Author |Liu Baodan.
Last year, ByteDance achieved $110 billion in revenue, surpassing Tencent, and China's Internet industry's long-standing BAT giant pattern is being subverted.
In the past decade, Byte has undoubtedly done a lot of things right by growing into a towering tree in the gap between the two giants of Alibaba and Tencent. However, as the Internet enters the era of stock, the traffic peaks, and bytes are also facing the problem of slowing down growth, and reducing costs and increasing efficiency is on the agenda.
In 2024, what kind of development strategy will Byte adopt, the latest speech of the company's CEO Liang Rubo gives the answer, the sense of crisis is the biggest background, and fighting mediocrity is the antidote. Bytes are very different from what they used to be.
At the byte all-staff meeting on January 30, Liang Rubo shared the priorities for work in 2024, and the first place is the organizational management culture level; secondly, to continuously increase social trust; Finally, the business continues to focus on a small number of important things.
Putting the organizational management culture in front of the business shows how much bytes are valued.
In terms of organizational management, Byte emphasizes the need to strengthen the sense of crisis, always start a business, and escape the gravity of mediocrity. Liang Rubo said frankly that the biggest sense of crisis is the fear that Byte, as an organization, is becoming mediocre and unable to make new breakthroughs.
This concern is not unfounded. Douyin data shows that from 2019 to 2021, ByteDance expanded rapidly, and the number of employees increased from more than 10,000 to more than 100,000, which also made Byte inevitably infected with the disease of large companies.
One manifestation is that bytes are far less responsive to new opportunities than startups. Liang Rubo mentioned that the semi-annual technology review at the company level did not start to discuss GPT until 2023, and the large-scale model startups that did better in the industry were founded from 2018 to 2021.
Liang Rubo's prescription for how to solve this crisis is to break complacency, raise standards, and build a lean organization. In his opinion, only in this way can bytes "escape the gravity of banality".
Byte is trying to get back into the entrepreneurial state. In fact, shortly after taking over as CEO, Liang Rubo proposed to prevent falling into the disease of a large company. To this end, he made changes to the internal culture, elevating "always entrepreneurial" from fifth to first.
However, the re-introduction of entrepreneurship also shows that the previous progress has not been smooth. Bringing an organization of 100,000 people back to entrepreneurship is indeed a big challenge for Liang Rubo.
Shifting the strategic focus to the interior is an important shift for Bytes, indicating that the management problems brought about by high growth in the past few years have gradually been exposed when the growth rate slows down, and Bytes should "grow muscles and strengthen bones" internally.
At the same time, bytes have also entered the stage of contraction from expansion at the strategic level.
Although Liang Rubo only emphasized one sentence on business, this sentence has a high gold content, which represents that the strategic direction of bytes is still focused on focus. In fact, this is also the main tone of Byte's development over the past year or so.
In March last year, Liang Rubo said at the 11th anniversary meeting that "information platform" and "e-commerce" are the backbone businesses of bytes and should be focused.
As the backbone business of bytes, Douyin has achieved 700 million daily active users in six years, and Douyin e-commerce is also the fastest platform with a transaction scale of more than one trillion yuan. However, after rapid growth, platform users and e-commerce transactions have begun to show fatigue.
It is an indisputable fact that the growth of Douyin users has slowed down. According to QuestMobile data, as of December 2023, the total number of users of Douyin Group is 105.7 billion, an increase of only 60 million over last year, and the growth rate has slowed down significantly.
Douyin's ability to "make stars" is also getting worse and worse. In the past few years, there were crazy Brother Yang, Liu Genghong, Dong Yuhui, etc., who continued to be out of the circle, but in 2023, Douyin will have almost no top stream, and the "Wenshen" who will be out of the circle in the second half of the year will have less than 5 million fans.
To a certain extent, the "Wenshen" out of the circle also implies the anxiety of Douyin, and Douyin hopes to inspire more people to create content through the popularity of "Wenshen".
In terms of e-commerce, Douyin has focused on the construction of shelf e-commerce, and the GMV growth rate of the Douyin platform in the past year has exceeded 80%, which is significantly slower than the doubling growth in the past. To this end, Douyin has accelerated the layout of overseas markets, TikTok has launched closed-loop e-commerce in the United States, and its investment in the Southeast Asian market is also increasing.
Compared with the continuous cultivation of the main business, Byte has carried out a large-scale contraction of the exploratory business.
At the end of last year, Byte's domestic VR giant PICO significantly reduced its workforce, laying off about 23% of its workforce, and only retaining its core team. At the same time, Byte's game business has undergone a large-scale business contraction, and the online projects have sought to be divested, and most of the unlaunched projects will be shut down.
Whether it is user problems or the slowdown in e-commerce growth, Byte tries to regain its growth state by stimulating organizational efficiency, which is the core essence of Liang Rubo's speech.
In the rapid expansion of the Internet industry, Byte successfully broke through with two products, Toutiao and Douyin, and became the new king of the industry in one fell swoop. However, as the growth of the industry slows down, the pressure gradually increases.
If you want to wear the crown, you must bear its weight, and the new challenge of bytes has begun.