Robin Li looked at the hot word "China's third largest Internet company" displayed on the Qiandu search engine, and was filled with emotions and inexplicable.
Qiandu was once rich and was the Internet company with the highest market value in China.
Why is it called "BAT" instead of "ATB" or "TAB"? This also has historical origins.
In March 2011, Qiandu’s market value reached US$48.1 billion, surpassing Penguin and becoming the Chinese Internet company with the highest market value at that time.
He, Robin Li, also became the "richest man in China" in the Forbes Mainland Rich List.
Google withdraws from China, Qiandu search accounts for 76% of the Chinese search market share!
This is Qiandu and his most glorious moment!
The name BAT also gradually became popular from that time.
Later, when we entered the mobile Internet era, Qiandu was a little slow in its transformation.
Qiandu has a presence in the mobile application market, long video, O2O and other fields.
But except for iQiyi, other investment and merger cases are lackluster.
The media and netizens all call "2000-2010" the golden decade of Qiandu!
There was no shortage of innovation at that time, and a series of excellent products such as encyclopedias, Zhibao, Tieba, music, libraries, and pictures emerged.
Coupled with the acquisition of hao123, Qiandu firmly controls the traffic entrance in the PC era.
Graphics, BBS, UGC, audio, video...Qiandu's content products cover almost all content forms.
Robin Lee sometimes wonders, what went wrong with Qiandu?
After summarizing, he came up with three questions.
First, there were investment problems. Qiandu Nuomi and Qiandu Takeout, which had invested heavily, were completely vulnerable to Magnesium Tuan and Ele.me.
The second is the lack of innovation within the company, which has been resting on its laurels and has no innovative products.
For example: products like DouShi and Ruixiang Digital have not been born.
The incubated Du Xiaoman Financial has no way of competing with these three companies: Leech Financial Services Group, Tenpay, and Ruixiang.
It can only fight a small battle with Yimindai, a less important company under Zhang Yida, on the education installment battlefield, and it has not been able to completely gain the upper hand.
The summary is that Qiandu’s traffic and content are no longer dominant.
Without good content and products, you will naturally not be able to attract traffic.
This also led to the third problem. In order to make the financial reports look good, they worked hard on the road of advertising monetization, which led to many out-of-control problems.
For example: Completely commercialize Tieba and kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
In an official capacity, each post bar is packaged and sold in order to quickly realize cash.
In 2016, the hemophilia bar incident broke out in Tieba (the hemophilia bar was sold to a private medical institution that had been reported many times by patients).
Immediately afterwards, the "bidding ranking" mechanism that had created a lot of profits for Qiandu was also controversial due to the "Wei Zexi Incident", which directly had a severe impact on the company's revenue.
The core problem is that with the explosion of mobile Internet, the only entrance to search has been eliminated, but it has given Ahri and Penguin a new opportunity.
The mobile terminal has created a traffic portal for Penguin who is engaged in social networking and e-commerce, and search engines have become dispensable.
It can be said that the revolution in the mobile Internet era has revolutionized thousands of lives.
In order to make Qiandu great again, he regards "All in AI" as the company's core strategy and takes "using technology to make the complex world simpler" as its mission to open up and empower.
As early as 2013, Qiandu started its AI deployment and was the first company among BAT to deploy AI.
After years of careful planning, Qiandu has become one of the world's top AI giants and is the absolute leader in the domestic AI field.
In October last year, Qiandu was selected as one of the top four global artificial intelligence companies selected by Fortune magazine, together with Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
But this is all water far away, and it cannot solve the fire close by.
The news is that the throne of the third largest Internet company is about to be taken away!
Robin Lee, who has enjoyed so many flowers and applause, has long seen through the false fame.
He doesn't care who takes away the third largest Internet company. What he cares about is that the thousand-degree moat is really getting shallower.
AI is poetry and distance, while search information flow and advertisements are the bread and butter of the family.
Now all the rice in the house has been emptied by those robbers.
He received news some time ago that Toutiao is grabbing high-quality creators and traffic from Qiandu, and DouShi is also grabbing advertisers.
Looking at the traffic of Toutiao and DouShi, he was also very envious!
If Qiandu had these two products and got some enhancements in graphic information and short video content, not to mention a comeback, it would at least be able to reverse some of its decline.
"Robin, are you looking for me?"
A gentle man in his thirties walked into Robin Lee's office.
"Shen Dou, you're here, sit down quickly!"
Robin Li greeted Shen Dou with a smile and sat down, his eyes full of expectation.
Shen Dou is a Ph.D. from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He was born in 1979. He only joined Qiandu in 2012 and has successively served as deputy technical director of the Alliance R&D Department, technical director, technical director of the web search department, and senior technical director.
In May of this year, he was promoted to Vice President of Qiandu, with overall responsibility for Qiandu APP and information flow business system, including Qiandu APP, information flow, short video, Baijiahao, Qiandu News, Qiandu Browser, hao123 and other mobile related
business.
Robin Li is very considerate, otherwise he would not have been promoted so quickly.
After describing his worries about Qiandu's content and traffic to Shen Dou, Robin Li looked at him and asked, "Do you have the confidence to shoulder this burden?
Baijiahao, the company can use 10 billion yuan to subsidize creators.
For short videos, I plan to separate the short videos from the information flow in Qiandu on my mobile phone and create an independent brand named "Haokan Video".
iQiyi can provide copyrights and materials, relying on our content ecological advantages and artificial intelligence technology distribution advantages.
