This article is from the WeChat public account: Alter Chat IT (ID: spnews), author: Alter, title image: Visual China
20 years after NetEase landed on nasdaq, Ding Lei released the first shareholder letter.
What is expected is that Ding Lei's shareholder letter, together with the "real hammer" of NetEase's upcoming second listing in Hong Kong, quickly brushed the screen in the Internet circle.
Unexpectedly, the 2,000-word letter did not describe NetEase's strategic positioning, profit expectations and business layout throughout the pie, but expounded NetEase's unique philosophy: like a fool, insist on one thing, go crazy for a thought, and one day you will find the answer you want.
The Internet industry in which NetEase is located has always been a jianghu of smart people. In such a voice channel that is destined to be focused, why Ding Lei does not hide his love for "fools" must be a question in the hearts of many people.
Ding Lei and "Forrest Gump"
Nearly a decade of deep living has made the outside world's impression of Ding Lei somewhat blurred. Even the rumors that are talked about by the anecdote are mostly from the "mouth of others".
As Wu Xiaobo once said to Dou Wentao in "Threesomes": "Among the rich Chinese people I have seen, more than two-thirds are unhappy, except for Ding Lei."
As a result, the image of the "happiest richest man" gradually became deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. When Ding Lei is mentioned in the Internet circle, there is no shortage of various happy passages: such as Uniqlo, which likes to wear 300 yuan, which is made into memes to contract the source of happiness for NetEase employees, and even HR uses his custom divine comedy to recruit people... Playing the master, sensibility, etc. have gradually become Ding Lei's "human design".
But Mr. Ding is not a natural resistance to the media and the magnum, at least not until he took the title of "China's Richest Man" in 2003. In the not-so-rich written materials before that, Ding Lei mentioned the most in his external interviews and speeches.
One weekend in 2000, Ding Lei gave a speech at Peking University, and after briefly recalling his entrepreneurial experience, Ding Lei said a rather sensational remark: "I really appreciate 'Forrest Gump's Biography', especially the section where Forrest Gump ran all over the United States. At first, Forrest Gump also began his journey in a sneer, but later, he led thousands of people to run after him. From 'crazy' to 'frontrunner', it is a process that every entrepreneur has to go through, and without Forrest Gump's persistent spirit, it is impossible to complete this process. ”
Because of financial misreporting because it did not understand international rules, NetEase was tragically suspended by Nasdaq in 2001, and the Wall Street Journal even commented: "The Internet portal NetEase seems to have come to an end." For this bitter past, almost no one cares how Ding Lei, who is just 30 years old, survived, only Ding Lei accidentally mentioned in an interview: At that time, I watched "Forrest Gump" 5 times, running, playing table tennis, catching shrimp, everything Forrest Gump did was very simple, but the key was that he did the ultimate.
In 2003, Ding Lei personally led a team to Hangzhou to recruit, and offered 100,000 annual salaries and stock options for newly graduated students. Today, such a seductive job advertisement is enough to brush the circle of friends. The explanation given by Ding Lei at that time was: "I do not pay attention to achievements in the selection of talents, what I value is ability." I like people like Forrest Gump, and the goal and persistence are exactly what many of our young people today lack. ”
Today, almost no one associates Ding Lei with "Forrest Gump", but early netizens may not be unfamiliar with the ID of the "Network Young Master", when Ding Lei wrote such a signature: "Life is like a box of grenades, you never know which one you will get." Behind the slightly ridiculous text, it also allows the outside world to see another Ding Lei, a Ding Lei independent of the "play master" persona.
NetEase's "Forrest Gump Philosophy"
As a company with a strong founder culture, Ding Lei's Forrest Gump complex has obviously influenced NetEase. Just like forrest Gump, who can't read and can only run, the market has also misread Ding Lei and NetEase to some extent.
A popular view is that Ding Lei is a person with uncertain points of interest, resulting in a lack of rules and boundaries in NetEase's product layout, and a company that people "can't understand" has become the consensus of Internet observers.
The reason why "can't understand" NetEase is because the outside world "understands" other Internet companies.
Alibaba has long defined the strategy of "building the commercial infrastructure of the future of society", and then orderly landed on the tracks of e-commerce, finance, cloud computing, and pan-entertainment;
Tencent launched a new round of strategic upgrading at the age of 20, on the basis of connecting people, connecting digital content and connecting services, it will further explore the integration of social networking, content and technology that is more suitable for future trends, and promote the upgrading from the consumer Internet to the industrial Internet;
Even the newly rising Internet giants such as Meituan and Pinduoduo have found their own strategic positioning, the former to deeply cultivate local life services, the latter to the combination of Costco + Disney as their own...
Ding Lei did not seem to agree much with this strategic positioning, expressing his views in the shareholder letter: "In my opinion, strategy is a mysterious concept. When it comes to strategy, many people always want to show a grand blueprint and exquisite calculations, but the charm of business lies in the fact that there are always some accidents that will make those exquisite calculations on paper fail. ”
NetEase's business strategy is less like the so-called "grand idea", from mailboxes, portals, games to education, music, e-commerce, it seems difficult to understand the boundaries of NetEase. However, it is undeniable that most of the products launched by NetEase have a unique understanding of user needs, and the starting point of many products is not for commercial layout.
