Listing slogans have been shouted out, horse honeycomb must come up with a clear profit model.Source. | Burning Finance (ID: rancaijing)
Not long ago, Horse Cello became the most lively company on the veins because of rumors of layoffs of up to 40%. This is not the first time horse honeycomb has been exposed for layoffs, and in April 2019, horse honeycomb had a 10% staff optimization.Prior to this, the horse honeycomb has been the topic of continuous, hotel booking oolong incident, data fraud, the World Cup brainwashing ads and other storms appear. Still, Mr. Ma received a $250 million capital raise from Tencent in May 2019 and has called for an IPO in the next year or two.Departing employees told Burning Finance that the layoffs, content centers and trading centers are "heavy-hit areas", and in April that optimization, the soul of the horse honeycomb department including the strategy department, the destination department cut, so that everyone is both heartache and heartache.For this "hurtful" move, investors said, whether it is the company's development or investor requirements, listing is imminent, horse honeycomb must come up with a clear profit model, but commercial investment is too large, input and output rate is not good, can only shrink the team.This "small and beautiful" community, started with a tour, and many "content to deal" feelings of the community such as knowledge, small red books, pods, in the commercialization and old feelings of the tangle, can not run forward. They face a common problem - users are here to plant grass and watch strategies, but they don't have to order here.Change means that you may offend loyal old users; Of course, horse honeycomb is now facing a new problem, in the capital under the wrap of running too fast, afraid of falling, how to do?With the online tourism industry dividend gradually fade, coupled with tourism consumption "low frequency, instability" and so on, the profits of the entire industry is very limited, the active users of horse cellular in Ctrip and flying pig system in the squeeze still maintain a certain market position.However, according to the 2019 China Online Travel Market Annual Comprehensive Analysis, Ctrip's market share accounted for 36.6%, where to go market share of 16.5%, flying pig travel market share of 14.3%, the same journey Yilong market share of 5.3%, Tu niu and the United States group review market share of 3.4%, horse cellular can only look at its back.On the way to an IPO, the horse cells seem to need more results to prove themselves.A horse honeycomb with a broken hamstring2019 is the year of the horse's honeycomb injury.In the common memories of many employees, the working atmosphere of the horse honeycomb is very lively, friendly and avant-garde, free even a little lazy. But at the 2018 annual meeting, CEO Chen Wei proposed that the company move into combat in 2019, and the company began to promote a culture of wolf sex and overtime.At the beginning of 2019, Ma Cello consolidates its previously fragmented business units into four business centers:Content Center(Travels, strategies, and notes), trading center(E-commerce, tickets, machine wine and big traffic)data center, user growth center,And the formation of data-driven as the core, "content and trading" dual structure strategy.The adjustment of the structure is bound to be accompanied by personnel changes, from the above strategy, the importance of the content center and the trading center is self-evident. But some of the departing employees told Burning Finance that the two departments, whether they are layoffs or departures, are among the hardest hit areas.According to Zhao Ping, a former employee, the company called in a new HRBP in 2019(Human Resources Business Partner)That optimization in April,cut some of the soul departments of the horse honeycomb, including the entire strategy department, the destination department,Many of the employees who have been laid off together are seven or eight years old."The whole atmosphere is not right. The students in the attack department are generally in the artificial output of high-quality strategy, their production capacity may not be very high, but it is the soul of the horse honeycomb, their contribution to the content will retain a lot of fans. Many users are responding that the content updates are very slow and unsymonsmed. They were cut, and everyone was heart-tinged and cold-hearted. Zhao Ping said.After the reorganization of the department, Zhao Ping's team was separated, and there were many more teams like them. Zhao Ping said, not only that, many people in the hands of the original project has been suspended, because the temporary replacement of leader, need to keep working, when he did things for half a year did not go online, can only choose to leave."Ma honeycomb working environment can be regarded as the Beijing company inside the 4 stars, the company previously paid attention to the harmony between employees, once a year there will be a different theme of the department year-end photography, now look back, together with the photo of the people visible to the naked eye less, very sad." After leaving office, Zhao Ping still expressed his unyielding to the horse honeycomb.They left together, and the HRBP. Ma Cello was originally a small and beautiful company, but expanded by about 800 people in 2018 and faced two optimizations in 2019. Big change, very hurt.Another former employee, Xiao Ya, said that throughout February-June 2019, ma cellulars were hiring people above the P8 level. "The leader of the previous trading department was transferred to the content center, and then the leader