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AutoNavi "disrupts the situation" and runs errands, and the ride-hailing platforms want to tell new stories, but are Meituan errands willing?
Author |Gao YuzheEdit |Xing Yun**: Leopard Change (ID: baobiannews).
Author: Gao Yuzhe.
There are many errand runners with players, and there is another cross-border general.
Recently, AutoNavi Map has launched the "second delivery" service in Beijing, Wuhan and Hangzhou, and currently only connects to Ele.me's Hummingbird errand platform.
Unlike Didi Express's 200 cities and 0 commissions, AutoNavi tested the water and ran errands, which seemed a little "quiet". If you don't search for keywords, you can only find it in the "travel" menu on the secondary page, and the reduction and exemption of 5 yuan for the first order is also more restrained.
As the ride-hailing market becomes saturated, major mobility platforms are looking for new growth points. It is not surprising that Didi Chuxing, Haro, Cargo Lala and other leading errand industries have many years of travel experience and their own transportation resource platforms are among the city's distribution services. The addition of AutoNavi undoubtedly made the battle more intense.
Actually,As a subdivision of the instant delivery track, errand running mainly meets the needs of some personalized distribution, buying, and helping in the same cityIt already has the participation of local life players such as Meituan and Ele.me, and also gathers professional delivery players such as SF City, Flash Delivery, and UU errands.
Under the scuffle, can the online car-hailing platform get a piece of the pie? What is the situation of the errand running rivers and lakes of the involution upgrade?
Online car-hailing platform, collective "cross-border".Among the many online car-hailing platforms, Didi Chuxing was the first to test the water errand business.
In 2020, Didi Chuxing launched the "Help Me Buy" errand business in 21 cities, buying milk tea, coffee, medicines, etc. by special delivery, and can also help pick up express delivery and documents. Inspired by the head "big brother", in the same year, Hello launched the "Hello Express" service from some cities in Guangdong, with the help of Hello Hitch car owners, online car-hailing drivers, etc.
After three years of cultivating users' minds, Didi launched the "Didi Express" business in June this year, which connects to professional errand companies such as Dada Express, Flash Delivery, and SF Express in an aggregate manner, covering more than 200 cities. Cargo Lala, which mainly focuses on large-scale freight, also launched two rounds of intra-city errand services in March.
After savage growth, the demand for the online car-hailing industry is still increasing, but the first-class war has compressed the profit margins of the platform. Judging from the actions of each company, errand running is expected to explore new business growth points, and in order to attract users and riders, platforms have their own strategies.
In order to gather more riders, Cargo Lala opened the "burning money" mode and invested 20 million subsidies, which were used to reward users and subsidize new capacity. At the same time, the threshold for riders will be lowered, and no commission will be charged for riders who register before August, and a running order reward will be introduced.
Didi cooperates with third-party platforms to expand its business scope with the help of companies such as Dada Express, Flash Delivery, and UU errands, which only need to carry out scheduling and coordination, and can also improve distribution efficiency.
In addition to the strategy,The platforms have their own focus on their errand services.
Didi Chuxing's "express delivery business" takes the "delivery and moving" in the first-level page as the entrance, providing multi-order delivery and two-wheel direct delivery. From the perspective of rider capacity, the order page shows that "there are 100+ couriers nearby, and it is expected to take orders in 1 minute", which seems to have sufficient capacity and a better experience.
Due to the own advantages of large-scale distribution, there is no overweight fee, and the same-city pick-up and delivery of large-weight items is more cost-effective; Hello has errand business on the first-level page "Delivery", and the current discount can be reduced by up to 10 yuan.
Judging from the entrance settings of the errand business, Didi, Lalala, and Haro all jump to the first-level page, and only AutoNavi is set on the second-level page. In terms of **, taking Beijing as an example, Didi's services are the most but high; Haro is lower under the discount**, but like hitchhiking, you need to choose the pick-up and delivery time, and instant delivery is not guaranteed.
Behind the collective entry of online car-hailing into the errand business, one isIn the face of demand saturation and declining performance, it is necessary to extend the travel business to the direction of logistics delivery, and the idle time of drivers can be used to improve resource utilization；Second, instant delivery in the same city is indeed a piece of "sweet and sweet" in local life services.
According to the "2022 China Errand Economy Market Insight Report" released by iiMedia Consulting, the market size of China's "errand economy" will reach 13.1 billion yuan in 2021, and the market size is expected to reach 66.4 billion yuan in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 75 from 2018 to 20254%。From this point of view, the errand track can reach 100 billion yuan.
This blue ocean that can be tapped is also favored by capital. In 2020, Dada went public and became the "first stock of instant retail", and since then it has continued to deeply integrate with JD.com; In 2021, SF Express will be listed on the Hong Kong stock market; In 2022, UU errands will receive hundreds of millions of yuan in B+ round investment.
The incremental market attracts new players, but the difficulty of breaking through cannot be underestimated.
There are many entrants, and the head effect is obviousAmong the 100 billion-scale errand tracks, mainlyThree types of players are gathered.
One is the errand business extended from comprehensive service platforms such as Meituan and Ele.me, including Meituan errands and Ele.me errands, which have cultivated certain user Xi habits and consumption mentality after seven or eight years of rapid development.
The other type is Dada, flash delivery, UU errand service as the representative of the focus on errand service players, this single service platform often enters the game early, provides one-to-one urgent delivery and other services, and establishes a high brand recognition. Among them, there are also brands with smaller volumes, such as love to run errands and 365 errands.
