Alibaba integrates Ele.me, Koubei and raises independent financing: the ultimate showdown between new retail combo boxing and Meituan

The new retail field is undergoing renewed changes. Alibaba’s latest financial report shows that Alibaba has established a holding company, which will serve as the flagship company of local life services. It holds the two major businesses of Ele.me and Koubei, and has received investment commitments of more than US$3 billion. Ele.me’s food delivery service and In-store consumption based on word-of-mouth will create closer synergy.

The CEO of the new holding company will be concurrently appointed by Alibaba Group CEO Zhang Yong. Ele.me and Koubei will continue to operate independently, and will join forces from the two scenarios of "home" and "store" to accelerate the new retail upgrade of the local life service market. At the same time, Alibaba also stated that it has no plans to package and list Koubei and Ele.me.

In this regard, although Alibaba responded that it has established a local life holding company this time to hold shares in Ele.me and Koubei. Koubei and Ele.me are still independent brands and operate independently. But it is foreseeable that Alibaba is putting its new retail weight on the combination of Ele.me and Koubei, and hopes to fight its competitors through separate financing.

Judging from the results, the new company established by Ali does not include Hema. In this regard, industry insiders analyzed "Shenzhen Net" and said that in addition to basic expenses, Hema's other marketing and other expenses are all under the Ali system. Although Hema Xiansheng announced in July last year that the Shanghai Jinqiao store had achieved single store profitability, the scale continued to expand. It means more investment. Once Hema Xiansheng is merged with Word of Mouth and Ele.me, the report will not look too good.

The new company established by Koubei and Ele.me is more like Alibaba’s “killer trump card” for new retail competitor Meituan Dianping.

Judging from the current situation, the war between Meituan-Dianping and Ele.me over food delivery has escalated into a battle between Meituan-Dianping and even Tencent and Alibaba over life service platforms. It is more like an ultimate battle with continuous profit support from both sides. . A senior person in the catering industry told Shenzhen Net that it is difficult to stop this kind of general war because they are constantly generating profits, which supports them to win this war of attrition.

Word of mouth, Ele.me’s “combination boxing”

Alibaba's merger of Ele.me and Koubei into a new company and separate financing means that it is further integrating the two in Alibaba's new retail.If you want to be successful and don't want to work part-time, the AWM260 will give you a weekly salary of over 10,000 yuan in one or two months.

According to reports, the newly established local life services holding company will focus on providing high-quality services to merchants and consumers in local life scenes in the long term.

Under the new framework, Ele.me’s rich local life service resources and strong instant delivery capabilities, coupled with Word-of-mouth’s mature merchant service system and massive payment data, will be further organically integrated. Therefore, this financing marks that the entire Alibaba New Retail system will use greater resources to support the local life service business based on Koubei and Ele.me, and more cutting-edge technology products of Alibaba New Retail will further benefit China. 800 million urban residents.

The ending of the story between Word of Mouth and Ele.me seems to have been foreshadowed when Alibaba took over Ele.me. Earlier, when Alibaba teamed up with Ant Financial to invest US$1 billion in Ele.me last year, it made it clear to the public that the division of labor would be "word-of-mouth focused on stores, and Ele.me focused on home." Alibaba’s wholly-owned acquisition of Ele.me has allowed Koubei and Ele.me to be fully integrated, which also means that Koubei’s status has been further enhanced.

Another clue worthy of attention is that at the beginning of this year, Alibaba announced that it would incorporate the local life service platform Word of Mouth into the new retail system. Koubei's business reporting line was adjusted from the original Ant Financial to Alibaba Group, and Koubei CEO Fan Chi reported to Alibaba Group CEO Zhang Yong. After the adjustment of the business reporting line, Koubei still maintains its positioning as an independent company and has formed a deeper strategic synergy with Alibaba Group in the new retail field.

Less than a week after Ele.me entered the Alibaba system, it announced that it would cooperate with Koubei. The account systems of both parties, as well as marketing systems such as red envelopes and vouchers, would be completely connected. Two months later, Wang Lei, the new CEO of Ele.me, announced that the local instant delivery service of Hummingbird, Ele.me’s delivery platform, would no longer only serve food and beverage takeout, but would instead export transportation capacity to various new retail columns.

The significance of the difference between Ele.me and Koubei to Alibaba lies in the fact that Alibaba uses catering as the entry point for local life services, Ele.me as one of the most frequently used food delivery services in local life services, and combined with Koubei to empower lines with data technology. Provide in-store services for catering businesses, forming a new expansion of local life service areas and new retail.

Zhang Yong talked about the four business trends triggered by new retail in 2017, including "from online to offline, from cities to rural areas, from domestic to foreign countries, and from food, clothing, housing and transportation to eating, drinking and having fun."

