Ali and Byte Limit pull, can Ele.me feed Douyin takeaway？

　

Text | Blue Hole Business, Yu Weilin

Editing | Giorgio Lisa

In just one month, rumors of "ByteDance acquiring Ele.me" broke out twice.

In the latest version, Caijing quoted sources as saying that not only did it state that ByteDance’s bid was $7 billion – one of the points of disagreement between the two sides, but also that ByteDance only wanted the delivery team of Ele.me, while Ali wanted the word energy saving to undertake the entire Ele.me.

Although soon, the rumors were once again confirmed by both sides, the outside world believed that the "Schr?dinger’s acquisition" was only a layer of window paper away from the ground – "denial" was just a prescribed action in the negotiations between the two sides.

In the past two years, the local life battlefield has seen renewed waves due to Douyin’s disruption, with the store business performing traffic magic, but the home business has experienced ups and downs. Douyin’s local life is still in a state of "running through the process".

The low-hanging fruit has been picked, and moving forward is a tough battle with real swords and real guns. Meituan spent tens of billions of yuan to build the performance ability, and if Douyin wants to replicate it, he needs to invest several times more time and money. Buying Ele.me is the most cost-effective way, and it is also in line with Zhang Yiming’s usual style of "vigorously performing miracles".

Five years ago, Ali bought Ele.me for $9.50 billion; in the past few years, the decline is not only valuation, but also market share. Now Ele.me is almost reduced to a regional player, takeaway is a low-margin business, and it is difficult to make profits without scale effects. If Ali wants to stop losses in time, Douyin is the only potential buyer on the table.

If Douyin wants to be a "universal entrance", it is impossible to give up local life. But the question is, even if he eats Ele.me and completes the closed loop of local life, can he win Meituan? What Douyin lacks in local life is only the ground delivery team? What Ali + Ele.me couldn’t do in the past, can it be done by Douyin + Ele.me?

Just as Yu Yongfu said in his internal letter in 2021: "This is a protracted battle, a boxing match that has just begun. The process is destined to be long and cruel. Neither side can defeat the opponent, but can only fight for points."

The Infinity War of local life, even if the acquisition is completed, is far from the end.

Douyin Local Life: Good Night Yet to Come

In the past two years of the Douyin Meituan dispute, the outside world’s attention has focused on how Meituan defends the city, but it has ignored that Douyin’s battle for local life has not gone smoothly as imagined, and the traffic stick has also encountered "hard bones".

"Changing coaches" is the most obvious signal. In November 2023, Douyin publicly admitted that Pu Yanzi, the head of commercialization, will also serve as the head of life services business, and Zhu Shiyu, the original head, will be transferred. Pu Yanzi’s internal evaluation is that his style is pragmatic and he is good at solving complex problems.

Industry analysts "Zouma Finance" interpret that the role of the commercialization leader in Douyin is similar to that of Alimama to Ali, and it is the existence of the "God of Wealth". Pu Yanzi, who is more "important", can not only mobilize the commercial traffic of Douyin, but also the commercial traffic resources of almost all traffic-type products such as Jinri Toutiao and Watermelon Video in Douyin – this is the highest configuration that Douyin can give.

Douyin’s local life is far from a "good night". They need more resources and more fierce leaders. The core incentive is the failure of takeaway.

In June last year, according to the "LatePost" report, Douyin takeaway’s annual GMV target was reduced from 100 billion yuan to 5 billion yuan, which came to an "ankle cut". At the same time, the focus of takeaway business changed to: try to run through business processes in more ways.

Half a year has passed, and according to a report by "Whip Bulls" at the end of December last year, Douyin life service partners in multiple regions revealed that Douyin will no longer renew their contracts with them. "Except for the five cities of Chengdu, Changsha, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Fuzhou, the Douyin takeaway business in other cities will be suspended." The purpose is to "penetrate the above five cities in order to obtain comprehensive and sufficient experience and lessons, and then promote the replication to other cities."

Since it was exposed in July 2021, Douyin has been running in the takeaway field for two and a half years, but it is still "running through the process".

The cost is undoubtedly huge. According to a report by Sohu News in March last year, Douyin’s boost to merchants in the pilot takeaway service was 5%, which was three percentage points lower than that of its peers. But Douyin’s traffic is expensive, and its investment in takeout should be higher than that of Meituan and Ele.me, including the costs of delivery and service providers.

This raises the suspicion that takeout is a low-margin chore, and if it is so difficult to move forward, why not give up? Because it does not want to watch consumers flee due to the lack of takeout.

According to a report by "LatePost" in February last year, Douyin Group CEO Zhang Nan once imagined at an internal meeting that Douyin would become a universal portal for users’ mobile devices, not only to swipe content when bored, but also to shop, choose restaurants, and buy plane tickets to book hotels.

