This article was first published in "Cloud Finance"**Welcome to watch more financial stories.
Raise your head and look ahead
**The first article was posted on December 15 of last year.
That afternoon, the warm sun hit everyone's face, but the city of Kunming was experiencing the first wave of infections after the epidemic was liberalized. The malls are empty, and the streets are deserted. The only thing that's running around is:
Delivery riders.
10 hours, 14 hours ......Working hours are constantly being lengthened. From south to north, from morning to night.
It was hard to find someone back then. It took me a few nights to block a few little brothers and chat for a while while they were resting. After that, we never got in touch again.
In the second half of this year, my buddy chatted with me and said that there was a special situation this year: more and more people came to deliver food, and the company's business volume was getting bigger and bigger
But the profit is getting less and less.
He is the largest service provider of a large factory in Yunnan. And he also learned that the ride-hailing industry is not as good as before, and the crowd is constantly pouring in.
This year, I also developed a habit that every time I take a taxi or call a substitute driver, I like to talk to the driver about their income.
I don't know if it's luck or necessity, I've met several who were bosses before. It's a rare sight in previous years.
After chatting, everyone's expectations were constantly lowered, and they wanted to make some money, but then changed their words to support their families, and finally disappointed. When there is no single or little single, they will say a word of comfort to themselves and me:
Don't make yourself so tired.
Ride-hailing and food delivery are both industries trapped between algorithms and people's hearts, but in 2023, they have both become a lifesaver for many people.
A few days ago, a leader of the Research Institute of the Ministry of Commerce posted a data on his account: In 2023, the total number of registered drivers on online ride-hailing platforms has exceeded 100 million, and more than 20,000 new drivers are still registered every day. At the same time, the number of new registrations of delivery workers also exceeds 20,000 per day.
What surprised him even more was that the profession of delivery rider was more popular, because with the same income, the delivery guy worked every day
Much less than ride-hailing drivers.
Unlike many exciting data, in 2023, Brother Cai has talked to many people, and most of what he feels is a different temperature difference. In retrospect, many details were forgotten and numb.
In a flash, a year has passed:
If I had known, I wouldn't have shaken.
Some time ago, when I was having dinner with a few friends, I learned that after the collapse of Kunming Carrefour, those goods that did not have time to sell ended up going to **. A friend happened to be involved in this matter, and the stranded goods were transferred to two large warehouses in Kunming and Yuxi, where they were bought by merchants in Yunnan Prefecture and different cities across the country at lower discounts. Friends say that in the current economic situation, it is not difficult to sell:
It's like an offline spell.
At about this time last year, Kunming Carrefour began to show bad signs, and my partner and I found a businessman, and quietly participated in a negotiation between the businessman and the relevant departments. After listening to it, it's just five words:
Carrefour is cold.
A lot of people didn't believe it at the time.
More people didn't expect that they would survive the three years of stopping, but they would not survive 2023 after returning to normal. The gears of fate are turning, but the direction and speed are a little unexpected.
At first, it was real estate, then it was the first debt, and exports were not good, and the biggest engines of China's economy in the past were almost simultaneously shut down.
It can only rely on consumption. The data also makes it clear that in the first 10 months of this year, consumption contributed 94% to China's economic growth, driving GDP growth by 46 percentage points. It is indeed the engine.
People are experiencing discomfort.
In the past 40 years, China's economy has experienced 30 years of rapid growth and 10 years of medium-high growth, and the last three years have been in a medium-to-low-speed growth stage
It's not going to be able to fix everyone.
In 1991, Japan's "Tokyo Love Story" became popular in Asia, when the Japanese economy had actually begun to decline, but the whole society was still immersed in the narrative of the 80s.
In 2020, this romantic drama that once made Brother Cai cry was remade again, but the ratings hit the street. The Japanese, who survived the Heisei era (1989-2019), are no longer interested in the stories of the struggles of small-town youth, and they no longer care about grand narratives.
From time to time, I like to flip through books about the Heisei era in Japan, and I always feel a sense of déjà vu. Although it cannot be simply equated, human nature and the laws of the market are the same.
Japan was first a car nation and then an electronics boom, but during the Great Recession caused by real estate, companies were busy paying off their debts. At the same time, there are many people who often talk about the topic:
Population ageing.
