Chapter five hundred and eighty first to many international
As the end of the year approaches, Rui Xiang and Zhang Yida's series of actions still attract people's attention.
First, it fully acquired Bilibili, which became famous with its chairman, and then acquired Lilith, a well-known game studio.
What attracted the most attention from Internet giants was Ruixiang’s acquisition of British cross-border payment company Wanlihui.
This acquisition has passed the review of the British Financial Supervisory Authority and completed the ownership change, becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ruixiang and the first subsidiary of Ruixiang Financial in Europe.
GrabPay, a subsidiary of Grab Group, of which Ruixiang is the majority shareholder, is currently firmly ranked as the largest e-wallet in Southeast Asia. The following players cannot catch up with their combined share.
In India, Paytm is leading the way, but BBPay has been chasing closely, and its share is getting closer and closer.
In Japan, South Korea, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Africa, Ruixiang Investment’s series of e-wallets are on par with Leech Financial Services.
However, after Leech Financial failed to acquire MoneyGram and suffered a setback in the U.S. market, Ruixiang's high-profile entry into Europe has to be said to be a step ahead.
But Zhang Yida is not complacent. Credit cards are well developed in Europe, and mobile payment involves citizen data, making it difficult to really promote it locally.
The acquisition of Wanlihui is more about laying out the cross-border e-commerce business.
Pinduoduo also launched Duoduo International, a cross-border e-commerce business that had been prepared internally for a long time.
Duoduo International borrowed the resources of Wanlihui and began to tap the tens of thousands of cross-border e-commerce and trade customers on the latter platform to open stores on Duoduo International.
In addition to helping these small and medium-sized merchants open up the Chinese market, Ruixiang's Wanlihui can also help with cross-border e-commerce payment collection and exchange.
Grab's Yidaimai has also joined Duoduo International's investment project. In addition to guiding Southeast Asian e-commerce sellers to open stores in Duoduo International, they also invested US$200 million in Duoduo International and obtained 20% of Duoduo International's shares.
There are many players in the field of cross-border e-commerce. NetEase Kaola is far ahead with a market share of more than 26%, and Tmall International is catching up with a market share of 22%.
In addition, Vipshop’s market share in this segment is similar to Goudong’s global shopping market share, both between 12% and 13%.
Xiaohongshu, owned by Ruixiang, ranks fifth with a market share of 6%.
No one doubts that Ruixiang cannot succeed in this field. After all, domestic short video live broadcasts such as DouShi and Kuaishou are already on the right track.
Ruixiang also has Musical.ly, which has hundreds of millions of overseas active users.
What the outside world is looking forward to is that Musical.ly will also start short videos and live broadcast to bring goods, putting some pressure on Amazon.
At the same time, a high-level meeting was also held internally at Ruixiang.
Gu Panpan looked at Ma Jun, the president of the international business group, frowned and asked, "Why can't Musical.ly start live broadcasting to bring goods? Even if you learn TikTok through short videos, open a TikTok shop, and hang up a product display window, is that enough?"
Ma Jun smiled bitterly and quickly explained, "Foreign markets are somewhat different from domestic markets. Historically, adding a purchase button on foreign social software has not been effective.
Most people are accustomed to choosing specialized shopping websites, and super APPs like ours are not popular in China.
Almost every major social media platform has tested e-commerce functions. For example, Instagram launched an in-app shopping function, and Snapchat also cooperated with Shopify last year to provide a shopping experience, but the results were not satisfactory.
For foreigners, Musical.ly is for sharing life videos or watching short videos."
Gu Panpan is still a little unwilling to give up. Now that Duoduo International is in charge of her, she certainly hopes to achieve success.
If Musical.ly makes good use of this chess game, surpassing NetEase Kaola is no longer a luxury.
"How about giving it a try first?"
She smiled and said, “Renjia platform is Renjia platform, and it is also different from short videos.
Let’s give it a try, what if we make a big breakthrough?”
Ma Jun is a little tangled. He is mainly worried that adding these functions will affect the user experience and cause user activity to decrease.
Although Facebook's launch of Lasso failed, it has never given up. It has been watching from the sidelines, waiting for Musical.ly to reveal its flaws.
Zhang Yida came out to smooth things over and said with a smile: "User habits are indeed a problem. Social e-commerce is very popular in Asia, and users don't think there is any problem.
However, European and American users are accustomed to doing different things in different apps, and it is difficult to change their mindset for a while. We need to cultivate this slowly."
Gu Panpan was a little tangled, but couldn't help but said: "Ruixiang will be listed next year. If the commercialization of Musical.ly can be as successful as Dou Vision, it will have a great impact on our listing valuation and market confidence.
Big benefit.”
Zhang Yida nodded, “I know this, but Musical.ly is still trying to cross the river by feeling the stones.
Before us, no Internet company had ever been so successful in going global, and we had nothing to learn from, so we had to explore everything ourselves."
Lu Qi quite agreed with Zhang Yida's words. He said with a smile, "Musical.ly currently uses in-app purchases of virtual props as its main monetization method, and they don't even dare to add too many ads at once.
Just taking into account that the current number of Musical.ly users is still growing rapidly, the ceiling has not been touched, and the market structure is not completely stable.
If you act rashly, it is very likely that a good situation will be ruined."
Gu Panpan stopped talking now. Both the chairman and CEO objected, so she couldn't say anything more.
Zhang Yida saw that she was a little depressed, so he reassured her, "Although we cannot start e-commerce monetization on a large scale all at once, we can make some small attempts to let users adapt little by little."
"What attempt?" Ma Jun asked.
Zhang Yida said: "Establish a product sales page for the brand, and then let KOLs and users on the platform promote it through a "challenge" format."
Gu Panpan roughly understood that PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds had used the same method to promote before, and the exposure rate was very high. However, if you did it this way, you wouldn't be able to sell many products, so it was mostly promoted in the form of advertising.
Her ideal e-commerce monetization is to directly configure an e-commerce system so that every user can open a store and sell goods on the short video platform.
Lin Zhenyang thought for a while and commented with a smile, "I think this is a way. First, let users know that they can buy things on Musical.ly. This is called cultivating users' minds.
Moreover, our early products are all big brands, so we don’t have to worry about quality control.
As for after-sales, we are currently beyond our reach in the global market.
If there is any scandal about "inferior quality", we will be in big trouble."
Zhang Yida nodded, "Yes, that's what I'm worried about. Unless Pinduoduo really enters the global market, the problems you mentioned can be properly solved."
Lu Qi nodded, "I have a small suggestion. For the brand merchants who launch the challenge, we can provide them with multiple sets of components for labels, product display, and videos. Customers can use these components to design their brand pages.
"
"This is simple, I think it's okay." Lin Zhenyang agreed.
After a group of senior executives discussed for a while, they decided that Musical.ly should wait until Duoduo International's operations reach a certain scale before launching e-commerce monetization.