Eight months after the listing storm, a series of new developments in Ant Group have once again attracted attention. First, the application for the opening of Chongqing Ant Consumer Finance Co., Ltd. was approved, taking an important step in compliance operation in the new regulatory environment; then, five brands of Ant Group, such as Alipay, Ant Chain, Ant Wealth, Alipay+, and WorldFirst Wanlihui, appeared on the sidelines of the European Championship and returned to the public eye again.
The LED advertising space next to the European Championship is a top marketing resource for any sponsoring company. Interestingly, in the European Cup, a globally watched event, Ant Group left its exposure resources to its sub-brands, including Alipay+, Ant Chain and WorldFirst, which are relatively unknown to the outside world.
Such a choice must have its own meaning for commercial companies that are accustomed to considering the ratio of inputs and outputs. This playful consideration, it is not difficult to read that Ant Group emphasizes the intention of independent growth and development of its sub-brands.
After the IPO was suspended, Ant Group entered a period of rectification and business adjustment. Everyone is talking passionately about whether the elephant of the ant "has never been revived." But interestingly, most of the discussion mainly revolves around the growth space of the credit business, but ignores the layout and possibilities of other businesses.
The advertising layout at the European Cup just gives us an opportunity to glimpse the business considerations of ant in the rectification period and the strategic direction hidden behind it. Let's try to answer from another angle: Why does Ant Group let the sub-brands attack independently? Does the adjusted business layout inadvertently confirm the "ant colony effect" of the biological world?
Ants, not just small loans
Generally speaking of Ant Group, I think of Alipay and micro-loan business. In fact, Ant Group's business goes far beyond that:
1. Alipay. At present, the services provided by 3 million+ mini programs in alipay include travel services, convenience services, and local life. This year, Alipay launched a series of merchant services, such as opening up home page traffic to merchants to help them better operate themselves.
2. Wanlihui and Alipay+ are global payment brands. One is committed to achieving "one account, sold all over the world", and the other is committed to "one wallet, all over the world".
Since around 2015, Ant Group has been cooperating with local payment companies overseas to support them in building a local version of Alipay, covering countries and regions such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea and Hong Kong.
All of this shows ant's determination to provide services to consumers and small and medium-sized merchants around the world and implement the globalization strategy.
3. Ant Wealth. Mainly focusing on the fund distribution business, it cooperates with about 170 asset management institutions to provide services on ant wealth APP and Alipay APP.
As a wealth management platform, it can be seen from two aspects. First, the overall scale of personal investable assets in China is rising steadily, reaching 241 trillion yuan in 2020. Second, china's cash and deposits account for 58% of personal investable assets, compared with 12% in the United States, and even considering Chinese special financial preferences, China's wealth management market has a lot of room for improvement.
4. Ant Chain, a technology brand of Ant Group, integrates blockchain, AIoT and other technologies, and is committed to linking industrial networks and building trust mechanisms, so that blockchain can change production and life like mobile payment.
"The role of ant chain is to build roads in the industry, help industries better link and trade, and then create a more prosperous industrial ecology." Jiang Guofei, vice president of Ant Group and president of the intelligent technology business group, once explained this.
The leading technical strength has made the ant chain gradually known to the outside world. According to the data, the number of patent applications of ant chain blockchain has ranked first in the world for four consecutive years, and it can technically support 1 billion account size, 1 billion transactions per day, and achieve 100,000 cross-chain information processing capabilities per second.
In the past four years, AntChain has solved trust problems in more than 50 industry scenarios, including commodity traceability, cross-border trade, copyright protection and development. Not long ago, AntChain also became a global partner of Euro 2020, exploring the application of blockchain and other technologies to help the digital upgrading of the sports industry.
In addition to the above businesses, Ant Group also has many businesses such as insurance, credit information, online banking, etc., and is in a leading position in their respective industries. A new ecosystem has been formed.
As we all know, Alipay was originally born to solve the trust problem between buyers and sellers on the Taobao platform. Why can Alipay develop into an ant group, and how does a seed grow into a towering tree? Let's look for the answer in the name of Ant Group.
Colony strategy and self-organization
In 2004, at the first China Online Business Conference, Ma Yun delivered a keynote speech on "Ant Corps Can Defeat Elephants". Although the ants mentioned at that time were not today's ants, we can already glimpse the strategy of Ali and even the ants, and we can also see the deep meaning behind the future name of the ants.
Coincidentally, in September 2012, Jack Ma proposed at the online business conference that Alibaba was about to transform and reshape the platform business. A few months later, in the Naked Heart Valley of Moganshan, Peng Lei, Jing Xiandong and other Alipay executives focused on 8 projects that Alipay wanted to do in the future, including Yu'e Bao, MYbank, Zhao Caibao, sesame credit, etc.
There is no doubt that these have become key projects in the future, and they have also become star products. Why discuss so many product matrices with high success rates as early as the beginning of the payment business? Behind this is actually related to the strategy of the ants. Let's start with ants as a living thing.
Economics and management often derive nutrients from biology and physics, such as the laws of thermodynamics, the theory of evolution, etc. The existence of ant colonies as a kind of supra-individual, its operating mechanism has also aroused the interest of many scholars.
