One piece costs 79The red sweater of 9 yuan sent Tencent CEO Ma Huateng to the hot search.
On January 29, Tencent held its annual meeting in Shenzhen. Ma Huateng wore a slightly earthy red sweater and sang the Cantonese song "Bless You" on stage. On multiple e-commerce platforms, the price of Ma Huateng's same sweater is about 79$9,158; The billionaire's dress is so approachable that it has caused a large number of netizens to watch and hotly discussed.
But according to people familiar with the matter, this sweater is just a performance costume worn by Ma Huateng temporarily; At the end of the ** and the speech, the 53-year-old Ma Huateng is still the same"Old dry style" dress - gray stand-up collar jacket with gray trousers,The expression is serious.
In his speech at the annual meeting, Ma Huateng spent 35 minutes reviewing in detail the performance of Tencent's various businesses in 2023 and pointing out the direction of development in the new year.
When talking about the core game business, Ma Huateng bluntly said that "it has been greatly challenged", and "I am at a loss for a while" and "it seems that I have achieved nothing". Even new products such as "Yuan Dream Star" have been criticized by Ma Huateng"It's not as good as it could be".
Among other businesses, CSIG (Tencent Cloud and Smart Industry Business Group) was criticized as "many products below the surface of the water", except for particularly important strategic products and basic investments, "must be landed and surfaced as soon as possible". Ma Huateng even mentioned that "a lot of CSIG and PCG (Tencent Platform and Content Business Group) have been caught in the anti-fraud recently", which is an alarming statement that is extremely rare in the company's annual meeting with the theme of celebration.
Only the ** number has been vigorously affirmed by Ma Huateng and is regarded as the "new sprout" of WeChat.
A year ago, I said that the first number is the "hope of the whole goose factory", after more than a year of development, it has indeed lived up to expectations, giving us a lot of surprises in the process of growth, so that we have a solid grasp in the past short ** failure. He said, "The most important thing is that we are not doing the same thing behind others, but combining our own characteristics and making acquaintances social."
Similar to Tencent's annual meeting in the festive and slaughtering,This year's byte all-staff meeting is even more serious.
On January 30, Byte held its 2024 annual all-staff meeting. CEO Liang Rubo said frankly that many people have reported that now Byte "has all the diseases of large companies"; The company's key words for 2024 are "always start, escape the gravity of mediocrity".
In his speech, Liang Rubo repeatedly mentioned the "sense of crisis" and included "strengthening the sense of crisis" as an annual goal. He believes that Byte needs to break complacency spiritually, raise standards, maintain a sense of crisis and always have an entrepreneurial mentality, and at the same time increase the differentiation in incentives to attract the best talents"Escape the gravity of banality".
Previously, Byte had been adjusting its business layout: the investment of Chaoxi Lightyear and PICO, which cost a lot of money but did not return well, was reduced, and the user scale was difficult to break through, and the company was divested and an independent company was established; At the same time, Byte accelerates the pace of option vesting and increases incentives, so that employees with good performance can get greater returns.
Ma Huateng is pragmatic, Liang Rubo is "pragmatic", and the helmsmen of the two giants are cut in from different dimensions, and the purpose is to drive the company to continue to make great progress. The practice of the two seems to be well water and does not interfere with river water; But standing in the dimension of giant competition, Tencent's most important "sprout", Hao, is likely to become the most powerful opponent of Douyin in 2024; And dragging down Liang Rubo and Bytes, perhapsIt is not that the so-called "mediocrity" and employees do not have a sense of crisis, but Tencent's direct impact on the hinterland of Douyin.
After Byte faded out of the game, the competition between the two giants shifted to "coopetition and cooperation", and there were more opportunities to make it bigger and share the cake of commercial benefits together. However, judging from the latest speeches of Ma Huateng and Liang Rubo, in addition to commercial interests, Tencent and Byte will still face a fierce strategic game.
A Ma Huateng and Liang Rubo's latest speeches, one points to business, the other points to culture,The common denominator is to face specific problems head-on and criticize mercilessly.
For example, Ma Huateng spent a lot of time talking about Tencent's mobile game "Yuan Dream Star", which was launched in mid-December last year. He bluntly said, "It's not as good as I imagined." Martin Lau, Tencent's No. 2 person, pointed out in the PPT, ""Yuan Dream Star" has initially achieved scale and has a long-lasting competition. ”
Ma Huateng also prescribed medicine to "Yuan Dream Star", which had just entered the battlefield, believing that this game was "not only a game, but also has a social component", and raised it to"Base camp position".requires the company to go all out and combine with all businesses to explore common development.
