text | Zhu Yingli
editor | Siwen
has a market value of more than 170 billion US dollars, and Pinduoduo has proved the market value of sinking users in 5 years. Can a similar logic be established in the United States?
On November 20th, Wish, a mobile shopping platform called "Pingduoduo", submitted a prospectus for listing on the Nasdaq. According to the
prospectus, Wish is the most downloaded shopping app in the United States. It currently has more than 100 million monthly active users, 500,000 sellers, and provides services in 100 countries. As of September 2020, its revenue in the past 12 months reached 2.3 billion. Dollar. The mode of
Wish is very similar to Pinduoduo.
also uses low prices as a selling point. Necklaces and pillows for less than $1, sneakers and jackets for less than $10 are all available; the search box is also replaced by image information flow, and the interface is similar to Xiaohongshu and Pin A combination of Duoduo; gamification is also respected, Pinduoduo is to plant trees to get fruits for free, and Wish is a discount code for stamp collection.
Huang Zheng used "Disney+Costco" to summarize Pinduoduo's innovation. Wish founder Peter Szulczewski made a very similar statement in his 2017 speech:
"There are two missing points in current e-commerce, one is The lack of product design, I mean the way of human-computer interaction, the process of people finding and buying things is mainly through the search box; the other is the failure of demographics, some people have been forgotten by the mainstream."
However, similar opinions and opinions have completely different situations in different countries and soils.
Pinduoduo was established in 2015, listed in 3 years, and grew into a new giant with a market value of 100 billion US dollars in 5 years. Wish was founded in 2010. After more than a dozen rounds of financing in 10 years, Wish began to go to IPO with the help of the offline impact of the epidemic. Where can
, a company that provides services for the "sinking market" and "invisible population" in the United States under the banner of "consumption equal rights"?
is aimed at the "sinking market" of the United States
China has about 300 "cities", 2,856 "counties", 41658 "townships", and 662238 "villages". Outside of the few first- and second-tier cities, most of the consumption Those from the sinking market.
This is the foundation of Pinduoduo's rise. Wish also pointed out the customer group it is targeting:
"44% of American consumers and 85% of European consumers have household incomes of less than US$75,000. In addition, in emerging economies such as Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Eastern Europe The average household income is about 18,000 US dollars (about 120,000 RMB). We established Wish to serve consumers who value benefits rather than brand and convenience." Peter Szulczewski, founder of
, listed the top 50 Wish sales Regions, most of which are distributed in remote areas with less crowds.
In the United States, in addition to the inherent low-income groups, the middle class is also shrinking, and the poor market is getting bigger and bigger. According to data from Pew Research, a US research organization, from 1971 to 2015, the income share of middle-income earners in the United States fell from 61% to 50%. In 1983, the wealth of rich people was three times that of middle-income families, and by 2013, this number had become seven times.
However, unlike Pinduoduo's rise in China, the first deep players in the "sinking market" in the United States were offline 1 yuan stores.
E-commerce Online once analyzed in the article "Apocalypse of the US Version 1 Yuan Store" that the offline 1 Yuan store is a long-standing business with 80 years of history in the United States. Among them, Dollar Tree is the most vigorous one, with a one-year deal. The amount is equivalent to 8 MINISO products in China.
For Wish, this is undoubtedly a strong opponent in direct competition. The turnaround of
occurred after the epidemic. Affected by the epidemic, offline and online have fluctuated from one to the other. Wish has also experienced rapid growth again after a long time since its establishment 10 years ago. According to data from the
prospectus, Wish's revenue increased by 32% in the nine months of 2020, while before the epidemic, between 2018 and 2019, its revenue increased by only 10%.
In addition to aiming "downIn addition to "Shen Market", information flow recommendations based on pictures and videos are also genes that Wish was born with. After several adjustments,
has become an e-commerce website that can conduct commodity transactions. The core is still to satisfy users for shopping and browsing. At the same time, personalized recommendations. The founder of
Wish believes that fuzzy shopping is the nature of human shopping. “Many times we don’t know what we want to buy.”
, a shopping method that highlights entertainment, is also written in the prospectus: Our user experience is mobile first, discovery-based, deep personalization and entertainment. "Z2z
94% of sellers are from China
"slow growth and stable losses"
, a matching e-commerce platform that focuses on low prices, for European and American capital markets, the biggest concern comes from Wish's largest supplier. In the
prospectus, Wish mentioned that the main sellers of the platform are from China. “Because Chinese sellers can sell high-quality products at very competitive prices, the development of the platform initially focused on Chinese sellers, and China was the world’s largest exporter of goods in the past decade. "Z2z
Research Institute Marketplace gave specific data. 94% of sellers are from China, of which Guangdong sellers accounted for 27%. The prospectus also shows that as of September 30, 2020, 43% of Wish’s core market revenue comes from Europe, 42 % Are from North America, 5% are from South America, and 10% are from other parts of the world. The problem of
almost entirely dependent on China’s supply chain is obvious. Under the epidemic this year, cross-border logistics has been severely impacted and costs have risen rapidly. The prospectus shows that 2020 In the first three months of the year, Wish’s operating costs reached 605 million, compared with only 255 million in the same period last year, more than doubled.