This was followed by an employment ice age, with the most injured mainly young people born between 1968 and 1977. They thought they could get a good job by working hard, but they were hammered again and again. In the end, a lot of people turned into Heisei waste.
Japanese journalist Miki Kobayashi once wrote a book "Middle-aged Drifting", which describes the lives of these 2.75 million middle-aged people who were abandoned by the country. There are many other books that chronicle that era, the most famous being Kenichi Ohmae's "M-shaped Society", which describes the collapse of the middle class.
In 1996, the Cabinet Office of Japan wrote in the "National Life" that the Cabinet Office wrote:
For Japan, the end of the 90s was an era of big dreams, with policies in the toolbox exhausted, companies always wary of debt, and afraid of expansion.
People accept that prosperity is gone, and they no longer pursue grand narratives, no longer obsessed with economic indicators based on national units, and no longer greedily crave victory.
In the last two years, everyone has been saying that the economy is recovering in a K-shape. Everyone looks at it from a different angle, some sectors of the economy are the top one, but most people feel the bottom one, not going down, but climbing up slowly:
Almost makes you feel it.
A friend of Brother Cai said it more specifically, and I also know to stimulate consumption:
But now I'm a little bit overwhelmed.
The environment is not good, but I am not the one who destroys the environment.
It's not easy for everyone. Even in the case of negative growth in general public budget expenditure in the first ten months, the growth rate of social security employment expenditure in Yunnan remained at 74%。
I asked a friend, is there anything happy about 2023?He thought about it for a long time, there was no splashing wealth, and nothing was far ahead, as if it was the day when he saw his stock mortgage figure decrease:
I feel quite happy.
In 2023, which is like Super Mario, everyone's heads are bruised, and they may not be able to top out mushrooms. Most individuals are suffering from a "singular and abstract consistent fate" that they have not yet chosen.
I have heard a lot of stories this year, and there are nearly a million words in the transcript alone. Some are not easy to say, and some can be moved out to talk about. It's not all complaining, I think, more than anyone else, they want their hometown to be better.
Only those who are truly desperate will not say a word.
Two doctors of a photovoltaic company were going to build a factory in the local area, and during the meeting with the leaders, the two science and engineering men were intoxicated with explaining their own technologies and projects
Let's look into it.
After coming down, they asked the company to provide a lot of materials, such as the amount of registered capital, etc., which made people confused. Later, it was not surprising that the matter turned yellow.
Another thing is also quite regrettable.
Another friend told me that the CEO of a cutting-edge FMCG brand company once wanted to talk to a certain leader about support policies, but was repeatedly abandoned. At the last meeting, the pigeons were released again. The reason for the leadership is said to be:
How much value can this brand create?
In a fit of rage, the company moved its headquarters to Chengdu. By the end of this year, the company had more than 3,000 stores worldwide.
The founder of another fast-moving consumer goods company with the same fierce momentum spent a year to make the company's valuation hundreds of millions after smashing the pot and selling iron, but he couldn't borrow 5 million yuan in the bank. The reason is also very simple, this private enterprise that has been established for less than two years, despite the beautiful taxes and flows:
But there are no fixed assets as collateral.
There are also relevant departments that have cared about them. When they moved to a new office building, a street office at the new site came to him and asked him if he could move the registered address here with a subsidy. The boss told me that he had dozens of registered trademarks in his hands, and it would be a big expense to change them.
They all feel that there are some things that can be more professional and flexible.
This year, I have watched the story of the "Eight Kings" of Wenzhou in 1983 several times, and because of a "liberalization", countless economic vitality was born. Entrepreneurship really needs to be re-understood.
The CEOs of private companies I have contacted have told me that no one doubts that the future will be better, but they are afraid of the A4 paper that suddenly appears.
After listening to it, I suddenly liked the sentence:
It's good to know where you start, but can you not set off yet.
I've read a lot of books and watched a few TV series this year, but my favorite is "The Long Season", which depicts a group portrait of losers.
What touched me the most was that despite the bad cards, they never raised their hands to surrender, they were beaten all over the ground looking for teeth, and they pretended to say freely
Don't look back, look ahead.
Produced by Yuncai Cai.
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