Author: Perry
At the beginning of the new year of 2024, on February 16, OpenAI released a new **generative AI model SORA, which can quickly make a 60-second ** through text, in which multiple characters, specific actions and complex scenes can be presented.
The emergence of SORA has shaken the global technology circle, and OpenAI has brought great pressure to Internet manufacturers.
As a result, between technology and real estate, the Internet giants have made a collective choice.
Technology or Real Estate? The choice of major Internet manufacturers
The emergence of SORA is not accidental.
Considering that the development of AI systems is extremely expensive, its huge computing power requires huge amounts of money, and at the same time, it is by no means realistic to make a profit in the short term, so OpenAI was founded as a non-profit research company. As early as 2015, when OpenAI was founded, it was co-sponsored by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba, Ilya Sutskevel and John Schulman, OpenAI is the development of secure and open AI tools to empower people (not wipe out humanity).
It wasn't until 2019, when OpenAI fell into a financial crisis, that OpenAI announced that it would be restructured into a "for-profit company" OpenAI LP to attract more investment. That is, "capped profit" organizations, which are "a mix of for-profit and non-profit".
At the same time, OpenAI ushered in a large investment from Microsoft:
In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI to provide OpenAI with servers with powerful computing power to support the development of large models.
In 2021, Microsoft invested an additional $2 billion in openAI;
Until December 2023, OpenAI became an instant hit with its chatbot ChatGPT, and Microsoft took advantage of the trend to increase its investment by $10 billion in January 2024.
The big investment in technology has given Microsoft a new impetus to grow:
According to Microsoft's financial report released at the end of October 2023, Microsoft's "intelligent cloud" business (including Azure, GitHub, server products, enterprise and cloud services) revenue increased by 19% year-on-year in the third quarter, and the revenue growth rate of Azure, the flagship product of the cloud business, returned to a high of 29% year-on-year, ending a slowdown trend for seven consecutive quarters.
In fact, not only Microsoft, but also Apple, a veteran technology company, has been investing heavily in technology
At the beginning of February, Apple's virtual reality device Vision Pro was officially released, and although the first generation was not perfect, its usability and control were already the best among virtual reality products, and many consumers saw the potential of virtual reality devices to become mobile devices in the next era.
Compared with the choice of the Internet giants, the preferences of the two are clear at a glance:
Technology investment is long and difficult to achieve profitability, in essence, technology research and development is a "life to death" process, not only requires a lot of capital, but also needs to invest for several years or even decades, which can be observed from Samsung's early years of research and development of chips, often billions of dollars of investment for several years, which once led to Samsung into a crisis, after surviving this stage, the position of Samsung chips is firmly stable, Samsung relies on the moat to develop so far.
However, real estate is relatively less risky, and it is easier to make a one-time investment, and then realize multi-year rental revenue, although the profit margin is relatively low, but the risk is low enough.
As a result, between technology and real estate, the most innovative Internet giants collectively chose real estate.
Of course, as a company, this choice is understandable, nothing more than to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and reduce risks, however, it also means that they have bid farewell to the previous spirit of innovation.
If you look at the history of the development of the Internet giants, you will find that although the times are changing, the willingness of the Internet giants to buy land seems to have never dissipated.
As early as the portal era, buying land is the "standard" for the development of large factories, in 2006, the mobile era is still in the future, Sohu, one of the "three musketeers" of the Internet at that time, spent 27.7 billion US dollars to buy Wudaokou Sohu Building, in 2010 and at least 2 billion yuan to buy Zhongguancun Sohu ** Building, according to the current housing prices, the value of the building has long been several times higher than the market value of Sohu, I have to say, Zhang Chaoyang investment real estate is still discerning.
Since then, the development of the Internet and the real estate industry seems to be blended together, and among the buyers of land, Internet manufacturers have always been frequent customers.