Finally, the errand platform represented by SF City and Cargo Lala, which has developed from the express delivery and logistics industry, has experience in intra-city logistics and a complete logistics management system, and can provide services through self-built transportation capacity.
Judging from the current competitive landscape of multiple scuffles,The head effect of the industry is highlighted.
Judging from user feedback, the market share of the errand service of the integrated platform is relatively high, and Meituan has outstanding advantages. According to iiMedia Research's 2022 survey, among the errand brands, Meituan is the most commonly used brand by users, with 601% of consumers prefer this, followed by Ele.me errands (29.com8%) and flash (27.).8%）。Users have a high level of loyalty to errand brands, with 468% of users will identify one or two brands, 413% of users prefer to use several brands.
In addition to the number of users, the total number of deliveries throughout the year, the number of riders, and the coverage of cities are also important indicators to measure the scale of the platform. Looking at this data can be foundThe head player of the errand track has a clear advantage.
In terms of the number of riders, Meituan's "2022 Meituan Rider Rights and Interests Protection Social Responsibility Report" shows that more than 6.24 million riders earned income in Meituan last year, with an average of more than 1 million daily active riders. As of June last year, SF Express had 700,000 active riders in the same city, and Dada Express had 1 million active riders per year.
At present, the capacity organization model of each platform is divided into two categories, one is to recruit riders by itself, and the other is to convene social idle capacity in a crowdsourcing mode. It is also common for delivery workers on many platforms to take care of errand runners, or for one person to work part-time and run errands on multiple platforms.
According to the feedback of riders, the commission ratio of major platforms is mostly 20 -30, "almost one-third". In order to increase their income, many part-time riders have registered on multiple platforms, and some riders can earn 300+ income a day by running orders at the same time in Meituan and Hummingbird. In contrast, a part-time rider of Meituan Crowdsourcing told Leopard Change, "The income of the platform depends on different time periods, but Meituan's order volume is large and the unit price is low, so it will be given priority to full-time riders; The commission for flash delivery is slightly lower, but the order is less. ”
In order to seek increment, errand runners not only need to burn money to change the marketAt the same time, look for "alliances" to expand the volume and traffic。In addition, players are constantly expanding the coverage of the cityThe sinking market has also become a battleground。Under the fierce battle, the competitive pattern of the errand track has been formed, and the players in the second and third echelons are in a more difficult situation than the head with strong barriers.
The money is not that easy to makeWith the development of consumption Xi such as "everything at home" and helping to run errands, the errand industry is visibly hot, but it is not so easy for players to make a profit.
Judging from the data of the top player SF Express, the intra-city delivery service for C-end consumers, that is, the errand business in a narrower sense, accounted for 4. % of the entire revenue plate in 20189%, up to 18% in 2022.
According to the financial report, in the first half of 2023, SF's C-end errand revenue in the same city will reach nearly 1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 254%, the scale of annual active consumers continued to expand, reaching more than 18.5 million in the past year ending June 30, 2023, a year-on-year increase of 503%。
However, from the perspective of the overall business, the net loss of SF City for three consecutive years from 2019 to 2021 was 47 billion yuan, 75.8 billion and 89.9 billion. It was not until the first half of 2023 that it achieved a turnaround for the first time, recording a net profit of 30.3 million yuan.
Another listed player in the field of intra-city distribution, Dada, has never stopped losses, the prospectus shows that from 2017 to 2019, Dada's net loss to the parent company was 144.9 billion yuan, 187.8 billion yuan, 16700 million yuan, with a cumulative net loss of more than 5 billion in three years. It was not until the second quarter of this year that Dada Group achieved its first overall profit after listing.
Although the company did not disclose the profit and loss of the segmented business, it can also be seen from the fierce competitionConsistent self-transfusion is the key to winning the competition.
On the one hand, in the early stage of business development, giants and capital "burn money" for growth in order to stake their land and occupy market share as soon as possible; On the other hand,The size of the errand platform is largely determined by the number of riders, and the high labor cost squeezes profit margins.
It can be seen in the financial report of SF that the operating cost in 2022 will be 985.1 billion, of which the cost of labor outsourcing reached 963.3 billion yuan. SF City has said that it is due to the expansion of business and the increase in order volume, which has led to the expansion of the rider group.
The remuneration and incentives paid to riders are also Dada's biggest expense, which from 2017 to 2019 amounted to 152.6 billion yuan, 1918.3 billion yuan and 2679.1 billion yuan. Even Meituan's delivery cost last year was as high as 801900 million yuan, accounting for 61% of the total operating costs.
In order to solve this problem, some errand platforms try to reduce costs through unmanned delivery. Through machine distribution, it can run 24 hours a day a year, and the efficiency is greatly improved. Meituan began to explore drone delivery in 2017, and by 2022, drones have completed more than 120,000 delivery tasks. Dada Express and SF Express have also carried out unmanned distribution in the same city.
This is still the case for the top players, and the difficulty for the new players is even more difficult.
Taking Huolala as an example, it is different from Didi's huge user base and aggregate rider resources. Switching from four-wheeled to two-wheeled means building your own team of riders from scratch, and in the face of veteran players with hundreds of thousands of riders, the pressure to grab people can be imagined. Therefore, the "burning money" subsidy model has been launched since the entry of the cargo to attract new riders and new users, and once the subsidy stops, the order volume of the platform may be affected.
Online car-hailing platforms have expanded their errand business in order to break through the growth bottleneck and try to share the dividends of the errand track. However, whether it can "survive" to profitability has also become a common problem for new and old players. 