For another example, Ma Huateng believes that going overseas is Tencent's biggest hope for internationalization at present, and requires "to do a thorough and solid job in software and game research and development, rather than being an enemy of other game companies or hardware manufacturers from a deep perspective, and more importantly, to find out their main business and focus on it, so that they have a better chance of winning." ”
Ma Huateng
Martin Lau revealed in the PPT that Tencent's revenue from overseas game business last year was about $7 billion. According to public data, the size of the overseas game market in 2023 will be about 140 billion US dollars. This means that Tencent currently only occupies about 5% of the overseas game market share, and there is still a lot of room for improvement.
The * number is the focus of Ma Huateng's troop arrangement. He believes that the consumption power of the ** user group is very strong, but Tencent has lacked e-commerce knowledge for many years and needs to make up for it. "SoWhat we can fully develop this year is the first live broadcast e-commerceE-commerce and advertising go hand in hand. ”
According to the data of the WeChat Open Class in mid-January, in 2023, the GMV (total merchandise transaction) of the ** live broadcast will reach 3 times that of 2022, the supply of goods will increase by 3 times, and the orders will increase by 24 times; GPM (the average total amount of orders placed per 1,000 viewers) exceeds 900 yuan.
In addition, the No. 1 advertisement is also the focus of Ma Huateng's attention. 36 Krypton quoted sources familiar with the matter as sayingIn 2024, the advertising revenue target is 24.3 billion yuanIt is expected to exceed 50 billion in 2026. At that time, the commercialization ability of ** number will likely surpass Moments and become WeChat's main advertising revenue**, and may even exceed the total advertising revenue of all other business segments of Tencent.
At the byte annual all-staff meeting, although Liang Rubo did not talk about specific business, his wording was also very harsh. He admits that the biggest sense of crisis is the fear that bytes, as an organization, are becoming mediocre — inefficient, sluggish, with low standards and unable to make new breakthroughs.
Liang Rubo cites several specific cases of "mediocrity". For example,After an employee left to join a start-up company, he worked in bytes for 6 months in 1 month; For another example, the semi-annual technology review at the company level did not start discussing GPT until 2023, and the large-scale model startups that did well in the industry were founded from 2018 to 2021.
Liang Rubo even pointed the finger at himself. He said that after Byte became a large company, he sometimes felt that it would not be shocking if the company was 30% or even 50% less efficient than the good team. Reflecting on it now, this kind of "not shocked" makes Liang Rubo "break out in a cold sweat", because it means that "my own standards are falling".
Liang Rubo asked that each team of bytes need to demand themselves with the standards of excellent startups, "strengthen the sense of crisis, always start a business, escape the gravity of mediocrity", and continue to focus on a small number of important things. This is also the second time that Liang Rubo has publicly mentioned entrepreneurship after he elevated "always entrepreneurship" to the top of corporate culture in June 2022.
In the new revolution initiated by Liang Rubo, the first passive knife is likely to be the middle layer of bytes. Tencent's "Deep Web" quoted Byte employees as saying that Liang Rubo's view at the all-staff meeting was that the more leaders there are, the better the performance; Poor performance cannot be carried by the grassroots, and leaders must be carried by them.
Another interesting news is that there have been rumors on the Internet recently that a major Internet company is about to undergo personnel changes, the CEO will resign, and the person in charge of commercialization will take over. A number of Byte employees told "Deep Web" that there are rumors similar to external sources inside Byte.
b The common problem in front of Ma Huateng and Liang Rubo isTencent is committed to cultivating the "sprout" of **, which may collide head-on with the byte of "always starting a business".
As early as more than a year ago, the ** account relied on the boost of WeChat, and the MAU (monthly active users) has surpassed Douyin, and the DAU (daily active users) has also surpassed Kuaishou, ranking second in the short ** industry. However, due to the disadvantage of user usage time, ** is usually not regarded as the biggest threat to Douyin.
However, with the improvement of the content ecology of the ** number, its user usage time has changed a lot. Coupled with the gradual spread of commercialization, the ** number has increasingly become the fatal enemy of Douyin. Especially at the beginning of 2023, Ma Huateng listed the ** number as the "hope of the whole audience", and the latter's monetization pace has accelerated significantly.
Similar to Douyin, the main monetization channels of ** are advertising and e-commerce.