A single ant is extremely small and has no individual consciousness, but a colony can complete complex projects such as reproduction, moving, foraging, nesting, etc. through the internal mechanism of genetic recording.
When we look at the behavior of a single ant, we are completely confused; when we observe the behavior of the entire colony, we can tell whether it is foraging, moving, or building a nest.
Such a cooperative system that relies on the unconscious behavior of individual bodies and is ultimately able to show the results of "intelligent" behavior is called self-organization.
Research on self-organization is already abundant. One of these theories, known as dissipative structures, proposes that the following four conditions should be met to form a self-organization:
Open system. We all know that a closed system, it must tend to be disorderly, such as our room, if not regularly mustered up to clean up, the best golden nest silver nest will soon become a kennel. This trend of closed systems developing irreversibly toward disorder is the famous law of entropy increase; to maintain order, there must be an exchange of external energy and information. For example, in a messy room, one day, my mother came in, and the room would become neat and orderly. This is the work of an external energy that changes the disorder. This is the first condition, to open the system to maintain the exchange of energy and information.
Nonlinear interaction between system features. This one is a bit difficult to understand. Again, take the ant colony as an example. A single ant is very stupid, not even stupid. But queens, worker ants, soldier ants, etc., by completing their seemingly random behavior, can build a very orderly nest. This is not a simple accumulation of behaviors, but the interaction and cooperation between the behaviors of different ants can only be achieved. This action can be understood as a nonlinear action.
Away from equilibrium, a state of dynamic equilibrium. In this state, the microscopic random changes that occur in the system can be amplified.
Ups and downs, i.e. ups and downs. Microscopic random changes are amplified away from equilibrium, allowing the system to reach a more advanced and ordered state. This amplified movement is called a rise or fall.
The reason for spending a lot of time on the connotation of self-organization is that we will find that Ant Group has actually adopted such a colony strategy and is intentionally or unintentionally creating a self-organization.
1. Stay open. There is no doubt that Ant Group is an extremely open system. As an Internet company Ant Group, the emphasis on employees and high salaries can attract countless talents to join; the customer-first corporate culture and the credit endorsement as a large platform make countless merchants and consumers willing to use and understand; as a global group, it can contact countries and regions with different backgrounds and constantly receive new stimuli...
The open system allows Ant Group to exchange information with a huge user base and talent group. This is the premise for Ant Group to become self-organizing.
2. Ant colony strategy. There are many business segments, and each business segment is independent and autonomous, but there can be a non-linear effect between different business segments.
Ant Group has a very clear roadmap for development. From the payment business serving merchants and sellers, the transition to the financial business, and then the development to the technology output business serving financial institutions, it has always been closely focused on the central theme of the financial technology service platform.
When the number of businesses is large enough, there is a complementary effect and synergy effect between different businesses, and even a wonderful effect of unintentional planting willows.
These non-linear effects give Ant Group a unique vitality. This time, Ant Group unveiled five brands at a time at the European Cup, which seems to be announcing its own ant colony strategy in the outside world.
3. Stay out of equilibrium. Every business is in a process of dynamic balancing. Once new business growth points are generated or external factors change significantly, the company enters a state of instability. In a state far from equilibrium, this change is amplified.
The Ant Group is in a state of disengagement. In a platform with a large number of users, every small attempt to change is infinitely magnified.
4. Continuous R&D investment triggers "ups and downs". In a state of distance from equilibrium, even a small change can develop into fluctuations. Regulatory changes, for example, are a change for the industry as a whole. But for self-organization, it is possible to develop into a huge ups and downs, allowing enterprises to re-enter a new dynamic balance and form a more dynamic and orderly state.
In a science and technology enterprise, the most important and core change is scientific and technological innovation.
In 2018, 2019 and January to June 2020, Ant Group's R&D expenses were 5.72 billion yuan, 10.605 billion yuan and 4.789 billion yuan, accounting for 7.89%, 8.79% and 7.32% of the revenue, respectively.
At present, Ant Group has formed the technical cornerstone of BASIC (B stands for Block Chain or blockchain, A stands for Artistic Intelligence for artificial intelligence, S stands for Security for information security, I stands for Internet of Things, and C stands for Cloud Computing is cloud computing) to provide digital financial services for financial institutions, consumers and small and micro enterprises.
From Fintech to Techfin, it is both the self-organizing development of Ant Group and the need to reverse market stereotypes
epilogue
In fact, Ant Group has had many successful attempts at self-organizing development.
Alipay, the predecessor of Ant Group, is itself a self-organizing development. The emergence of payment business was originally only to facilitate transactions, but because of the huge number of users and capital flow, Alipay soon had a huge accumulation of funds and technology. So it began to operate independently and gradually developed into a completely new business.
Another example is artificial intelligence, blockchain and privacy computing technology, which were originally only done to make the platform customer experience smoother and more secure, but because of the existence of a large number of users, once the relevant technologies are matured in internal incubation, they can be opened to financial institutions and form a new business.
As a self-organizing species, ant colonies have allowed ants to survive on Earth for hundreds of millions of years, evolving more than 12,000 species.
If Ant Group can stay away from equilibrium, constantly innovate, and complete self-upgrading again and again through various "ups and downs", it will hopefully hold the weight of the time cycle again.