This is Douyin’s ambition, and it is also the common dream of Internet giants. Today’s Capital Xu Xin once said in his early speech that there are actually only 12 apps commonly used by users, and apps that are opened more than 8 times a day are exclusive and monopolistic, and "flowers" can grow on them.

Therefore, for Douyin’s local life, it is necessary to close the loop between home and store, which is the answer that Meituan proved ten years ago.

As early as 2014, Wang Huiwen once answered the reporter "Why does Meituan want to do takeout?" He said, "Group buying and takeout, there must be a lot of overlap in the business. From the perspective of the merchant, we can bring it customer flow and transactions. Consumers group buying to the store, or ordering takeout to be delivered to consumers for transaction. Although they are two different transaction models, the merchants will not reject them."

The lack of Douyin takeaway links today is like the short board on the bucket. On the one hand, consumers who have settled through home group buying will flow to Meituan when they repurchase takeaway; on the other hand, the merchants who have made great efforts to attract them will only stay at the store level, and cannot reap the commission of takeaway business.

According to public information, Douyin’s GMV in 2022 is 77 billion yuan, while it has increased by 256% in 2023. It is estimated that the GMV completed in 2023 is about 197.12 billion yuan, exceeding the original target of 150 billion yuan. But if you can’t take takeaway business, how long can such high-speed growth be maintained is an unknown.

Since takeaway is a must, then the existing cooperation model is not good? Since August 2022, Douyin and Ele.me have cooperated, and Douyin has diverted traffic and Ele.me has fulfilled the contract, but both sides have different ideas, and they have not fully connected on the page jump. Douyin cannot obtain the core data assets, so he has more than two years of experience in "running through the process".

Douyin and Meituan are bound to have a head-to-head war, but Douyin looks at his hand and only has abundant traffic and funds, but lacks infrastructure, including systems, teams, and the Know-How capabilities that Meituan has accumulated for more than a decade.

And these, eat Eli.me can make up for it?

"Are you shaking?" Can you win Meituan?

Before Douyin’s disruption, the takeaway battlefield had long since died down. Meituan began to explore instant retail in search of incremental growth; Alibaba’s Ele.me system became infrastructure, focusing on stopping losses.

A set of data clearly illustrates the changes in Ele.me in Alibaba. According to third-party data agency trustdata, in 2020, Meituan and Ele.me’s market share was 60% and 25% respectively; by 2022, it had become 72% and 15%.

From Ele.me to "Shake it", how much can it shake Meituan? Let’s take a look at the fundamentals of the two companies first.

Look at the supply side first, there is the most intuitive data. According to the relevant report of Guolian Securities, the average daily active users of Meituan takeaway business version in October 2023 4.8861 million, and the average daily active users of Ele.me business version 2.6131 million, Meituan is almost 1.87 times that of Ele.me.

Looking at the demand side, according to Quset Mobile data, in October 2023, Ele.me APP DAU 2154.6 million, Meituan takeaway APP DAU 17.4993 million, Meituan APP DAU 144 million. You know, Meituan APP is the main position of all businesses. Combined with past financial reports, Meituan takeaway also leads Ele.me in terms of annual transaction users.

What about Ele.me + Douyin? According to the data report released by "Douyin Life Service Business Observation" on January 2, 2024, in 2023, Douyin Life Service stores will exceed 4.50 million. Even taking into account deduplicate factors, on the supply side, Douyin + Ele.me will still have a considerable base.

In addition, the addition of Ele.me may recoup Douyin’s disadvantage on the supply side of small and medium-sized merchants. "Blue Hole Business" once mentioned in the article "Meituan, Can Use Magic to Beat Magic" that the high cost makes it difficult for small and medium-sized merchants to survive in Douyin. "If you don’t buy advertising and don’t have traffic, you will have zero sales."

On the demand side, Douyin’s traffic magic and Ele.me’s home consumption mindset are expected to make up for their previous shortcomings.

Different from Meituan, benefiting from the acquisition and Ali system, a large proportion of Ele.me’s loyal customers come from 88VIP members, which is characterized by strong spending power. Double 11 in 2023, 88VIP user scale broke through 32 million, and transactions increased by double digits year-on-year. According to Ali’s financial report, the average annual consumption of this group in 2022 reached 57,000 yuan, and the demand-side customer unit price may be expected.

From the perspective of supply and demand, Ele.me has been ahead of Meituan, and it may have new vitality. But whether it can win or not, the performance side is more critical. What Douyin wants most is also the delivery team of Ele.me. Capacity is the "card point" that Douyin takeaway cannot push, and it is also the "east wind" that Douyin only owes for the development of instant retail.

