Ali rhinoceros, real or fake?
Source: Shenrancaijing
Author: Wei Jie
Edit: Cersei
Shenran Finance and Economics learned from industry insiders that this new project can be combined with the initiative proposed by Jiang Fan, the president of Taobao Tmall not long ago, to "help 1,000 new brands sell more than 100 million yuan in the next three years". Through this smart factory, Taobao hopes to cultivate 1,000 brand allies to produce low-priced and high-quality products for Taobao. Industry insiders believe thatThrough this project, Ali can form an e-commerce closed loop integrating production and sales internally, tell a new growth story, and externally can attack Pinduoduo's core advantage of "cost performance" and further seize the sinking market share.
The essence of Ali’s Rhino Project is to focus on merchants, and Pinduoduo, which is good at driving traffic growth with tens of billions of subsidies, has also begun to change its strategy this year, subsidizing mid-waist brands from traffic, and exploring C2M customized production. At present, the two major e-commerce companies are eyeing small and medium-sized businesses, but Pinduoduo is good at increasing users and subsidizing traffic for businesses. Ali directly intervenes in the production process and incubates factories independently.But in the long run, there will be a battle between Pinduoduo and Ali in C2M.
The growth of traditional e-commerce has slowed down, and C2M has provided giants with a channel to penetrate into the sinking market. Na Mingyuan, co-founder of Dolphin Think Tank, believes thatIf Ali's rhino plan can run smoothly, Ali can attack Pinduoduo from a higher dimension.At that time, how Pinduoduo will fight back is unknown for the time being. But what is certain is that among the traditional e-commerce giants, the smell of gunpowder is getting stronger.
re-sell clothes
What exactly is Ali's new project?
Before the press conference, the news that "Ali Zoo is about to have new animals" has been uploaded on major social platforms. Words such as "new track" and "three years of confidential operation" have whetted everyone's appetite. At that time, everyone's guesses were focused on medical health and new manufacturing, and some C2M concept stocks even rose for two consecutive days because of this.
On September 16, the answer to the mystery was revealed, and "Rhino Smart Manufacturing" was officially unveiled. Alibaba officially defines it as "the world's first new manufacturing platform" and the implementation of "new manufacturing" in Alibaba's five new strategies.
Image source: Screenshot of Weibo
Open the official website of Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing, a series of technical terms and unfamiliar concepts such as "demand brain, digital process map, intelligent dispatching center, flexible intelligent factory" make people more and more confused.
Putting aside these cool words, some analysts believe that Rhino Smart Manufacturing is C2M, but from the comprehensive information of Shenran Finance and Economics,This is a misunderstanding. Rhino Smart Manufacturing is not a C2M in the strict sense. There is no one-to-one private customization, nor is it that the user places an order before the factory produces it.Rhino Smart Manufacturing is still a "scale" production. The biggest difference from traditional manufacturing is that it makes the user's needs clear before producing through forecasting.
It may be advisable to summarize the model of Rhino Smart Manufacturing as C2B2M, that is, Ali predicts user needs, subdivides user needs, and feeds back to the factory, and the factory produces according to the predicted subdivided needs. The biggest difference from Taobao's B2M model is that it will pay more attention to the prediction of user needs.
"In the past, it was very powerful to produce 2,000 pieces of the same clothes in five minutes on the assembly line, but it will be even more powerful to produce 2,000 different clothes in five minutes in the future.Twenty years ago, it was popular for girls in the whole city, village and province to wear one piece of clothing, but now every girl must wear different clothes. "Combined with Ma Yun's speech at the Yunqi Conference in 2018, we can better understand the rhino model.
If the previous production logic is to produce 100,000 toothbrushes first, and then find a way to sell them to 100,000 users, then the logic of C2B2M is to first predict that users have a demand for 100,000 toothbrushes, and 70,000 of them Like soft bristle toothbrushes, 30,000 people like hard bristle toothbrushes, the factory produces soft and hard bristle toothbrushes in different quantities according to this demand.Users only contribute search data in this chainHowever, helping users engrave their names on toothbrushes is not what Rhino Smart Manufacturing Factory wants to do.
