Image source @ Visual China
Text | Old iron
Today's Double Eleven is not Ali's family, or roughly believed to be the shopping festival of the e-commerce industry, but like the big day of the entire retail industry, street shops hang up "Celebrate Double Eleven" banners, and the streets seem to be full of festive atmosphere after entering November.
Of course, some merchants have adopted the behavior of "free riding", using the double eleven promotion gimmick to be greater than the actual, but for the core retail enterprises, double eleven is also a real big day.
For example, Ali's double eleven momentum will exceed the previous year every year, creating a data record, but at the same time there are many controversies in the market: does Ali's current volume still need to expand the scale of the festival?
As the e-commerce enters a slowdown cycle, this kind of discussion is so rampant that I sometimes even believe it.
We're going to explore this issue in this article.
The capital market is often more sensitive to the operation of enterprises, and we first marked the price situation in November of the calendar year on the Ali stock price chart, see the chart below
In the above chart, we can see that since Ali's listing, the Stock Price in November during the high-probability cycle has been an upward or high point in the current year (except for 2020).
If the stock price is a barometer of the fundamentals of enterprise operation, the fluctuations of the stock price naturally reflect the market's attitude towards the enterprise, and the capital market still gives more positive attitudes to Ali's double eleven.
In order to strengthen the comparison, we add jd.com to compare the situation, after all, since the listing of JD.com retail has entered the expansion cycle, and Ali has conducted many rounds of competition on the business side, especially in the double eleven, how does the market view it?
Jingdong's earliest participation in the double eleven inevitably has the idea of "free riding", the market in the early stage of Jingdong pricing is relatively restrained, compared to Ali, Jingdong's stock price in November in the early days of a bit of a flurry feeling, but after 2017 Jingdong stock price began to rise, but then the gap with Ali stock price also began to open:
First, with the improvement of scale and influence, the market for JD.com began to reverse the "free rider" attitude, pricing power increased, while at the same time, Ali stock price growth rate is faster, we can speculate: the retail industry in the double eleven as a whole is rising ship, JD stock price rise has its own ability relationship, but can not ignore the "boat" is above the "water";
Second, after the internal crisis of Jingdong in 2018, the stock price fell, and then the price gap with Ali was enlarged, after 2019, the gap gradually narrowed, during the double eleven, the stock price as a whole was in the rising cycle, but weaker than peers, it can also be seen that the market will also take a different approach to industry individuals.
After the above simple comparison, we can conclude that from the perspective of the capital market, enterprises need a double eleven to boost market confidence, and the market will also give enterprises good pricing, which is a positive cycle.
Nowadays, the market value of Internet companies, especially e-commerce companies, is greatly reduced by regulation and other aspects, and it is completely understandable to continue to give confidence to the market by continuing to make double eleven.
So let's consider: from the perspective of corporate fundamentals, what does Double Eleven mean?
Continuing to take Ali as an example, we have sorted out the proportion of the core retail business in the current fiscal year of the current fiscal year, see the chart below
In the past few years, although Ali has launched shopping festivals in various quarters, such as beauty festivals, New Year festivals, etc., and "anti-free riders" to make 618 bigger, under these efforts, we can also see that the proportion of core retail in Q4 every year is declining, but we still have to say that the absolute value of the weight is not obvious, that is, about 3 percentage points.
It took several years and decades, a lot of energy and financial resources, to launch a series of shopping festivals, but we still have to point out: Q4 is still the largest value of Ali retail, and it is not too diluted because of other artificial festivals, so Ali can not lose enthusiasm for Double Eleven.
Many years ago, there was a joke in the anecdotes that a certain arrogant and ignorant person believed that Ali's double eleven was no longer in e-commerce, but testing cloud computing. I've been laughing at ignorance privately, because common sense can tell how big the loopholes are, but from the above chart we can confirm again: Singles' Day is really for the retail sector.
On the one hand, the capital market is extremely sensitive to Double Eleven, and on the other hand, one-third of the focus of corporate operations is also in Q4, and the focus of Q4 is Double Eleven, and the value of Double Eleven to Ali Retail is obvious.
But this year's double eleven situation is different, in the live broadcast industry with goods thriving, when the double eleven is already a public holiday, all practitioners are "free riding", Ali is difficult to get all the resources of the festival, the implication is that Ali's main control ability on the double eleven will have a risk of continuous decline.