In terms of advertising, Tencent's financial report for the second quarter of last year disclosed that the advertising revenue of the first number exceeded 3 billion yuan. In the third quarter, Tencent did not disclose this part of the revenue separately, but claimed that the ** number advertising revenue increased significantly quarter-on-quarter, which was due to the increase in ** volume and user time, while the ad loading rate remained stable.
According to the estimation of "Wei Xi Zhibei", in the second quarter of 2023, Douyin's advertising revenue will be about 99.5 billion yuan, which is equivalent to 33 times that of the ** advertisement in the same period, and the gap is still huge.
However, it is worth noting that Douyin has reported that its revenue will stop growing in 2021; At Tencent's annual meeting this week, Martin Lau revealed in the PPT that the ** number one advertisement is accelerating. Due to the stagnation of domestic Internet advertisingThe competition between the two platforms for advertising is likely to be a competition around stock rather than increment.
Compared with advertising, the market size of e-commerce is much larger, and it is also the top priority of ** in 2024.
*From the second half of 2022, live streaming will be increased, and sales will increase by 800% that year, and the momentum will continue into 2023. According to "LatePost", the GMV of the first e-commerce in 2023 will be about 100 billion yuan.
In comparison, the GMV of Douyin e-commerce in 2023 will be about 2 trillion yuan, which is equivalent to 20 times that of the ** number. The scale of 100 billion is obviously not enough to satisfy Tencent's appetite; Ma Huateng said in his speech at the annual meetingThis year, we will make every effort to develop the first number of e-commerce, and e-commerce and advertising are complementary to each other.
Tencent has already made some new moves. At the beginning of January, it was rumored that the WeChat payment team will join the construction of the first number of e-commerce, participate in the expansion and operation of various industry categories, talents, customers, as well as the construction of basic functions such as transaction products, with the aim of opening up WeChat payment and the first number to form a joint force.
In the domestic e-commerce market with a scale of 10 trillion yuan, Douyin and ** are not the most important players, and most of the share is still controlled by platforms such as Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo. Therefore, the best number to do e-commerce does not necessarily erode the cake of Douyin e-commerce, and it is more likely to cut the share from the plate of traditional e-commerce.
However, the basic gameplay of ** e-commerce is similar to Douyin, which is guided from the content scene to the consumption scene; In addition, it also has the high opening frequency brought by WeChat, as well as the convenience of deep binding to WeChat payment. In the past year or so, the number one e-commerce has grown rapidly to 100 billion; Now that Ma Huateng has clearly ordered "full development", Douyin obviously needs to deal with it with all his heart.
In addition to the ** number, WeChat'sOther "sprouts" - mini games, search, mini programs, etc. may also compete with Douyin.
Taking mini games as an example, the PPT displayed by Martin Lau shows that in 2023, WeChat mini game users will exceed 400 million, and the annual turnover will increase by 50%, accounting for 8% of the game**; More than 70 games have more than one million DAUs, and more than 100 games have a turnover of more than 10 million.
Douyin also covets the cake of mini-games. According to the data of the giant engine, in 2023, the user coverage rate of Douyin mini games will exceed 400 million, and the number of user interactions of short** games will exceed 1600 million, with an average of more than 800 million searches per day for game content.
In January this year, the giant engine announced that Douyin will invest more than 5 billion resources this year for talent subsidies, operation subsidies, project support, advertising grants, etc., to promote the continued development of Douyin's mini game ecosystem. In the context of the peak of the scale of domestic players, Douyin and WeChat will compete for mini game users, which will be a stock competition.
If Liang Rubo wants to lead Byte to get rid of "mediocrity", the domestic focus is naturally Douyin. However, with the growth of the first-class number users and content ecology, as well as the development of advertising, e-commerce and other businesses, Liang Rubo and Byte will face stronger challenges.
Since last year, the relationship between Tencent and Byte has gradually eased, and they have cooperated in many fields. But Ma Huateng and Liang Rubo's latest speeches show thatThe two giants will eventually step into the same river, and the strategic competition will continue.
The two companies once started a full-scale war, competing in many tracks such as short, information, corporate office, and games. But as Byte has made great strides back in the gaming field, the two have moved into a new phase of coopetition.
Judging from past actions, the tone of Tencent's byte coopetition relationship is: Douyin and other byte-based traffic pools "sell" water to Tencent, and the latter acts as a big advertiser and inputs rolling cash to bytes.