At present, the field that Rhino has entered is not a category with a high customer unit price that has a high tolerance for delivery speed, but a traditionally advantageous category on Taobao and Tmall——apparel. According to Ali, the choice of the clothing market is due to the traditional production-to-sales model, which has caused huge waste, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises, which are facing serious inventory problems.
Image source: Screenshot of Weibo
According to the description on the official website of Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing, the factory can connect the consumer demand of Taobao and Tmall with the production link. The specific operation mode is to discover consumption trends based on factors such as Taobao, Tmall, social information, and trends, and forecast according to demand. Research and develop explosive models, shorten the new product development cycle, and reduce inventory by sales. The rhino factory has shortened the industry's average minimum order of 1,000 pieces and delivery within 15 days to a minimum order of 100 pieces and delivery within 7 days.
In the view of Wang Guoping, a senior consultant of Linkshop.com, it is reasonable for Ali to choose to start from clothing.
"The current bottleneck of Taobao's development is reflected in the fact that it is increasingly difficult to match the products provided by merchants with the needs of consumers, but there is no enterprise that can lead the change in each chain of the supply chain.” Wang Guoping told Shenran Finance and Economics that this is also the plight of the entire apparel industry-clothing merchants are good at sales, but the design link is weak; designers have talent, but no orders, no There is room to play; foundries are good at production, but have no idea about design and sales; software vendors think their products are good, but they have no use for them.
"The market needs an organizer to open up this link, maximize the efficiency of each chain, and better satisfy consumers with the best products and the best prices." Blind spots cannot be resolved by one party alone. At this time, Ali, which has resources such as data, technology, and channels, surfaced.
"Xiaoyaozi set three directions at the time: to be a very large industry, to have prominent pain points on the track, and to be in Ali's advantageous field." Wu Xuegang, CEO of Rhino Smart Manufacturing, explained in an interview with 36 Krypton that Ali sells products every year. More than 700 billion pieces of clothes, a large quantity. In the future, Rhino will participate in the design, design, production, and manufacturing of clothing.
Why did Ali become a rhinoceros?
"Helping small and medium-sized factories achieve digital upgrades, driving employment, promoting the digital transformation of industrial clusters, and leading the upgrading of China's garment industry"... Ali pushed the concept of the new project to the height of the times, but did not mention any benefits for himself in it. So, what is Ali's plan for the layout of "rhinoceros"?
The official Weibo of Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing shows that the company behind the project is Alibaba Xunxi(Hangzhou)Digital Technology Co., Ltd.(hereinafter referred to as "Xunxi"). According to public information, the company was established on March 19, 2018. The legal representative is Jiang Fan, the president of Tmall Taobao. It has a registered capital of 30 million US dollars and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Taobao.
Although Rhino Smart Manufacturing has an independent establishment in Ali, with its own business, technology, development, and products, similar to an independent company, Wu Xuegang said in an interview with 36 Krypton,Rhino team will report to Jiang Fan. "Innovation on the supply side must be supported by demand...Put it on Taobao Tmall, it is a family".
Combined with Jiang Fan's speech at the Tmall Super Rookie Ceremony not long ago, it seems that the most important task of Rhino is toServe Alibaba's e-commerce business, Blood transfusion to e-commerce business.
To be more specific, it is to help Ali achieve the goal of "1,000 new brands on the Tmall platform will achieve annual sales of over 100 million in the next three years, and 100 new brands will achieve annual sales of over 1 billion". The specific way of practice is to directly connect small and medium-sized factories, cut off the brand premium, and produce more targetedly.
These visions will be reflected in the financial report in the future, that is, the substantial increase in GMV and profits is enough to make Ali e-commerce, which has fallen into a growth bottleneck and is being pursued by Pinduoduo, tell a new growth story.
Ali e-commerce is not resting easy.