If ali and Jingdong compete, the industry is because of competition and the water rises, although the open competition, but in fact, every company is a profiteer, competition is not a zero-sum effect, but at present, insufficient domestic demand, industry competition has increased sharply, "involution" may make "water" not rise too high, but "boat" has been quite crowded.
Recently, some of the remarks of The Eagle Ye even believe that Double Eleven has to make way for the anchors, the reason is that the anchors have mastered the laws of the supply chain, rather than the previous diversions, that is, the moat of the traditional e-commerce platform to be weakened by the live broadcasters.
This is certainly not what Ali wants to see, so what we want to discuss is whether Ali's moat is really strong.
Therefore, we have sorted out the relationship between user scale and GMV in the past year's Double Eleven, see the following figure
Before the data fit, we had taken it for granted that Tmall GMV might be closely related to MAU, but after comparing the data, we found that the relationship between the two was so close that R2 was 0.9277, which was a serious positive correlation.
We can also understand that as a mobile shopping platform, the MAU base represents attention, which represents the efficiency of traffic and customer acquisition, and it is not too much to regard this as an Ali retail moat.
However, in 2020 in the figure above, we also obviously see that the dot distribution deviates from the fitting line, which has the relationship between the double eleven participants, such as local life services and Fliggy and other businesses began to be deeply involved in the activity, but we can also roughly judge that in 2020, despite the impact of the live broadcast platform, the scale effect of the platform is still relatively good.
If we think of MAU as a moat for Ali GMV, we can explain some phenomena:
First, after entering 2021, Ali has significantly increased the investment in market expenses, that is, the requirements for customer acquisition are strengthening, and still wants to achieve a soft landing of business growth through the fact that the growth of MAU smooths the growth of GMV, but this will also have a greater impact on the income statement, and the operating profit has the risk of continuous decline;
Second, for the 2021 Double Eleven, Ali is bound to go all out, on the one hand, under the festival promotion, the efficiency of customer acquisition is higher than usual, on the other hand, to maintain the relationship between suppliers and merchants with the scale of users is also an important time point to improve the relationship, after all, the scale is still what business operators rely on.
Finally, let's explain the conflict between the live broadcast of the goods and Alibaba e-commerce.
On the surface, or in a long period, I am more in line with the words of The Eagle, today's anchors and the early traffic import anchors have been fundamentally different, and the ability to control the supply chain and products is not what it used to be.
But on the other hand, we should not overemphasize the impact of live e-commerce on traditional e-commerce, because when we use a simple evolutionary monistic idea to judge, the industry may be in a slow or even multi-format coexistence cycle, such as the United States has Amazon as a model for online retail, but TV shopping as the original scene has not disappeared.
HERE TV shopping is not a metaphor for Ali, and Amazon does not specifically refer to live e-commerce. Just think that we should not use too much "subversion" to look at an industry, for Ali, if we analyze the strong relationship between GMV and MAU analyzed in the figure above, although the current MAU is slowing down, the total scale is still the top domestic e-commerce, that is to say, Ali is still possible to maintain the fundamentals of e-commerce.
In addition, from a cyclical point of view, I personally also think that Ali is still likely to undertake the dividend of continuing to "consumption upgrade", taking the clothing industry I often cite as an example, in the past, the change in the industry boom value is actually closely related to the macro supply-side reform, if this work enters the end, then there is also a positive side for Ali.
Final summary of the full text:
First, whether it is out of the help of income, or the consolidation of the e-commerce moat, the double eleven pair ali is quite important, and every year the double eleven must go all out, which is beyond doubt;
Second, from the perspective of data, there is a strong correlation between Double Eleven and MAU, that is to say, live e-commerce will have a long-term impact on Ali, and Ali still has to do its own thing in the short term: stabilize the user market. Try everything possible to attract users, retain users, think in this direction, Tencent and Ali after opening up, there are more positive factors for Ali;
Third, for Ali, long-term problems are still quite many, such as how to solve the potential problem after the bottleneck of user growth, and whether the live e-commerce will fall into a zero-sum game, etc. In 2021, double eleven, the significance of Ali is quite large, we not only have to look at the GMV data, but also look at the financial report and after the double eleven, how the capital market reacts, which involves Ali's future "qualitative" problem.