At the beginning of 2024, a piece of news is hot. According to a public announcement on the official website of the Beijing Municipal Planning and Natural Resources Commission, Tencent Technology (Beijing)** won the B4 comprehensive commercial financial service industry land and B23 R&D and design land for plots A, B, C, J at the north end of Xueyuan Road, Haidian District, with a transaction amount of 64200 million yuan. In this regard, Tencent said that the transaction will be mainly used to meet the company's demand for office land and provide stable and centralized office space for the company's employees, and before that, Tencent also won the land plot at No. 10 Xibeiwang East Road, Haidian District to build Tencent's Beijing headquarters building, which was completed and put into use in 2019, with a total investment of 1.8 billion yuan.
In fact, with the continuous change of real estate policies, real estate companies and Internet "big factories" have completely different attitudes towards land acquisition. Starting from the second half of 2021, affected by a series of policies, the investment intensity of real estate enterprises began to decline sharply, and among the top 100 real estate companies, the total amount of land acquired throughout the year decreased by 21 percent year-on-year5%。Judging from the data, among the top 100 real estate companies, most of them are small and medium-sized real estate enterprises, accounting for 107%, and in 2022, although the performance of private real estate companies is not ideal, there is still one in the top 10, but in 2023, none will be among them.
In January 2024, China's real estate enterprises will be among the top 10 in terms of new value
Unlike the prudence of real estate companies, the Internet "big factories" are aggressively acquiring land. For example, Tencent, which acquired the land this time, has spent at least tens of billions of yuan in the real estate field since its first "cross-bank" in 2006. In addition to Tencent, in the past 1 year, Huawei, JD.com, Alibaba and many other Internet "big factories" have taken land, compared with traditional real estate companies, the speed of land purchase is significantly faster. In the case of JD.com, in February 2023, JD.com will start with 31On June 18, 2021, JD.com and Excellence jointly won a plot of land in Shanghai Putuo 237 square with nearly 10 billion yuan in the first batch of centralized land supply in Shanghai. In addition, in the land buying camp, there is also a figure of ByteDance, from its 9 billion yuan acquisition of Zhongkun Plaza of the Great Bell Temple, to 204.2 billion yuan to win the south block of 1 neighborhood of Pingliang Street, Yangpu East Bund, Shanghai, in recent years, bytes have spent a total of about 22.8 billion yuan, and won 6 projects with a total construction area of nearly one million square meters, which are basically "headquarters level". In June 2020, Shenzhen Toutiao Technology, a wholly-owned subsidiary of ByteDance, won 108.2 billion yuan to auction a commercial land in Yuehai Street, Shenzhen.
Why did the Internet giants become "landlords"?
On the surface, all the "big factories" have "reasonable" reasons for buying land.
After the "big factories" embarked on the fast track of the development of the digital economy, the number of employees also skyrocketed, and the state of "no fixed residence" is not only inconsistent with status, but also has many inconveniences for employees. Therefore, "placement" of employees is one of the reasons. Taking ByteDance as an example, as of now, its number of employees has reached about 160,000, and it is difficult to imagine what it would be like for 160,000 people to go back and forth without stable office space. Similarly, there is Xiaomi, after the completion of the capping of Xiaomi's headquarters, the founder Lei Jun once said excitedly: "Beipiao, after more than 9 years of struggle, finally bought a house."
There is also a giant that said that the land was acquired to prepare for internal housing purchase benefits, but its internal employees said: "We have not heard of this good news at all."
Looking deeply, the deep reasons why "big factories" buy houses are nothing more than the following:
1."Buying land and building buildings can be profitable".
This is in 2010 when the Sohu ** building was completed, Zhang Chaoyang confidently released the "bold words" to the outside world. However, Sohu has the confidence to say this. As a high-quality asset recognized by banks and capital, real estate can not only bring profit appreciation, but also "survive" at critical moments, such as Lenovo.