"From the perspective of user growth, Taobao can cover a wide enough number of e-commerce users. From the perspective of monthly activity and sales, Taobao's growth has been relatively limited, and Taobao's growth bottleneck also means thatTraditional B2C e-commerce growth is slowing down, limited room for expansion. If Taobao wants to continue to expand its revenue and profit, it must either continue to expand the number of users, or increase the unit price of users, or increase the profit of a single product. Zhang Yi, CEO of iiMedia Consulting, told Shenran Finance and Economics that the increase in users is gradually peaking, and it is unlikely that the unit price of users will increase significantly. Only by increasing the profit of a single product can Taobao have a chance to grow significantly.
From the perspective of industry competition, according to the latest financial reports of Pinduoduo and Ali, as of June 30, 2020, the number of active buyers of Pinduoduo for many years reached 683.2 million, an increase of 41% over the same period last year, and an increase of 55.1 million in the second quarter alone. The largest single-quarter growth since listing. In the same quarter, the number of annual active consumers in Ali’s domestic market increased by 16 million to 742 million.It is true that Ali is the number one e-commerce company, but Pinduoduo is catching up and narrowing the gap with active users, which inevitably makes Ali flustered.
According to Jiguang Big Data, as of the end of June 2020, Pinduoduo was in the first-tier industry(mobile shopping)and secondary industries(Comprehensive mall)Zhongdu ranked second, second only to Taobao. On June 30 alone, Pinduoduo added 3.98 million new users, ranking first in the entire network. Among the top 3 e-commerce applications, Taobao has an exclusive rate of 13.03%, followed by Pinduoduo with 11.59%, and JD.com with 1.52%. Pinduoduo's user base and Taobao's user base have a higher degree of overlap, reaching 58.91%.
Pinduoduo not only grows rapidly on the user side, but also has long taken a fancy to the C2M track and is working hard on the factory side. In December 2018, Pinduoduo launched the "New Brand Plan", claiming to help 1,000 factories build a C2M model. In September 2019, Pinduoduo said that its "New Brand Plan" has 85 official members, more than 800 companies have participated in C2M, and the order volume exceeds 70 million. It is expected to achieve a billion-level annual order for customized products within three years quantity.
"Pinduoduo's continuous tens of billions of subsidies have allowed its user base to grow all the way, which has put a lot of pressure on Taobao. In terms of model, Taobao is slightly older than Pinduoduo's group social model. If Taobao wants to continue to dominate the industry, The model must be changed.” Zhang Yi analyzed to Shenran Finance and Economics that Xunxi has two benefits for Taobao, one is to enhance user stickiness by accurately meeting user needs; the other is to open up another track in the industry The competition is not only to sell what the supplier has, but to sell what the customer needs. Through the transformation of the model, Taobao in turn challenges the Pinduoduo model.
Na Mingyuan, co-founder of Dolphin Think Tank, believes thatAfter the application of Xunxi, it can provide Taobao special editions with cost-effective products, and it can also attack Pinduoduo from a higher dimension.Ali uses Xunxi to turn small and medium-sized merchants into allies. Because the cooperation with merchants is more in-depth, these merchants do not have the problem of choosing between platforms. And these small and medium-sized merchants cultivated by Xunxi produce cost-effective products that are sold on the entire network. When they supply Pinduoduo as suppliers, they are grabbing Pinduoduo’s market for Ali.
Are rhinos real cows?
Ali is good at "making waves". Thinking back to the period when promoting "new retail", Ali used the "charm" almost PUA to make traditional retailers self-doubt. They either lowered their value and sold themselves to Ali, or impatiently carried out self-reform according to the concept of "new retail", which resulted in losses. Terrible. Ali used Hema Xiansheng to describe the bright future of the future retail industry with improved efficiency, reduced costs, and big data to meet user needs. However, until today, the new retail industry has not been able to explore a mature profit model.
Ali, like the sea banshee in Greek mythology, has a charming and charming singing voice, and every story can set off waves, but when followers rush into the tide with great enthusiasm, can they find the treasure they are looking for? Can the story of Ali's "new manufacturing" be told well?