of the data department was in charge of the content. Song Yajun(The pulse appears as the vice president of horse cellular, responsible for horse cellular app platform and content-related lines of business)He was previously the head of the trading center, but later moved to the content center. She said.But a current employee at Ma Cello denied the claim, saying that the address book now showed that the person in charge of the content center might have been responsible for travel or strategy; It is possible that the top has undergone another adjustment.According to reports, these are recruited professional managers, will directly over the horse honeycomb original BP（business partner）and they were in a different system before they entered the job. This left Xiaoya with the impression that "the whole of 2019, the horse honeycomb is in the circle", we must first circle the business and personnel into their own hands, before they can do performance. "A lot of people were recruited, but soon they were laid off again."Another big change is that there was no OKR before the horse honeycomb（Objectives and Key Results）Or KPI, which will not be available until April 2019. "A bunch of people who don't understand OKR start using OKR, which leads to meetings all day and then touch O, and the goals keep changing, and the way they achieve them keep changing, and the results are even less likely."This series of adjustments suggests that the horse honeycomb is eager to change from a small, beautiful community to a tourist service platform, but the road is not easy.Is being forced to go public a good way out?Ma cellular by Chen Wei and Lu Gang was founded in 2006, from the accumulation of many years of "tourism strategy" to cut into e-commerce, in 2015, horse honeycomb APP changed its name to "grass honeycomb free travel", business coverage of air ticket reservations, hotel reservations, tickets, cars and so on.In fact, since 2018, the horse honeycomb on the wave, hotel booking oolong event, data fraud, World Cup brainwashing ads, so that it has become the focus of public attention time and time again. Despite the setbacks, Mr Ma has been called out for an IPO in the next year or two and has been financed by Tencent.Horse Cellular Financing History Chart / CVSource.comHorse cellular all the way from the attack community to grow up, the advantage is obvious - the attack content of the moor is very high, which is also its core values. In May 2018, Ma Cellular released a set of data: the number of monthly user travel has reached 130,000, accumulated more than 180 million reviews, the number of independent users exceeded 120 million, MAU more than 80 million. "The horse cellular DAU at the end of 2018 should be about 1.2 million, and it could reach 2 million by the end of the holiday season." XiaoYa told Burning Finance.However, how quality content should be combined with business is always a problem. "That's why horse cells are laying off workers, commercialization is too big, input-output rates are not good, and teams can only be contracted." One investor told Burning Financial.According to Jiang Tao, managing partner of Gobi Ventures, there are two major challenges in the development of horse cells:First, ma cellular later want to review from the strategy to review, especially the direction of hotel reviews, but the quality of hotel reviews is not Ctrip's high;Second, content and commercialization are not so close.Mr. Ma, who had said he wanted to be China's TripAdvisor, began by focusing on hotel reviews and then expanded into a booking channel, which was sped up in December 2011 and is now valued at $4.205 billion. However Chinese compared with foreigners, itself is not so love reviews, coupled with some domestic brush reviews of the evil, in the hotel booking itself is not high quota premise, hotel reviews have little effect.For a long time, horse cells were not profitable, and in June 2012, after the horse honeycomb began trying to commercialize content,Brand advertising fees and trading commissions are the main sources of revenue.Jiang Tao told Burning Finance,Its commission ratio is about 3%, which is much lower than other OTAs.Early in order to attract merchants to do so is reasonable, but later if the volume does not come will become a loss-making business.People close to the horse honeycomb say that on the horse honeycomb platform, the premium customization is relatively high, the ticket category is only 2%, very low.The reason why the horse honeycomb vigorously develops the hotel reservation also has a lot to do with its high valuation. "The latest valuation of the horse cell has reached $2bn, and if we continue to do tourism only, gross margins are too low to support such a high valuation." Jiang Tao said,Whether it is the development of the company or the requirements of investors, listing is imminent, horse honeycomb must come up with a clear profit model."The value of the horse cell is certainly worth recognizing, but valuations don't match the current performance, revenue is low and growth is not up, which is a challenge for it." Jiang Tao said.Tourism industry entrepreneur Meng Fei believes that today's tourism industry, Ctrip is a mountain that can not be bypassed. It seems that the United States group in the hotel did a good job, but mainly to do the low-star hotel, Ctrip in the air tickets and high-star hotel's core supply chain control means very tough, resources have tended to be monopolized by the giants, want to change very difficult.Machine wine is the standard, the final match of the label or the price. For users, from which hotel is the same, the price is the core."The