In the spring of 2022, the stock prices of major Internet companies in China plummeted, and news of a large number of layoffs suddenly spread. Among them, my country's largest market capitalization company and Tencent were the first to bear the brunt. Although the specific figures are unclear, it did cause a violent industry shock.
Tencent boss Ma Huateng
In fact, the traces of Tencent’s layoffs were reflected many years ago.
It is said that Tencent transformed many years ago. Many executives at the headquarters discussed Tencent's corporate core competitiveness , and finally came up with two answers,
one is traffic,
the other is capital.
I burst out laughing. If this is true, then this decision really put me in a trap. The decision was wrong, so there were problems with the route.
Why do I say that traffic and capital cannot be Tencent's competitiveness?
Let's talk about traffic first. Tencent's QQ captured the largest PC user group, and WeChat captured the largest mobile user group. This is the case even today. The vision of
is great, but the word "traffic" has always existed along with fashion, trend, and change. Today we see the Paris Fashion Show 80 years ago. Those clothes can still arouse our admiration and lead the fashion trend. ?
cannot, not to mention QQ. With the evolution of mobile Internet, user losses are serious, and its functions have long been degraded into advertisements and a paradise for scammers.
Even WeChat, which leads mobile users first, as user needs are further deepened and refined, it is increasingly used as a tool to carry ordinary user needs and public services, and it is more difficult to penetrate into more effective in user experience.
Douyin has occupied far more personal time slices than WeChat’s video account. The winner-take-all approach in the short video field means that Douyin will take away more than 80% of the profits, while the video account will lose money.
Douyin’s traffic is driving
It is even more ridiculous that Tencent regards capital as its core competitiveness. Speaking of capital power, can Tencent compare with China Construction Bank in China? Can foreign countries compare with , Goldman Sachs , and Dalian ?
I know that Tencent’s original intention was to build a fortress by relying on its No. 1 user power in WeChat and QQ, and form a win-win situation through capital investment in companies with development potential, thereby expanding Tencent’s competitiveness in the mobile Internet. The idea of
is very beautiful, but the reality is very skinny. After all, it is not your own competitiveness that invests in others. The track of venture capital is to stop when it is good and cash out at a high price. But if Tencent thinks that it is its own competitiveness, will miss the most important thing. track and time.
We know that Tencent’s most successful investment is JD.com , with a shareholding of more than 20%, supporting JD.com to become the most important competitor of Alibaba . Tencent estimates that in this way, it will have the leverage to compete with Alibaba in the e-commerce field. .
is realistic! ! !
E-commerce Dragon Liu Qiangdong
The result is that Liu Qiangdong firmly controls 76.1% of the voting rights with 13.6% of JD.com shares through AB equity. With strong control, JD.com has spun off JD Logistics , JD. Technology , , JD Health come to invade the interests of major shareholders.
What is even more inhumane is that JD Cloud, a subsidiary of JD Technology, has launched cloud services, cloud resources, and various cloud-based B-side solutions for the B-end market. It has become the main competitor of Tencent Cloud , directly competing with Tencent. A flank attack in the enterprise services market.
The so-called capital defense is simply a joke. Except for Tencent, have you ever seen a major shareholder of a company that would allow the holding company to directly develop a business and compete with shareholders? It doesn’t matter if there is no such capital control!
Because of these reasons, Tencent's Liu Chiping will step down as chairman of JD.com this year and reduce his shareholding from 17% to 2.3%. From now on, we will see each other again, and friends will also be enemies.
Even if the shareholding is reduced, I am also greatly surprised by Tencent's way of reducing its holdings. Shares worth more than 100 billion Hong Kong dollars are hastily distributed to shareholders in the form of dividends, instead of retaining the most valuable shares through market reduction. Funds are confusing.
You must know that in IT in 2022, cash is the most precious thing. Even if 50 billion Hong Kong dollars are cashed out, the current layoffs will not be so ugly. It is just like a clearance sale. The investment level of
is really unbearable!
Tencent Cloud's Attack
In the past three years, Tencent has invested the most and hired the most people. Tencent Cloud may be the one that hired the most people. According to the recent financial report, the total revenue has exceeded the Game Interactive Entertainment Division, but it has lost tens of billions.
Tencent Cloud, the so-called finance + technology, mainly targets the enterprise service market and some government IT markets. Competition in this area is particularly fierce. The previously mentioned JD Cloud, Baidu Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Huawei Cloud are all Deeply trapped in it, fiercely fighting in multiple industries, it is still unclear who will win, but burning money is inevitable.
