On December 22, the e-commerce platform Mogujie was exposed to plan to lay off 30% of its employees, of which the technical department will lay off 80%, leaving only more than 30 people after the adjustment.
Mogujie was founded in 2011. It first started with social networking and attracted traffic to Taobao. Later, it was banned by Taobao to start an e-commerce company. It once stepped on the trend of brand sales , community, social e-commerce, etc., and was regarded as the star of the future in the fashion e-commerce industry.
The other side of it is magical: it has been established for 10 years, and has never made a profit in continuous transformation. Its market value plummeted by 98% in three years of listing, and it has never recovered. After the rise of live streaming, Mogujie has completely transformed into live streaming e-commerce, trying to catch the last bus of the trend.
With the top anchors such as Viya, Sydney and other top anchors fell in 2021, and live e-commerce swayed in the wind again...
一
Hot to start with a content shopping guide, which is to post on QQ space, Weibo to attract traffic to Taobao.
At that time, Mogujie had a unique skill, using crawler technology to recommend algorithms. The more you like the product, the higher the ranking, the more you rank, and the conversion effect was significant.
backed by Taobao platform, Mogujie quickly became bigger. Data shows that at that time, Mogujie had more than 6 million female buyers, and imported 80,000 transactions to Taobao every day, with a conversion rate of 8 times that of peers.
At its peak, Mogujie and Beautiful Say once provided Taobao with 10% traffic...
But Taobao quickly realized the crisis of traffic being divided by third-party shopping guide platforms, and banned external websites around 2013. Mogujie was forced to transform into an e-commerce platform, and since then he embarked on the road of "chasing the wind" of repeated defeats.
One is brand special sale . After Mogujie started alone, it tried brand special sale, which was to put big-name products online for special sale, but was interrupted by Vippineshop , and it also took the innovative special sale model of "famous brand discount + limited-time rush purchase".
In 2019, Vipshop's annual revenue reached 93 billion yuan, while Mogujie only had more than 1 billion yuan left.
The second is the community model . Mogujie was actually a community at the beginning, and girls share all kinds of good-looking clothes here, just like the current Xiaohongshu.
But Mogujie has never thought about the community matter thoroughly. He wants to cultivate community content and build an e-commerce platform. He has been swaying all the way and has not made it bigger.
Later, Xiaohongshu, which insists on community content, became popular, and celebrities from all walks of life went to open accounts and sell them. The latest valuation has reached 20 billion US dollars. Mogujie, which is undecided, misses the opportunity again...
Third is social e-commerce . After the rise of Alibaba , Tencent has been investing in JD , Vipshop, Mogujie, Pinduoduo and other e-commerce platforms.
Mogujie went public in the United States in 2018. At that time, social e-commerce was emerging, and it was to set up a small program on WeChat to divert traffic. As a direct descendant of Tencent, Mogujie successfully became the first batch of internal testing cooperative companies for WeChat mini programs.
This time Mogujie still missed the opportunity and made it a rising star Pinduoduo. With the popular WeChat group buying model, Pinduoduo ran all the way, rushing toward Nasdaq from outside the Fifth Ring Road.
As of December 22, the market value of Pinduoduo was US$74.3 billion, becoming the third pole of e-commerce in China; Xiaohongshu has a valuation of US$20 billion, with monthly active users of over 100 million, and is known as the first entrance for young people to consume;
Even if Vipshop, which plummeted 80% this year, has a market value of US$5.67 billion. In contrast, Mushroom Street's market value is only US$43 million, becoming the most failed e-commerce case in Tencent.
10 years are fleeting, and fate is different.Brand sales have made Vipshop, community model has made Xiaohongshu, social e-commerce has made Pinduoduo, Mogujie always gets up early and goes to the evening market, which can be called a professional runner-up...
2
The latest transformation of Mogujie is live e-commerce. This time it got what it wanted, but the industry has a crisis.
In 2016, live streaming sales rose with the help of Taobao. In 2020, the epidemic broke out and the sales industry expanded rapidly.
data shows that in 2020, the scale of China's live e-commerce market exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan, with an annual growth rate of 197.0%; more than 8,800 related companies have been registered, and the number of anchors has exceeded 1 million.
Mogujie is still the first to enter the market this time, but in the early stage, he still had little investment in testing the waters and missed the early dividends of the industry. It was not until 2019 that the strategy of comprehensively transforming into live e-commerce was determined.
At that time, Mogujie proposed strategies such as the "Double Hundred Plan" and "Migratory Bird Plan" to vigorously develop live broadcast business, recruiting anchors with experience in dressing and beauty from the entire network, and opening the road to breaking the deadlock of live broadcast e-commerce.
In the fiscal year 2021, Mogujie GMV (total transaction volume ) was 13.855 billion yuan, of which the live broadcast GMV reached 10.878 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 38.1%, and the live broadcast GMV accounted for 78.5% of the total GMV of the platform.
Mogujie founder and CEO OChen Qi said at the time that this means that Mogujie has completed its business transformation and becomes a live e-commerce company.
However, although live streaming has become the core growth driving force of Mogujie, it has not improved its profitability. Data shows that from the 2019 to 2021 fiscal years, Mogujie suffered losses of 500 million yuan, 2.238 billion yuan and 328 million yuan respectively.
In the live e-commerce road, Mogujie's overall strategy still needs to be optimized, otherwise 30% of its employees will not be laid off.
The good phenomenon is that the live streaming industry suddenly encountered a regulatory storm in 2021. After the top anchors are investigated, the industry will usher in a major reshuffle.
On December 20, after Viya was fined 1.341 billion yuan, the supervision continued to follow up on tax evasion. The tax bureaus in Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Guangdong and other places issued notices:
urged celebrities, online anchors, etc. to speed up the self-inspection of tax laws and relevant notice requirements, and actively report and correct tax-related issues to the tax department before the end of this year. The tax department will be lighter, relieve or exempt from tax penalties according to the notice.
Live streaming and selling goods A new round of regulatory storm is on the way.
3 regulating strict supervision of live streaming sales, but the core is that the industry is too chaotic, such as tax evasion, order swiping, volume swiping, selling counterfeits, and the disadvantages of big anchors' dependence.
6 years of sales war, millions of anchors were selling, and the most popular ones were Li Jiaqi and Weiya, which were supported by Taobao's huge traffic.
Taobao live broadcast data shows that on the first day of the "Double 11" pre-sale in 2021, Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room sales reached 10.653 billion yuan; Viya's live broadcast room sales reached 8.252 billion yuan.
And in 2020, among the more than 4,500 listed companies in the entire A-share market, less than 400 had revenue exceeding 18 billion yuan. The total amount of goods sold by the two anchors in a day exceeds the annual revenue of 90% of listed companies in A-shares.
On the Forbes Rich List, Via and his wife have valued as high as 9 billion yuan, and most small anchors have a monthly income of 3,000-5,000 yuan, which shows the serious polarization of the industry.
With the action of supervision, these stubborn diseases will improve in the future, and the industry will return to rational and orderly development, and it is difficult for big anchors to have monopoly.
industry reshuffle has arrived, and it is actually an opportunity for small and medium-sized anchors. After all, the traffic given up by the top live broadcasts must be redistributed.
If Mogujie can follow the trend and formulate a legal and compliant live broadcast strategy for a long time, it will be an opportunity to turn things around!