Returning to the film "Forrest Gump", perhaps you can better understand the mystery of this business philosophy: in order to fulfill the last wish of his friend Buba, Forrest Gump used the money endorsed by advertising to buy a shrimp boat, and even went to sea on a rainy night to catch shrimp, resulting in other shrimp boats in the dock being destroyed by the hurricane, and Forrest Gump's shrimp boat eventually made a fortune. In the eyes of other shrimp catchers, catching shrimp is just a livelihood, but for Forrest Gump is a love.
NetEase's performance in many tracks is somewhat similar to Forrest Gump, and NetEase Cloud Music is the most direct example. Someone asked Ding Lei what the biggest threat to NetEase Cloud Music was, and Ding Lei's answer was "I'm afraid that everyone will lose their love for music." "Online music can be said to be one of the most frequent tracks of capital operation, Tencent Music with a series of mergers and acquisitions and copyright erected a high wall, many players chose to withdraw from the battlefield, NetEase Cloud Music firmly occupied a place in the market." For other companies, online music is just a part of the pan-entertainment ecology, and Ding Lei's starting point is his love for music.
Ding Lei's unique philosophy of NetEase seems to be able to be called "Forrest Gump philosophy".
The long-termism of "Forrest Gump"
Deeply studying the core of "Forrest Gump's philosophy" is similar to the Taoist idea of "doing nothing".
No matter how the world around him changes, Forrest Gump always goes his own way; no matter how many tempting outlets there are in the Internet industry, NetEase is steady and steady at its own pace.
As early as 2009, at ChinaJoy, Ding Lei elaborated on his understanding of business operation in his speech: "When a company's products are destroyed, whether it is a 168-year enterprise or a rapidly growing enterprise in more than ten years, it may be difficult to come back." ”
The next decade coincided with the craziest decade of China's Internet, catching up with the wave of mobile Internet, every year there was a new outlet, and capital was also happy to mass-produce unicorns. But most companies that embrace the outlet are caught in a strange circle, need to constantly adjust the direction according to changes in the external environment, and the attention of management is focused on the business model, gradually deviating from the track of product king.
Recall that during this period of time can be called excellent products, Missed all the outlet of NetEase is one of the most existential enterprises, NetEase Cloud Music, NetEase Strict Selection, Youdao Cloud Notes, and then to a series of mobile games represented by "Yin and Yang Division", which have won the user evaluation of "NetEase Production, Must Be Excellent" time and again.
Reflected in performance, NetEase's annual revenue in 2009 was 3.8 billion yuan, and by 2019, this figure has grown to 59.24 billion yuan. At the same time, in the 20th anniversary of the listing, NetEase's stock price has increased by more than 2,000 times, and the annual return on capital has exceeded 26%, which can be said to be the well-deserved "first bull stock of Chinese stocks".
NetEase, which believes in the "Forrest Gump philosophy", is by no means a fool like Forrest Gump, but the smartest person in the market. If a company's survival is based on changing things, even the most delicate calculations will fail. Ding Lei's perception is: "To be a company, it has never been a 100-meter run, but a marathon. Starting and timing are not winning. Since the pursuit is long-term, we must come up with good things that are worthy of users and the times. ”
Just "pleasing" users also has a price, and polishing excellent products requires reducing the pursuit of speed and scale. To be precise, all the incomprehensions and doubts of the outside world about NetEase originate from "slow", which seems to be incompatible with the Internet industry, and even more radical will label NetEase as conservative and not enterprising.
In the past, too many people's cognition of the Internet was biased towards "fast food", accustomed to using a set of seemingly correct standards to measure Internet companies, once a new field rose rapidly, and the so-called Internet giants did not catch up, and when they could not maintain a high growth rate in revenue, most of them would fall into the whirlpool of public opinion of "falling behind". Some enterprises with weak strategic determination are often "kidnapped" by the unified standard of the Internet, wandering between one outlet after another, misestimating the right direction for themselves again and again.
NetEase let the outside world see the other side of the Internet: the Internet is by no means an industry that has been piled up by the wind, and "slow" is also a way of survival. Just like Forrest Gump in the movie, who seems to like to do "stupid things", because he does not have so many concerns, he firmly controls his own direction, and finally surpasses everyone with his own rhythm.
Write at the end
As Ding Lei gave in the shareholder letter to "understand" NetEase's methodology: when you use the keywords "user" and "love" to retrieve NetEase's past, you will never fail to understand NetEase again.
Undoubtedly, it provides a new perspective for the outside world to examine Internet companies. Many founders like to compare competition on the Internet to "war", but whether it is a limited war with the purpose of winning or an infinite war with the purpose of continuing the war, it is more or less mixed with the gamble of success or failure. But who is the target of this "war thinking"? I'm afraid it's not users, it's capital.
Especially in the context of the Chinese stock crisis and the return of more and more Internet companies to Hong Kong for listing, Ding Lei's "Forrest Gump philosophy" is not only applicable to NetEase: chasing capital as a gambler, gambling nine times out of ten, because the outlet and direction of the wind are themselves uncertain events; chasing users for the long term, naturally also chased by capital, after all, this is the core value of a company.