China Cloud Service Market
I can’t comment too much on the cloud business, but China’s B-side enterprise market has a huge feature, which is large dispersion, many customization requirements, and low cost.
Before major manufacturers entered, the B-end enterprise market relied mainly on government investment for a long time and lived within their means. After Tencent entered, they poached a large number of traditional product manufacturers, integrators, and even Party A customers. It has created more than 100,000 jobs and an average annual salary of more than 500,000 yuan. Graduates can earn an annual salary of 300,000 yuan, making countless professionals jealous.
However, investment in this market itself has not experienced explosive growth, and the results can be imagined.
The wage cost of the entire market is high, sales are slowly growing, and repayments are slower. Everyone is eating the money that major Internet companies cut meat from other sectors. By 2022, as the epidemic normalizes, government investment and corporate Investment has slowed down, and this contradiction has become extremely huge.
Major Internet companies are panicking, and the only option is to lay off employees.
It is right to strategically enter the B-side market anyway, because the growth of Tencent's main business has slowed down, but is it necessary to enter so regardless of the cost, especially when recruiting so many talents in the society at high cost, and entwining each other? .
It can be said that the enrollment expansion in the previous three years is the main reason for the layoff crisis this year. Whoever recruits more will have to spit out more.
In 2021, Tencent’s offer to graduates used to be the best on the Internet. Everyone said that there is a goose before a goose. So in 2022, we can only go where they came from. I just don’t know the graduates who have not worked for less than a year. With a high salary of more than 300,000 yuan, can the small and medium-sized B-end companies in society still have room for one of their desks?
It was once difficult to overcome the difficulties!
is not home except for penguins!
The collapse of Tencent’s platform and content
pcg. Tencent’s platform and content department includes QQ, Tencent Video, China Literature Group , Tencent Music and other cultural and entertainment-related organizations. This time it is a key area for layoffs. The reason is that it is not profitable.
The original intention of establishing this BG in the first place is worthy of discussion. QQ is for social networking, and Tencent video and music are all entertainment. Why should they be forcibly bound together? It is said that at that time, in order to balance the dominance of WeChat, we also hoped to use QQ users to promote the development of various entertainment lines.
What are the results of Tencent Video
which has been losing money for consecutive years!
QQ’s organization is a platform-based structure based on IT. All content divisions are staffed by cultural people, including people who work on novels, scripts, variety shows, advertising, and talent shows. You name it? Is it compatible?
I don’t know much about PCG’s management structure, but it’s really easy to cause problems by forcibly linking an IT product with entertainment. Among global technology companies, Google ’s oil pipeline and IT are not compatible, but they are wholly-owned acquisitions of independent companies. Operations, but there has never been a way to operate them together.
So we have seen more and more problems in PCG in recent years. Tencent QQ is getting heavier and heavier because it carries too much content and entrances. However, the number of users is not increasing but decreasing because it does not have a global export. , domestic traffic began to increase.
Tencent Video, like other video platforms across the country, loses money every year and is complained by users every year. Recently, its membership fee has been increased. I guess there is another loss of members.
Where did the money from Tencent Video go?
Go to the expensive appearance fees of young freshmen,
go to various obscure copyright screening fees,
go to buy out the copyrights of various domestic and foreign performing arts programs.
In a word, Tencent's content department wants to use monopoly and copyright to make money, but it has the opposite effect. It goes against the trend. A large number of users have moved to the free , Bilibili, , and even the free Douyin video. , the traditional membership fee method is a dead end.
What do you think of Netflix, which is also a world-class content manufacturer? They are also lenient in receiving membership fees.
Netflix profit changes
Tencent Video Want to learn from Netflix?
Does Tencent also want to have a profit of US$5 billion in one quarter?
Then let me tell you, Netflix’s dramas are all homemade. In order to maintain high quality and low cost, Netflix chooses low-profile and capable actors and spends all the money on audience analysis, cultural grasp, and production. Chip.
Netflix's works are first-class cultural masterpieces that respect the cultural needs and characteristics of different countries. Even China's Three-Body Problem was filmed by Netflix.
Tencent Video allowed him to give up being a traffic star, stop pursuing temporary attention and hype, and focus on doing things. Can
do it? ?
The failure of interactive entertainment
We know that Tencent is still the world's largest game developer. In 2020, Tencent's Tianmei Studio revenue exceeded 10 billion US dollars, ranking first in the world.
However, 2021 will be a year of decline for Tencent games . This year, due to the new crown epidemic and version number restrictions, Tencent's domestic game revenue plummeted, and its overseas expansion was unsatisfactory.
