Rebirth 2010: I taught Mr. Lei how to make a mobile phone

Chapter 627: The First and Second Half of China's Internet
2014 has passed. This year is recognized by the industry as a watershed that connects the past and the future, and is the year of handover between the first half and the second half of China's Internet.

It was also a big year for mergers, with capital market integration dramas taking place one after another:

First, there was the merger of Baidu Waimai and Meituan - a fight would have been earth-shattering, while a merger would have allowed both parties to move forward hand in hand;
The subsequent merger of Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache completely changed the original market structure of China's online car-hailing industry;

The merger of Ctrip and Qunar, and the merger of 58.com and Ganji.com, all confirm the market law that "separation will eventually lead to reunification."

The commercial layout and moves led by the traditional BAT have gradually allowed another completely different Internet force to reveal its true appearance, that is, the "Bi'anhao" business alliance.

Looking back at the development history of China's Internet, from early imitation and reference to today's innovative development, domestic Internet companies have completed the transformation from followers to leaders.

The era when companies such as Sina, Alibaba, and Baidu initially competed with Yahoo, Amazon, and Google is now a thing of the past.

If we say that 10 years ago, Chinese Internet companies were in a period of learning, borrowing, and then thinking.

With the commercialization and popularization of 4G technology, the wave of mobile Internet has swept in, becoming a new potential energy, giving birth to emerging technologies such as cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things, blockchain, and artificial intelligence.

Innovative models with Chinese characteristics emerge in an endless stream, influencing and changing people's daily lives: mobile social networking reconstructs interpersonal relationships, mobile payments change consumption habits, short videos reshape the content ecology, and shared travel optimizes urban transportation.
These innovations not only surpassed international peers, but also formed a unique "Huaxia model".

Now China's Internet companies have developed to a new stage from following to innovative development and then to surpassing.

Since last year, keen observers have discovered that the ever-effective tactics accumulated by some companies in the consumer Internet stage, such as "enclosing land to gain traffic", "spending money to grab users", and "subsidizing to occupy the market", have gradually lost their due effectiveness.

Under high standards such as customer personalization, application fragmentation, and standard diversification, the requirements and thresholds for companies to create products have also been raised accordingly.

The theme of the second half of the Internet is clear: Industrial Internet will become the main battlefield. Through technological innovation and mechanism innovation, Internet companies need to deeply integrate with the real economy and enable the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries.

At this historical juncture of bidding farewell to the old and welcoming the new, a profound industrial transformation is unfolding.

China's Internet has entered the second half and is also beginning to undergo profound changes.
The P2P online lending industry continued its rapid growth in early 2015, and market heat continued to rise, but potential risks have begun to emerge.

截至15年2月，全国正常运营的P2P平台超过1600家，单月成交额首次突破500亿元，同比增长超200%。

The industry's annualized comprehensive rate of return remains at around 15%, far higher than traditional financial products, attracting a large number of investors.

However, the successive collapse of platforms such as Shengrong Online and Liwaidai has cast a shadow on this carnival - nearly 100 platforms have encountered problems in the past three months.

Although the "four red lines" were proposed after the Internet Conference last year, and the central bank also stated in January this year that it would "regulate Internet finance" and sent a signal of strengthening supervision, the specific regulatory details have not yet been implemented, and the industry is still in a state of disorderly competition without thresholds and standards.

This allows the industry to continue to move forward in the grey area.

At the same time, a revolution in future travel is brewing.

In the new energy vehicle market, although Tesla, which appeared in China last year, has a market share of less than 2%, its high-end brand image has been established.

In addition, the company announced in February that it would reduce the price of Model S by 2%, bringing the price down to RMB 30, and the market is optimistic about the car.

According to statistics, technology elites and investors account for more than 60% of Tesla electric car users, and sales in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen account for 75% of the national total. Therefore, some media call Tesla the "Apple" of the electric car industry.

Tesla Model S has also become the best-selling imported electric car in China.

In China, at the beginning of the year, Li Bin of Yiche wanted to sell his startup business for a good price, but after being rejected by several leading companies, he began to plan his own car manufacturing plan.

This veteran automotive figure, who has invested in 30 upstream and downstream automotive industry chains and has worked in the industry for many years, finally plans to build his own cars. Only by building his own cars can he break the heavy dependence on 4S stores.

Surprisingly, when he handed the car-making plan to investors, he received an investment of US$1500 million each from Bian Ventures, JD.com, Shunwei Capital and Hillhouse Capital. The remaining funds were personally guaranteed by Li Bin, totaling US$1 million, to establish NIO.

Turning points in fate often happen unexpectedly.

During the preparation period of NIO, one night in October last year in a cafe in Guomao, Li Bin met a woman. This person originally introduced him to a car designer. It turned out that the car designer was planning to start a business at the time. She wanted to make a good-looking, smart and power-assisted bicycle and wanted Li Bin to invest.

After listening to this, Li Bin did not comment, but instead came up with a new idea. Wouldn't it be cool if he could make a bicycle that could be ridden and stopped at any time by scanning a QR code on a mobile phone, thus solving the "last mile" need for users? However, the car designer was not interested in this proposal.

Seeing this, Li Bin turned to the woman next to him and asked, "How about you do it?" The project called Mobike was born, and the woman in charge of this project was Hu Weiwei, who had worked as an automotive reporter in many companies.

In the same month, ofo's Dai Wei also received the first 100 million yuan in financing for the shared bicycle startup project.

