effective consumption cycle that has arrived.
Therefore, what Meituan should really build is a more systematic low-cost ability that can give full play to its own advantages and find its own rhythm.
In fact, just as content and traffic are to Douyin, as Meituan's key traffic entrance, it seems that takeaway can be used as a linker with other functions of the Meituan ecosystem, helping to build Meituan's more systematic low-cost capabilities.
For example, some industry insiders mentioned that when the in-store and Daojia business merged, Meituan could actually use the merchant's dependence on itself in takeaway as a bargaining chip, and through efficiency improvement, in exchange for greater discounts on takeaway products and group purchases. This is a kind of ecological synergy, which can also better provide overall services for merchants......
The second is sinking. In July last year, Meituan's takeaway partner cities issued a solicitation order to recruit partners in blank areas such as towns, scenic spots, and parks. In September, Douyin followed suit and launched the "Regional Service Provider Business" to attract and unite high-quality regional service providers to jointly serve the needs of local small and medium-sized businesses.
The shortcomings of Douyin's imperfect local life infrastructure may be exposed.
For example, delivery and fulfillment, as an important part of the local life service field, was largely inseparable from the support of its huge transportation capacity. But this is not much accumulation for Douyin, which crosses over from the content platform.
Although Douyin can also temporarily alleviate the delivery problem through third-party cooperation, it will still be greatly limited by the overall delivery cost. The only way to break the game quickly is to buy a business that has the delivery capabilities. But it depends on what Douyin chooses in the end.
In this way, even if Douyin is now killing all sides in the local life market, old players such as Meituan are not without a chance to turn the tide of the war.
From the breakthrough of enterprise consumption management on the B-end to the absolute distribution capacity advantage, Meituan's imagination in the field of local life services is far from the end.
This is also in line with Meituan Wang Xing's favorite book "Finite and Infinite Games": finite games are aimed at winning, while infinite games are aimed at continuing games, exploring and changing boundaries themselves to create infinite possibilities......