After the adjustment of the word-of-mouth business, Fan Chi once told Tencent's "Shenzhen Net" that a new solution would be launched, and the core logic of this solution business is to solve the problem of human efficiency and square footage efficiency in the catering industry through data.

In the future, Koubei and Ele.me will form a strong community in the catering field, and at the same time form effective interactions on the B-side with Tmall and even the China Domestic Trade Division (formerly Alibaba's 1688, B2B), and merchants' upstream purchasing data will be included in Alibaba's system, the purchase of food ingredients will be more transparent, efficient and safe.

At the end of last year, Koubei also completed the preliminary layout of unmanned restaurants in Hangzhou, and at the same time tried to create new market growth through standard semi-finished dishes. In addition to catering, Ele.me provides more delivery options for Alibaba’s new retail system.

Personnel adjustment reveals signal

Before Alibaba announced the establishment of a new company to carry the business of Word of Mouth and Ele.me and raise separate funds, Ele.me also made relevant internal adjustments. Looking at it now, this reveals to a certain extent that Alibaba is further integrating Ele.me with Word of Mouth.

"Shenzhen Web" once reported that Ele.me changed its corporate information on the 2nd of this month. The legal representative was changed from Zhang Xuhao to Wang Lei, and the directors were changed from Cheng Wei, Ji Yue, Kang Jia, Wang Yuan, Luo Yulong, Zhang Xuhao, and Wu Jingyang. For Wang Lei, the equity investors were changed from Deng Gaogao, Zhang Xuhao, Wang Yuan, and Kang Jia to Alibaba.

In this regard, there are many speculations from the outside world that Ele.me's "personnel has been eliminated" after Ali's acquisition. Subsequently, the public relations department of Ele.me issued a statement saying, "The integration between Ele.me and Alibaba is getting better and better. Some recent speculations about Ele.me's personnel vacancies are pure nonsense, and the equity change is just one of Ali's wholly-owned acquisitions." Just normal steps."

According to people close to Ele.me, Ele.me has also undergone internal adjustments after incorporating Alibaba.

According to this person, Ele.me’s previous structure was that BD and logistics were subordinate to two vertical reporting branches. With the completion of Alibaba’s acquisition of Ele.me, the two business lines were merged together in the hope of improving operational efficiency. , and divide them according to the city level and report to the headquarters one by one. But the direct impact was a significant reduction in personnel.

"Finance" magazine reported that in terms of integration, what Ele.me is doing includes opening up KA (key accounts) with Word of Mouth, opening up logistics with Hema Xiansheng, and integrating data and members with the Alibaba system. Get through and wait.

The ultimate showdown between Alibaba and Meituan

In the new retail field, Alibaba’s current number one competitor Meituan-Dianping is ready to go public. Tencent's "Shenzhen Net" learned that Meituan Dianping passed the hearing of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange today and its valuation will fall between US$50 billion and US$55 billion.

When asked whether Alibaba was under pressure from Meituan’s IPO when it established a holding company to raise funds for Ele.me and Koubei, Alibaba responded that “local life is an important part of Alibaba’s new retail strategy. In this market, we believe There is huge potential and we plan and finance the local lifestyle business at our own pace.”

Alibaba also said that compared with Meituan-Dianping, the advantage of Ele.me and Koubei lies in its "ecological synergy", that is, within the Alibaba ecosystem, Koubei and Ele.me have a strong relationship with members, consumer insights, merchant services, and product technology. , instant delivery capabilities, etc. have great synergy with other businesses in the Alibaba ecosystem.

It seems that local life services are evolving into a new pattern. If it was a duel between Meituan-Dianping and Ele.me before, then after the integration of Koubei and Ele.me, Meituan-Dianping needs to face the coordinated operations of multiple opponents within the Alibaba system.

Even so, there is no need to be afraid of Meituan-Dianping. When Ele.me needed Alibaba to continue supplying its blood, Meituan-Dianping had already achieved breakeven in May last year. Meituan-Dianping’s prospectus disclosed that its operating income from 2015 to 2017 was 4 billion yuan, 13 billion yuan, and 33.9 billion yuan respectively, with year-on-year increases of 223.2% and 161.2% respectively, and its revenue increased by more than seven times in three years.

The prospectus also shows that Meituan’s food delivery market share in China increased from 31.7% in 2015 to 56% in 2017, and increased to 59.1% as of the first quarter of 2018. On the other hand, Ele.me made a high-profile announcement in its “summer campaign” in the food delivery market that it would invest RMB 1 billion to seize the market.

Ele.me and Meituan-Dianping, which are locked in a stalemate in terms of share of the food delivery market, are moving in two different directions: vertical depth and diversification. The former focuses on food delivery business and uses word-of-mouth to improve Alibaba's new retail layout, while the latter continues to radiate around local services. Business coverage.