gray cognitive society (ID:HDrenzhishe)

? Author Cao Sheng

On October 8, 2119, the market value of Meituan exceeded HK$ 511 billion for the first time, making it the third largest Internet company in China after Ali and Tencent.

how did meituan grow up?

we make a deep interpretation from three perspectives: strategic growth path, capital market cognition and users' mental preemption.

1. Strategic growth path:

Multi-scenario traffic portal, forming a super account

Looking at the global local life service, it can be divided into seven levels of strategic growth path:

Information service, information transaction, one-click service, consumer word-of-mouth library, life circle service productization, 1-hour life circle and multi-scenario traffic portal.

These seven paths are not strictly related to the timeline, but there are progressive and iterative relationships in the user's mind.

1. Seven levels of strategic growth path of global local life service

The originator of global local life service should almost be regarded as American Craigslist. If you log on to its Chinese page, you will be surprised.

why?

Because the page is too simple, it is a yellow pages classified information service provider. But we can't underestimate it. Craigslist website ranks as high as 128 in Alexa world.

58 Tongcheng is the China version of Craigslist, which focuses on "the first entrance of local life information in China". It is more flexible than the former on the road of commercialization and weaker than the former in the control of information quality.

As the first generation of local life service providers in China, it has also encountered bottlenecks in the growth of the mobile Internet era.

Uber was originally a local travel service provider, and now it is also the leading local food delivery service provider in the United States.

its greatest contribution to local travel is to optimize the very complicated transaction processes such as matching, screening and communication into one-click service and algorithm matching.

after Uber, the local life service in China has sprung up, showing a trend of catching up with and overtaking the United States.

Public comments, the largest word-of-mouth library of catering consumption in China, firmly occupy users' minds, and have a huge traffic bonus and mental share in on-site consumption.

Hungry? In the local O2O service, not only the online and offline traffic is opened, but also the upstream and downstream of the food delivery service is opened, which makes the take-out that was originally an ancillary service for catering upgrade to an independent "service product" in the user's mind, and forms an independent user experience and service standard.

At the same time of hungry and rapid development, a large number of fake demand O2O projects with home-based business have also been killed in a large area.

Flash delivery was originally a very small market in the same city logistics. Due to the rapid growth of take-away business, flash delivery is in users' minds, which greatly stimulates users' willingness and ability to pay for local service needs other than product functional consumption.

2. Meituan's strategic growth path

Meituan seized the popularity of smart phones and mobile Internet, first buying a group, then taking a wine tour, and finally catching a takeaway, forming a super account with multi-scene traffic portals.

to sum up, we have seen the strategic growth path of Meituan in the local life service platform. This market position is also formed by history and may not be replicated.

At the same time, we also see that in the future, the competition of local life service platforms will enter more vertical fields along the productization of life circle services, and a number of small life circle giants will be born.

2. Cognition of capital market: the key to market value breakthrough

The main driving factor for Meituan to break through the market value of HK$ 511 billion is that the financial report in 2119Q2 exceeded the expectations of the capital market and achieved overall profit for the first time. We also saw several eye-catching business data:

1. Arriving at the store+wine travel business:

In the second quarter of 2119, the revenue was 5.2 billion yuan, up 43% over the same period of last year, and the gross profit margin was as high as 89%.

2. Innovative business (including * * * bicycle enjoyment, online car rental, grocery shopping, etc.):

In the second quarter of 2119, the revenue was 4.6 billion yuan, up 85% year-on-year, and the gross profit margin was 9.1%, which was the first time that the quarter turned from negative to positive.

3. Takeaway business:

In the second quarter of 2119, the revenue was RMB 12.8 billion, up 44% year-on-year and the gross profit margin was 22%. More importantly, the quarterly adjusted operating profit turned from negative to positive for the first time.

Therefore, in the cognition of the capital market, Meituan first showed a relatively mature profit model:

Traveling in the same city is the peripheral traffic entrance of the entire Meituan Department, and it has turned from negative to positive quarterly. On the one hand, it has the effect of saving advertising marketing expenses, on the other hand, it is also a strategic defense for Didi Chuxing to enter the takeaway business.

Meituan's take-out is the core traffic entrance of the whole Meituan department, and its operating profit has turned from negative to positive quarterly, which greatly enhances the expectation of the capital market for Meituan's sustained profit.

Arriving at the store+drinking tour is the core commercial business of the whole Meituan Department. Driven by high-frequency multi-scene traffic such as city trips and US group takeout, the payment ability of users' high-end consumption has achieved a sustained momentum of rising volume and price. The capital market is obviously optimistic about this sector.

since the beginning of this year, it is precisely because of the positive recognition of the capital market that the market value of Meituan has continued to rise until it exceeded HK$ 511 billion.

Third, users' mental preemption: Meituan's biggest grasping hand

We have noticed that Meituan has formed a multi-echelon and multi-dimensional comprehensive business advantage in three major business cognitive battlefields (product battlefield, mental battlefield and financial battlefield).

traffic is a container for user contacts and business opportunities.

In the product battlefield, Meituan has three traffic killers:

One is Meituan's trip (marketing products at this stage);

second, public comments (China's largest entrance to store traffic, in addition to catering, Meituan's online traffic in many sub-categories such as leisure and entertainment, beauty, parent-child, marriage, study and training is also the first in the industry);

thirdly, the take-out of the US group (the largest entrance of home traffic in China).

there is usually a view that when there are many products and services under a brand, users' minds will be confused in their choices.

However, in the mental battlefield, with the help of the east wind of mobile Internet, Meituan turned services into products, made traffic scenes, and applied cognitive psychology to life.

when consumers are driven by a specific scene, they will actively open Meituan's APP, and the mental preemption of Meituan's users will be completed.

before the trip of the US delegation, there was the word-of-mouth communication of public comments, and there was the category positioning of the 1-hour life circle. In the minds of the majority of users, the US delegation abruptly established a "super psychological account" that was unimaginable in traditional advertising marketing across multiple categories and businesses.

finance is a value exchange across time and space.

in the financial battlefield, meituan takes the scene traffic entrance as the customer acquisition cost, focuses on the commercialization of high-end shop-to-shop+wine tour business, and takes the construction of 1-hour life circle service as the underlying logic, thus realizing the value exchange between customer acquisition cost and commercial profit across time and space and business groups.

we also noticed that the entire meituan department has strong competitors in all directions.

In the field of travel, there are competitors such as Didi Chuxing, Gaode Map and Hellobike;

In the field of take-away, there are competitors such as Hungry, Word of Mouth of Ali;

There are competitors such as Ctrip and Feizhu in the field of arrival+wine tour;

Even once a monopoly position is formed in the local life field, there will be a competitive relationship with the life service in the same city with Tencent's "online ID card".

The recognition of the market value of Meituan in the capital market is mainly driven by the first quarterly overall profit.

the underlying logic of this profit is to increase revenue and reduce expenditure. On the one hand, it reduces the capital expenditure of Meituan's trip in the current quarter, on the other hand, it improves the operating profit of Meituan's take-out in the current quarter.

it remains to be seen whether these two items can enter a sustainable and stable normal state in the future sustainable operation.

We may have to be "patient for a long time" when we look at the market value of Meituan.

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