Although the smart manufacturing that Ali wants to do is not strictly C2M, butPut user needs ahead of productionIt is something that e-commerce giants are interested in, and these companies are also happy to describe their model as "C2M".
On March 26 this year, at the 2020 Taobao C2M Strategy Conference, Ali launched the Taobao special offer app with C2M products as the core supply. At the same time, the three major C2M strategic pillars of the "Super Factory Plan", "Ten Billion Production Area Plan" and "Double Hundred Goals" were announced.
Zhang Yi believes that if the requirements for the concept are relaxed, the typical model of C2M in the future is to transfer the needs of C-end customers directly to the production plant through the intelligent system, and deliver quickly. It is through this non-strict sense of C2M that Pinduoduo has gained a price advantage and launched a challenge to the traditional e-commerce model.And if Ali's Xunxi develops smoothly, it is not ruled out that Pinduoduo will also have a similar move to intervene in the production process to a greater extent.
Wanlian Securities Research Report pointed out that compared with the traditional "production first and sales later" model and the online e-commerce model, the C2M model can remove intermediate links such as inventory, logistics, general sales, and distribution, avoid layer-by-layer price increases, and make prices more transparent , Both consumers and manufacturers benefit from it, and can meet consumers' individualized and cost-effective consumption needs. the most important is,The C2M model fits the price-sensitive characteristics of consumers in sinking markets, can help e-commerce companies develop sinking markets.
According to a report released by the Mob Research Institute, the scale of users in the sinking market is670 million. It is estimated that in the next 10 years, the consumption potential of third- and fourth-tier cities will be stimulated, and there is huge room for development.
According to the above research report, at present, except for Pinduoduo, the penetration rate of other e-commerce platforms in the sinking market is not high. Taking Ali as an example, in the past 12 months as of June 2019, Ali’s retail market in China has(first- and second-tier cities)The consumer penetration rate in China is about 85%, while the less developed regions(except first- and second-tier cities)Consumer penetration is only about 40%. Therefore, the C2M strategy provides it with a channel to penetrate the sinking market.
The market is vast, but back to Ali's rhino factory, "Xunxi's product is not optimistic about the future.The challenge is being able to land as expected and actually solve the problem", Zhang Yi said, if Xunxi succeeds, there is no doubt that Ali will take the lead in the field of intelligent manufacturing, winning upstream suppliers and downstream customers, but if it fails, Ali Group's reputation and innovation leadership will be questioned, so Jiang Fan's responsibility this time is not easy.
A question that directly hits the soul is: can Xunxi really tap into the needs of consumers? Zhang Yi believes that consumers usually choose products that are already popular in the market and are in stock, so they can rest assured when buying, and users are actually not good at expressing their inner needs. "soCan you refine and form a clear demand on the consumer side?, is the information barrier that Taobao needs to break through. "
In addition, Zhang Yi believes that the rhinoceros factory is still mass-produced after all. Although the production capacity is not a problem, whether it can form a sufficient quantity, whether the factory has the willingness and enthusiasm to cooperate; whether it can guarantee sufficient profits for the factory, and whether this model can Bringing the benefits originally envisioned is a risk that needs to be considered.
"It's unclear how far Xunxi can do it. Ali will burn money in the early stage, and the settled party will(Enterprise side)The cost is estimated not to be high, and it may even be free for a period of time.” Wang Guoping believes that Ali’s new project will test the supply chain organization ability, improvement and optimization ability, and data storage and refining ability in the early stage. If it can be achieved Optimizing the entire supply chain and making it profitable for incoming players will be an explosive change to the existing gameplay.
Wang Guoping said that next, if most of the textile equipment in a region is connected to Xunxi Technology, it will be equivalent to forming a monopoly position. Join the players to reach a certain level and form an ecology, and it will be the season of Ali's "harvest". "Of course, this is the ideal, but it cannot be achieved in a year or two.Ali needs to make the merchants have enough orders to drive, so that the subsequent supply chain links will bite on this stable chain. "
Chen Qingqing 