Overseas game rankings in April 2022
Judging from the top 30 overseas games in April 2022, Tencent Games has only one PUBG MOBILE PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds - Stimulating the Battlefield, which was released 3 years ago.
From this list, we can see that the creativity of Tencent games is really deteriorating, reaching an extremely low level.
It can be said that Tencent Games has followed the spirit of QQ from the beginning, focusing on imitation. The first board and card games imitated the games of China Game Network, and won the first place in the country in terms of traffic through QQ, and it has been out of control ever since. Needless to say,
PC-side LOL is an agent for foreign products. When
arrived on the mobile side, it launched the Tiantian series through the WeChat platform, including Tiantian Masturbation, , Tiantian Cool Run, and other small games, relying on WeChat promotion to dominate the rankings. For a long time, it occupied most of the top 50 positions in , Apple, and Android, and used traffic to boost the rankings. . The creativity of
and later and King of Glory basically came from LOL on the PC side, and the creativity of the two chicken games also came from the Blue Hole game of Tencent Holdings. Most of the other popular games are mainly about making money, and there is not much Creative and engaging for players.
It can be said that the main actions of Tencent Interactive Entertainment are imitation + traffic + investment. If these three challenges continue, few small and medium-sized competitors can fight independently, but there are only a handful of companies that can be recognized for their creativity and planning. countable.
So, the world’s number one game company actually doesn’t understand games, and especially lacks an innate game spirit. Perhaps it is for this reason that the now popular and Mihayou rejected investment from Tencent Interactive Entertainment.
In MiHoYo’s words, it’s great to have money. Although you have money, you don’t understand the second dimension.
It is precisely because Tencent Interactive Entertainment does not understand the spirit and entertainment of games, so under the market downturn, Tencent Interactive Entertainment has faced its biggest crisis and needs to lay off employees. However, I hope that Tencent’s IEG will not just go out but not enter, and I also hope that they can Use this as an opportunity to recruit better game analysts and people who really understand the game, and usher in new life.
WeChat Business Department
The only remaining product department. Compared with the lack of Tencent Cloud, platform and content, and interactive games, I think WeChat can be regarded as a real product. This is also consistent with Zhang Xiaolong 's personal orientation Inseparable.
Zhang Xiaolong has brought Tencent onto the fast lane of mobile Internet. He has a greater say in WeChat’s mission and products. He is not too obsessed with KPIs. His philosophy is to use it and leave. So we use WeChat I don’t see so many dazzling entrances and advertisements on QQ. I only find the entrance quickly and easily when I need it.
The simplicity of WeChat proves its power. Today, although WeChat cannot directly compete with Douyin in the short video field, it has at least become a stable and reliable national application.
Zhang Xiaolong is getting old slowly, who can carry the banner of WeChat
But I think WeChat still has a major shortcoming, that is, WeChat payment is not made into an independent APP like Alipay, because finance and social interaction are, after all, complete in connotation. Different applications, if the main reason for putting together WeChat Pay at the beginning was to let WeChat's traffic support payment, then when it becomes three-thirds of the country, it will inevitably need an independent land to host more financial applications.
summarizes Tencent’s 8 shortcomings
has finished reading Tencent. At the end of the article, we summarize Tencent’s 8 major shortcomings:
1. Over-reliance on traffic has caused all APPs except QQ and WeChat to lose their characteristics and initiative. They can only rely on traffic to survive without themselves. unique skills.
2. I am very confused about capital investment and benefits. I don’t know when to exit, I don’t know how to maximize the benefits of exit, and I don’t know how to effectively control the invested enterprises.
3. A large number of Internet giants have been developed using traffic and capital, such as JD.com, , Meituan, , and Pinduoduo. However, they have been attacked by growing Internet companies in various aspects.
4. The platform representing IT and the content representing the entertainment industry are forcibly combined together, causing confusion in the main guiding ideology of PCG and going all the way down.
5. There is no thought, no pursuit, and no creativity in cultural content. They only want to make a lot of money relying on capital and copyright, which goes against the free trend of society and has no endogenous creative power.
6, the game imitation situation is serious, the long-term reliance on traffic to eat users, the lack of interest in games and the real experience of the second dimension, the subsequent development is worrying.
7 and Tencent Cloud have made mistakes in their strategic investment. They do not have phenomenal product competitiveness. They rely on capital to compete in the Red Sea in the low-end integration and industry markets, wasting a lot of profits and time, and losing their continued power.
8. Lack of long-term product layout, no ideals, and no culture. We must get rid of the habit of relying on traffic and capital as soon as possible, specialize, and highlight our own creativity and vitality.