According to Ele.me’s official website, Hummingbird, its delivery platform, has 3 million active riders, including full-time and crowdsourcing; but according to a report released by Meituan in 2022, Meituan has 6.24 million riders. In fact, in 2019, Ele.me has more than 3 million riders, and Meituan is 3.99 million. With Ele.me losing ground, riders naturally flow to Meituan, which has a more dominant order volume.

Of course, the fulfillment of contracts does not rely solely on offline capacity. Offline delivery and online fulfillment are two sides of the same coin. It is rumored that Douyin only needs "delivery staff" and does not need "programmers". Ele.me is currently the second largest takeaway in the market after Meituan, and its fulfillment system is the closest option to contend with it.

After it was merged into Alibaba that year, Ele.me’s hummingbird system was the first to be transformed. Alibaba’s expectation for hummingbird was to rely on the foundation of takeaway services and cooperate with Alibaba’s retail "three-kilometer ideal life circle", which meant that in the past few years, hummingbird and Hema, Tmall Hourly, and first-line brand instant delivery have a long match, and the handling situation is far more complicated than food delivery.

At the same time, Hummingbird’s intelligent scheduling system has been supported by Alibaba Cloud. Now AI has become one of the core directions of Ali’s development, and Hummingbird’s computing power and iteration speed have been enhanced. Because Hummingbird is deeply bound to Ali, it has also become one of the arguments that Alibaba will not give up Ele.me. easily.

But Ele.me in the Ali system can only be said to be self-improvement, and whether it can resist Meituan requires a question mark.

Takeaway fulfillment has the characteristics of "multi-concurrency" and "strong randomness", and a strong online fulfillment system can be regarded as Meituan’s "moat". As Wang Xing said in the first quarter of 2023 earnings report: "If the takeaway business wants to complete each transaction efficiently, it needs a reliable order fulfillment system. We have accumulated a deep foundation in the consumer, merchant, and distribution network of the takeaway business, and it is difficult for other players to break through."

Another factor that cannot be quantified, but can determine the course of the war, is methodology and organizational ability.

On the one hand, the Know-How capabilities and takeaway talents accumulated by Ele.me are equivalent to directly giving answers to Douyin, who has been "running through the process"; but on the other hand, with the invasion of organizational culture and the migration of management authority after Alibaba’s acquisition, Ele.me’s core management has gradually lost, and its playing style is also very different from that of Zhang Xuhao’s era. Ele.me, which pursues cost control, has gradually shrunk into a regional player.

In the two years after Alibaba acquired Ele.me, morale was booming. Wang Lei, the earliest head of Alibaba’s department, also stated internally, "It turned out that Ele.me played Meituan on the first floor and the second floor, but now we are standing on the sixth floor."

At that time, Wang Lei participated in Double 11 and Double 12 with his local life, interacted with Youku and Juhuasuan, and connected with Autonavi and Hema. But from the first quarter of 2019 to the second quarter of 2020, Ele.me’s market share did not rise but fell.

An industry insider told Blue Hole Business that during that time, he went on a business trip to Shunde, Guangdong. Ele.me increased subsidies and launched activities in the local area, hoping to gain momentum in several of Meituan’s advantageous cities, but the results came to nothing. [The business of local life is more complicated than imagined, and the success of one city may not be replicated in all cities.]

A Meituan person once recalled with "Blue Hole Business" that at that time, Meituan did not regard the other party as a competitor when competing with Ele.me. "Although Meituan gave less resources than the other party in each city, it always got good results in the end. There is indeed a methodology."

Frustrated by the competition, Alibaba began to adjust its thinking. In July 2021, Yu Yongfu, known as the "integration master", took over local life and proposed the so-called "541 formation" and "four vertical and four horizontal" playing methods, but this was an internal staff that also had some unclear theories.

Falling on Ele.me, the strategy focuses more on key cities, which is the so-called "efficiency first, then scale", emphasizing the strengthening of instant retail and distribution capabilities in terms of capabilities, and paying more attention to festival marketing in terms of tactics, such as the repeated mention of "guess the answer to win the free order".

The key data obtained from the above actions is that Ele.me’s unit economic benefits continue to be positive, and its losses have narrowed year by year. But takeaway is always a low-margin business, and if you want to make money, you still need to do it on a large scale. Ele.me’s long-term strategy is to stop bleeding for Ali, but it is the opposite for Ele.me itself.

The local life battlefield is far more complicated than imagined, and it is unknown whether Douyin can recover the share that Ele.me has lost in the past few years.

Although Meituan’s share price fell every time the acquisition scandal broke, it proved the outside world’s attitude towards the deal. But even if the acquisition is completed, it is only an escalation of the war situation, not an end.