After the acquisition of Motorola's mobile phone business, Lenovo's capital plummeted, and at that time, affected by the overall development of the industry, the development of its main business PC was also in trouble, and Lenovo was under great pressure at that time. In the half year from May 2016 to March 2017, Lenovo successively won all the shares of its three buildings and the real estate company Rongke Zhidi, in exchange for about 18 billion yuan in revenue, which greatly eased the pressure on the development of the enterprise.
Of course,There are no absolutes in the world,LETV is the failure of real estate investment"Lessons from the past",Whether it is spending a huge amount of money to buy a number of pieces of land in Moganshan planned to be used as LETV Ecological Automobile Industrial Park,Or the purchase of Beijing Shimao Gongsan,In the end, they were all miscarried due to LETV"Thunder",It can be said that there is no return。
2.Big but not strong, the real estate moat is relatively stable
Those who have constant production have perseverance, and those who do not have constant production have no perseverance", land is the best representative of "constant production".
At the same time, relying on their huge amount of funds, a matrix has been formed, such as "Ali system" and "Tencent system", etc., when the market value is at its peak, it can also "wrestle" with the global Internet giants, but it is also a fact that it is big but not strong. Many giants are only strong in China, and from an international point of view, they do not have their own core technology, and if they only rely on continuous iteration to develop, their ceilings can be seen with the naked eye. It may be the best way to rely on land investment to build a "moat" for enterprise development, you know, the plots obtained by large factories are generally core locations, on the one hand, they can be used as "ammunition depots" for the future appreciation of assets, on the other hand, when the cycle is down, the real estate on the land can bring value preservation, and at the same time, in order to attract large factories to "settle down", the policy will generally give tilt and preferential treatment, and this investment will not be lost.
Can real estate policy bring development prospects?
From the perspective of market acumen, rapid response ability and risk and crisis awareness, the Internet giants should not be underestimated.
In recent years, the real estate economic model has undergone substantial changes, and the operation and value release of real estate stock are about to usher in a new era of their own. As the Internet industry, which is at the forefront of information reception, agile manufacturers will of course take the initiative and act early.
At the same time, the follow-up trend of real estate development is worth looking forward to:
On the one hand, the current inventory cycle is close to the bottom, but due to the inconsistent inventory cycle in different fields, the degree of improvement in supply and demand is different, resulting in an uneven speed of recovery and transformation. For large factories, taking land at this time is undoubtedly "the time of day".
On the other hand, the introduction of a series of financial support policies, as well as the structural adjustment of the industry, can be seen that the country's determination to reform the real estate industry, for investment in real estate has a series of favorable policies. For sunrise industries such as artificial intelligence, digital economy, and new energy, the state has also begun to vigorously support and gradually promote the realization of industrial upgrading and iteration. In this development process, the stock of real estate will be organically combined with various industries, and gradually realize the new model of "space + content + technology".
In addition, for large factories, buying real estate in large quantities is also a means of asset management, while commercial real estate is a process of realizing the financial value of assets "starting with the end in mind". Through asset management, we can open up the financing and exit channels of the capital market to maximize the value of assets and optimize investment.
According to the current development trend, the layout of Internet giants in the real estate field is expected to be further expanded in the future, and will become an emerging force for the development and transformation of this field. However, when relying on "shortcuts" can make the financial report look good and profitable, which company is willing to really think about the development prospects and ways out of future science and technology? Investing in land and real estate, although it has built a "moat", it is inevitable that there are some regrets.
In the United States, such as Meta and Apple, after bidding farewell to years of rapid development, they have invested profits in technology research and development on a large scale, forming technical barriers, such as Apple chips have been increasing research and development, Microsoft's investment in artificial intelligence is obvious to all, and real estate is just to meet the needs of the office, but many Internet manufacturers have invested large sums of money in real estate, which has also led to the reduction of their research and development and technical strength.
After bidding farewell to the traffic era, where will the Internet giants who are deeply anxious about traffic go? Will you become the next "real estate tycoon"?