Li Bin, who has dabbled in everything from shared bicycles to new energy vehicles, first wanted to find a partner with another founding shareholder of NIO who is also his good friend: Li Xiang.

As the founder of Autohome, Li wanted to build a new energy electric car. He was ambitious but declined the idea of ​​partnering with Li Bin to establish NIO. Instead, he invested his own money, contacted Mingshi Capital, and raised 1 million yuan to establish Ideal Auto.

He Xiaopeng, who will be called "Wei, Xiao and Li" together with them in the future, is still the president of Alibaba Mobile Business Group at this time, and is still dealing with the internationalization of UC Browser and Alibaba Mobile's ecological layout.

History is often full of drama. While Li Bin, Li Xiang and others were busy making cars, Jia Yueting, the founder of LeEco, was bringing the concept of "new forces in car manufacturing" to a climax with a gorgeous performance.

As early as January 1 this year, an internal email titled "Not afraid of the clouds blocking the view, because my heart is in the most subversive" caused an earthquake in the Internet circle.

In the email, Jia Yueting first predicted that LeTV's revenue in 15 is expected to reach 230 billion, and revealed that LeTV TV's annual sales are expected to reach 300-400 million units.

Then the author changed his tone and used nearly half of the article to describe LeEco's grand blueprint for car manufacturing in an almost tragic tone:
".As early as 13, the company's senior executives held a vote on whether to build a car. Most people were firmly opposed to it because the investment was huge, the difficulty was high, the risk was huge, and the three problems might even bring down the entire LeEco. At that time, I compromised.
But now, I can’t not do it because of fear of failure. As long as I can ignite the dreams of more people, as long as I can ignite the dream of China New Energy to build cars, even if LeTV’s car manufacturing will put me in an irretrievable situation, I will not hesitate!
Even if we fail in the end, 'LeTV's car manufacturing' will inspire our peers and will surely drive more peers to join the Internet electric car industry, greatly shortening the development cycle of the industry, just as we led and changed China's Internet TV industry.

It is impossible to create disruptive products by defining the future from now.

If LeTV wants to become a great company, it must first define the future from the future, and then define the present from the future. As long as someone has this forward-looking awareness and overall view to predict the next few years, they will be invincible in the future Internet market.

I think that’s who I am!

The super car strategy just proposed is to define future cars and car manufacturing models from the future. When LeTV super car is unveiled, you will know what future cars will look like.

Finally, let us suffocate for our dreams together!"

When the content of Jia Yueting's email, which was full of "subversion" and "suffocation" arguments, was disclosed by the media, it quickly ignited market enthusiasm.

What is even more remarkable is that Jia Yueting proposed the subversive concept of "defining the future from the future", incorporating all seven major business systems of LeTV into the car manufacturing map.

The capital market immediately responded enthusiastically. On the day the content of the email was exposed, LeTV's stock price rose to the daily limit against the trend, and its market value exceeded 800 billion in one fell swoop.

At this time, Chen Mo looked at the LeTV Super Car ecological counter-strategy on the screen, nodded repeatedly, and kept typing on the keyboard. He was taking the essence and removing the dross.

LeTV mobile phones are the brains of future cars, LeTV TVs are the display systems, LeTV UI is the nerve center, LeTV movies, music, and car networking become audio-visual entertainment systems, and the cloud platform becomes an intelligent driving platform.

If we replace the word LeTV with Xiaomi and combine it with the business of Bi'an, the two will be combined.

Isn’t this the prototype of Xiaomi’s future strategy of people, cars and home?

Chen Mo muttered to himself, "ecological backlash" is a new term that appeared in the public eye for the first time.

In fact, the word "chemical reaction" cannot be found in the dictionary at all. However, according to Chen Mo's understanding, Jia Yueting wanted to express a word that seems high-sounding but is actually complex and obscure - ecological chemical fusion reaction.

As Jia Yueting has a background in accounting, it is difficult for him to come up with this word.

As someone who has experienced this, Chen Mo clearly sees the fatal flaw of the LeEco model: the so-called "ecological counter-attack" scenario described by the other party is nothing more than using one concept after another to hype up operations in the capital market, and then quickly integrating multiple fields through capital operations and forcibly bundling unrelated businesses.

This can be seen from the fact that LeTV's net profit last year was only 3 million yuan and its price-to-earnings ratio was over 200 times.

What does a 200 times price-to-earnings ratio mean? It means that if LeTV maintains its current status quo, it will take investors 200 years to get their money back.

The essential difference between LeEco and Xiaomi is that LeEco is capital-driven, has hollowed-out technology, and lacks users.
Xiaomi suddenly received a task assignment, shouldered the expectations from above, spent tens of billions of real money, put all the reputation of the boss on the line, recruited technical experts, built its own factory, and put down its efforts to focus on R&D and manufacturing, in addition to cost control and user collaboration.
The three years of hard work coincided with the outbreak of the epidemic, which was a devastating start. In the end, we did make a name for ourselves, which can be said to be no easy task.

But then again, Jia Yueting at this time still had considerable charisma among the public. He kept using the story of car manufacturing to push up the stock price, while at the same time he kept cashing out and claimed that he would lend the money to the company to build cars interest-free, forming an infinite cycle. After "making cars with PPT", he created the spectacle of "making cars with Weibo".

Unfortunately, his ambition was too great, his luck was bad, and he ended up on a path of no return.
(End of this chapter)