cross-border e-commerce is also facing supply interruptions and delivery delays. At the same time, Problems such as increased returns and poor user experience caused by the shortage of goods have also erupted. On platforms such as YouTube and Twitter,
complains about the Wish platform not shipping for one or two months, or the goods are lost, and the customer service does not respond. Yes. What's worse for
is that, in addition to the various genetic problems that come with cross-border e-commerce, Wish is called the "US version of Pinduoduo" and the other side is that it replicates the various issues that Pinduoduo originally criticized, such as products. Quality, service experience, etc.
Pinduoduo relied on rapid user growth to offset some market controversies, but Wish currently does not have this potential. Z2z
has seen monthly active users increase from 21 million increased to 108 million, and annual active consumers increased from 18 million to 68 million. Of course, this data is not comparable to Pinduoduo, but the real question is, in the United States and the world, what is the upper limit of this user growth? Is the growth method effective?
"We estimate that, with the exception of China and India, there are more than 1 billion households with incomes below 75,000 US dollars. "Z2z
In terms of the growth ceiling, Wish still has a lot of room, but there are also many competitors, such as Lazada, AliExpress, shopee, etc., the cross-border e-commerce platform from China alone. In terms of the growth mode of
, Wish is currently mainly The way to acquire users is to spend money on Facebook and Google to buy traffic, and it is difficult to achieve breakthrough growth. Z2z
CNBC commented on Wish's prospectus, "Growth is slow and losses are stable. "Z2z
Indeed, from the data point of view, even if it encounters the epidemic, Wish can only be a small step forward in terms of users and revenue. In contrast, Amazon, Target, and Wal-Mart have achieved more than 50% growth. Target’s sales in the third quarter soared by 155%. Z2z
’s cost control and losses were also stable, with operating losses and net losses only fluctuating between 100 and 200 million U.S. dollars. In 2018, there was a loss of 208 million U.S. dollars and in 2019, 136 million U.S. dollars. In the first nine months of 2020, it lost 176 million U.S. dollars. The
epidemic is a rare opportunity for Wish to break out, but the problem is that after this time, it must find new incentives.
建物流, Combined with offline
Wish possible future prospects If
takes the domestic e-commerce platform as the benchmark, the slow-moving Wish will not want to follow the path of Pinduoduo, but a combination similar to Jingdong and Meituan.
self-built logistics is an important project mentioned by Wish.
"We have recently developed and tested different logistics projects to realize the monetization of the logistics platform. For us, this is a relatively new business initiative."
Currently, Wish's logistics services include shipping and freight forwarding. , Customs clearance, transportation services, warehousing and logistics and other services. In the future, according to the prospectus, they will also establish strategic partnerships with some regional postal networks and commercial logistics companies. Next, this logistics system can be similar Like JD Logistics, it develops to merchants on other platforms.
"We intend to provide our logistics services to any merchants who are engaged in e-commerce and hope to obtain reliable and affordable global shipping solutions." Z2z
self-operated products are also one of the plans. Using the consumer data and sales trends of the platform, Wish mentioned the possibility of buying products directly from manufacturers for sale in the future. "Although this revenue is currently a small amount, we will continue to experiment and optimize, including the formulation of our own brand strategy." Z2z
In addition, localization services are also in the practice and planning of Wish.
Currently, Wish has access to local shops in some countries and cities. On the one hand, it brings online traffic to offline stores, and on the other hand, it also provides offline pickup points for some online merchants. "Through Wish Local, our online merchants have nearly 50,000 partner pick-up locations." If
is used to the growth story of Pinduoduo, Wish is undoubtedly not an ideal target, but from its establishment to the present, Wish has been in the capital The market is not much sought after.
In March 2011, Wish received an angel investment of US$1.7 million. Since then, new funds have entered each year. It reached its peak from 2015 to 2017-three rounds of US$500 million in financing. According to data from Crunchbase, Wish has raised a total of US$2.1 billion in venture capital in recent years.
In August 2019, Wish received another US$300 million in Series H financing and was valued at US$11.2 billion at the time. According to the Financial Times, Wish currently aims to be listed at a valuation of US$25 billion to US$30 billion. If the prediction is accurate, the starting point does not seem to be much lower than Pinduoduo. In the United States, besides Amazon, a new e-commerce giant is also expected to rise.