"Selling water" occurs mainly in the gaming sector. From 2023, Tencent will quietly restart the purchase volume on platforms such as Douyin and Watermelon** to divert traffic for its own games such as "Return to the Empire" and "Naruto". When "Yuan Dream Star" was launched, Tencent unabashedly invested about 38% of its advertising materials in the byte ecosystem.
On the other hand, Douyin is also in addition to getting lucrative traffic feesDraw content from within the Tencent ecosystem.
The first to break the ice was the short ** slice. Douyin creators cut film and television dramas without authorization, which has been a headache for Tencent and others; But in April 2023, Tencent** and Douyin reached a cooperation, and the former authorized the latter the secondary creation rights of its own copyrighted content, which relieved the "scissorhands" walking in the gray area, and also allowed Douyin to eliminate the risk of infringement.
More than half a year later, Tencent granted the live broadcast copyright of "Honor of Kings" to Douyin, and another flagship mobile game "Peace Elite" also started an e-sports competition on Douyin. In terms of creators, former Tencent anchors such as Zhang Daxian, Xu Xu Baobao, Feng Timo, and Sky Li Xiaofeng switched to Douyin, and Tencent did not stop it, but sent blessings.
Whether Douyin "sells" water to Tencent, or Tencent authorizes Douyin to broadcast games, it is the right choice in line with the commercial interests of both parties. The two giants learn from each other's strengths and weaknesses to make it bigger and share the cake together.
But it is worth noting that Tencent and Byte made concessions to each other and partially reconciled, mainly in thoseOn the edge business that is not developing well.
For example, in games, Byte once invested heavily in the morning and night light years, but failed to really gain a foothold, and the development of the entire game sector was mediocre, let alone challenging Tencent. In this case, fading out of the game sector and selling traffic to Tencent is not only in Byte's commercial interests, but also will not have an impact on core business segments such as Douyin.
For another example, Tencent previously granted the copyright of the live broadcast of the game to Huya, Douyu and other descendants, trying to use it as a pawn against Douyin. But now, the game live broadcast industry has entered a stable period, and the Huya Douyu merger has stalled, and Penguin Esports has also been shut down. Tencent has actually faded out of game live streaming, so it is not unthinkable to license "Honor of Kings" to Douyin, but it can find new players in the Douyin ecosystem.
In contrast, the ** number is Tencent's popular fried chicken, and Douyin is also the pillar of bytes. Tencent and Byte in the field of short **There is little opportunity for reconciliation and cooperation, but there are conflicts in multiple dimensions.
From the perspective of the number of users, the scale of domestic short-term ** users has exceeded 1 billion, and it will be more and more difficult to attract new users to ** and Douyin. In terms of commercialization, Douyin is currently riding in the dust, and the ** number is also accelerating to catch up, and the two cash cows aimed at are also advertising and e-commerce, especially the latter who has just been named by Ma Huateng.
In this all-out war, neither Tencent nor Byte can afford to lose.
As the "hope of the whole audience" and "new sprouts", the * number is not only burdened with the heavy responsibility of creating new income, but also supports the imagination of the entire WeChat and even Tencent to a large extent.
The same goes for Tik Tok. It is not only the main revenue of bytes**, but also the main stage for germinating and exploring new businesses. Taking local life as an example, the reason why Douyin was able to erode Meituan's share was not to start from scratch completely, but to start from the store visit**, completing the dimensionality reduction blow that Meituan could not follow.
In the past, the competition between ** and Douyin was not fierce. However, with Ma Huateng's request to fully develop the No. 1 e-commerce company, and Liang Rubo's proposal to "strengthen the sense of crisis", the two are likely to stage the first direct collision in 2024.
However, the two giants are constrained by internal and external factors, and it is impossible to return to the old path of all-out war. Under the framework of the new relationship of coopetition and cooperation,How to maintain cooperation and amplify commercial interests, and at the same time actively fight for more strategic interestsIt will be a great test of Ma Huateng and Liang Rubo's management ability and insight.
References:
Power Plant, "Ma Huateng 2023 Annual Meeting Speech: Commenting on the Business Sector, Focusing on Confidence".
36kr, "Tencent's Cruel Annual Meeting: ** No. was Heavily Praised, and the Game Was Heavily Criticized".
All-weather technology, "Byte Liang Rubo's latest internal speech**".
Deep Web, "Byte CEO Liang Rubo: Poor Performance Can't Let the Grassroots Back".
Wei Xi pointed to the north, "How big is the gap between * and Douyin? 》