user's perception of the horse cell is still at the critical level, at least for its core users, with inconsistent demand, difficult supply chains and too many challenges."”Meng Fei said that the horse honeycomb is currently doing the strongest, or day trip, fragmented free travel, scattered in a lot of strategy inside.Today's platforms need a continuous flow growth curve to tell a good story for capital if they want to go public. As Ctrip's growth slows, Mr. Jiang said, Mr. Ma should continue to implement some commercialization paths with a commission rate of at least 5%.Data show that Ctrip 2018 full-year GMV(Excluding sky patrol)Growth of about 30%, while the horse cellular official announced that for the fourth consecutive year has achieved GMV growth of more than 100%. However, from the commission amount, some media said that the platform GMV in 2018 is expected to exceed 15 billion yuan, at a 3% commission rate, horse cellular commission is only 450 million. By comparison, Ctrip's 2018 accommodation booking revenue was Rmb11.6bn, or 37 per cent of total revenue, while its travel and vacation business generated Rmb3.8bn, or 12 per cent of total revenue. To be forgotten by everyone, the revenue of packaged tourism products in 2018 also reached 1.8 billion yuan."In terms of the growth of the horse cellular business, I'm still not very optimistic about its listing. But there will certainly be another tentacles appear, before we all feel that can not beat Taobao, or there is a lot of spelling. Meng Fei said.Where are the opportunities for horse honeycomb?Horse cells grew up from PC-side communities, but suffered in the age of the mobile Internet. Short video and other fragmented, entertaining content form, has become the mobile Internet era to improve APP stickiness and retention means.Since 2019, the number of users sharing short content has increased by 150 percent compared to last year, and the number of likes has increased by 32 percent per month, according to ma cellular research. The same is true of trends abroad, with 54 per cent of travel marketers planning to use YouTube ads, 50 per cent planning to use Instagram stories and 49 per cent planning to use Facebook stories to attract visitors in 2019.In the age of the mobile Internet, ma cellular has met two major competitors, Little Red Book and Jiyin, which could theoretically cover travel content downwards. Ma cellular also realized this, has been the small red book as a competition, set up a special note department, and now is also vigorously layout short video content, defense against shaking. Now its APP interactive home page is more like a popular review.However, there is also a contradiction, Meng Fei said,Tourism content entertainment can not guarantee the conversion rate of transactions, such as horse cellular World Cup ads, large traffic is difficult to retain.High-trust travel content, such as strategy, is not attractive.In addition, although Ma cellular received Tencent's investment, but missed WeChat traffic. In addition to mergers and acquisitions, Tencent has been involved in 12 investments in the tourism industry, according to IT Orange. The horse cellular is likely to be just a pawn in Tencent's fight against Ali and Baidu in the OTA field."The grasshopper's honeycomb itself has content for moth holding, plus travel products are suitable for forwarding recommendations between friends,In fact, horse honeycomb has the opportunity to develop in WeChat ecology, but at present does not see very good results.”Jiang Tao told Burning Finance.Previously, under the impetus of Tencent, Ma cellular and the same Cheng Yilong cooperation. Specifically, users can browse horse cellular-related content when booking through the same yilong small program, and can even jump to horse cellular small program, trying to form a "booking-decision-transaction-sharing" closed loop. "But what the same yilong is doing is booking the target of the sinking market, the tourism business is very small, and the horse cellular users are difficult to match." Meng Fei said.Finally, as the entire trading industry has entered the stock market, fine operation has become one of the required test points for every company.The "Hotel Booking Oolong Incident" mentioned above is a counter-case in which a third-party vendor who booked an offshore hotel in cooperation with Ma Cello booked the wrong hotel and misbooked the Barbados Hotel, which was due to be booked in the Vladivostok region, to a hotel on the Greek island of Barbados. The solution offered by Horse Cellular Customer Service is to let users take their own rides.One in Russia, one in Greece, later compensated three times the amount of the original order, but also exposed their supplier management, customer service systems and other aspects of the rough.Some employees told burning finance, horse honeycomb to the late stage, began to separate from user demand and the pursuit of delivery rate. The average travel company pursues POI(Point of Interest), the horse honeycomb assessment is POE(Entertainment Point), like skydiving, hot air balloons, or secret room escapes. But the purpose of mining this entertainment point is to strengthen the transaction, not to consider the user's demands.Users are voting with their feet, for the user's irreplaceable is the value. It's not easy to start a business, it's harder to keep your job. The online travel industry has left very limited room for trial and error in horse cells.The puzzle is from the Network and is requested by the interviewee,In the text Zhao Ping, Xiao Ya, Meng Fei as a name。
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