Not to mention defeating Douyin and Kuaishou, at least we must gain a place in the field of short videos!
Can it be done?"
Looking at Robin Li's expectant eyes, Shen Dou groaned secretly in his heart.
Only after he was promoted to vice president this year did he realize what kind of mess he had inherited.
Qiandu is no longer the Qiandu it was six or seven years ago, and its advantages in traffic and content are no longer there.
Today's headlines are so aggressive that it's so scary.
However, he is not asked to completely defeat Toutiao and DouShi, but if he just grabs some market share, he should still be able to do it.
He nodded, "I will try my best!"
…
In addition to Qiandu, Ali announced Tudou's comprehensive transformation into a short video platform, and spent an unprecedented 2 billion in cash to launch the "Big Fish Project" to recruit Big Fish Project partners globally to support short video content entrepreneurs.
According to Ali Entertainment Chairman and CEO Yu Yongfu, Ali Entertainment will create an ecological matrix with short videos as the core.
Among them, around Tudou, the data, traffic, and content of the four platforms of Youku, Taobao, UC, and Laifeng are completely connected.
besides!
Weibo announced the launch of its new video product Coolan!
Miaopai, a subsidiary of Yixia Technology, announced a US$100 million short video support plan!
360 and NetEase also joined in the fun and said they want All ln short videos!
The Internet world, which has been silent for a while, is finally making waves again!
Because of Zhonghe Group’s acquisition of Kuaishou, all Internet giants who want to get a share of the short video pie have seen the unlimited prospects of short video.
Relying on two short video platforms and a social e-commerce company Pinduoduo, Zhonghe Group is valued at US$55 billion.
If we can grab some market share, can we also build a multi-billion dollar short video platform for fun?
There are not a few people with such thoughts.
In addition, these people also know that this year should be the last chance.
Once the resources of Kuaishou and Douyin are integrated, what awaits them will be out.
…
"Pony, Ruixiang is not yet engaged in mergers and acquisitions?"
Liu Zhiping came to ask Bonima.
Bonima shook his head. It was more than 60 billion US dollars, which was a bit beyond his estimate.
Rui Xiang, this little elephant, was originally raised to stomp on ants.
But if you are not careful, you will have grown into an elephant, and if not, the penguins will suffer backlash.
Seeing that Bonima looked a little confused, Liu Zhiping asked: "Are you considering the issue of the 16.362% shares?"
Bonima nodded, "It's not just a matter of this part of the equity, but also the support for Ruixiang, and...prevention!"
"Precaution?" Liu Zhiping asked.
"Yes, it's about prevention."
Bonima smiled bitterly, "At the beginning, Paybay accounted for more than 70% of the mobile payment market share.
Thinking of supporting Ruixiang to attract and bear some firepower, Penguin could use red envelopes and other tricks to infiltrate Chen Cang later.
Today, some results have been achieved, and WeChat Pay also occupies about 30 points of market share.
But Ruixiang has also grown, and its market share is almost catching up with ours."
Liu Zhiping shook his head, "It's difficult to catch up with us. The current market share of mobile payment is almost fixed.
Alipay is expanding its business scenarios, Ruixiang is also expanding, and we at Penguin are doing the same thing.
No one can do anything to anyone!
The breakthrough should still have to wait for new technologies and new trends.”
Liu Zhiping comforted him again: "The one who should really worry about Ruixiang is Leech Financial, because both companies are independent APPs.
We are different. We rely on the giant ship of WeChat and there is no shortage of traffic at all.
Subsequently, the most intense competition in the market was between the two of them because their businesses were highly overlapping.
Leech Financial Services has supported Paytm in India, Ruixiang has launched BBPay, and in Southeast Asia...
In short, wherever the business of these two companies develops, they will go wherever they go.
The existence of Ruixiang will affect Leech Financial Services the most, followed by us.
Of course, Ruixiang's equity appreciation also compensated for part of our losses.
The 16-point-plus equity is now worth US$10.9 billion, which is more than seven times the original cash investment of US$1.5 billion.”
Bonima looked at Liu Zhiping and asked, "What do you mean?"
"Let Ruixiang continue to contain Leech Financial Services, but we will no longer provide any resources to Ruixiang, including investment.
Wait for the right opportunity to sell your equity and cash out!”
Bonima thought about it and realized that this was the only way to go. Anyway, Leech Financial Services was the most affected, and Penguin could recover some losses through equity appreciation.
He looked at Liu Zhiping again and asked, "What about Zhonghe Group?"
Liu Zhiping thought for a moment before replying: "Based on the current situation, the e-commerce sector has the greatest impact on Ali, the advertising sector has the greatest impact on Qiandu, followed by Penguin..."
After listening to Liu Zhiping's analysis, Bonima said: "Seeing how popular the short video is, I almost want to resurrect Weishi!"
"If you do this, I'm afraid it will cause trouble with the Zhonghe Group!"
Bonima looked indifferent, "So many people are making short videos, why can't we do it?
Don’t forget, Pinduoduo still has to rely on us to divert traffic!”
After saying that, he added: "I am also planning for a rainy day. Short videos are very close to the entertainment sector.
If anything happens, we won’t be at a loss.”
Liu Zhiping always felt that something was wrong, but he couldn't refute it.
After all, no matter how good Divi or Kuaishou is, he is not his biological son.