Recently, Ali's public strategy is directed at Meituan.

At present, the projects of Meituan, including hotels and tourism, are making great strides, while Ali's corresponding local life service sector has been tepid, which forced Ali to make a large-scale and profound organizational restructuring.

This time, Zhang Yong's "liberation" of Chloe Wang and the expansion of Yu Yongfu's power were really "imminent and had to be made". After all, we can't watch a large amount of funds smashed in the early stage go down the drain in a tepid way.

faced with the fact that some businesses are lagging behind others, Ali's integration attack in the life service sector will become its main theme for a long time to come.

Ali continues to increase the service for local life

The huge opportunities contained in local life make it the "second growth curve" that many giants have been aiming at. Not only Ali, Meituan, Tik Tok, Aauto Quicker and JD.COM are also scrambling for the land.

Not long ago, Tik Tok put up the interface of "local eating, drinking and having fun" in three cities, including popular restaurants, accommodation, scenic spots, tourism and so on. This interface is almost equivalent to the video version of "Mei Tuan Review". Tik Tok, who used to guide the Mei Tuan, now directly digests his own users internally.

But among the giants, Ali definitely has the upper hand when it comes to starting chips.

Ali has made a high-profile announcement since the Angel Wheel won the reputation in 2114. As for Meituan, the most successful local life service platform in China, it will take six years to be established.

However, the subsequent development of word-of-mouth can only be described as "dying". Word-of-mouth merged with Yahoo China and Taobao successively, and stopped all promotion in 2111. Four years later, the reputation of resurrection is empty, and it still has not become the entrance of the local life service platform. It was not until 2118 that Ali set up a local life service company, fully acquired Hungry and merged with word of mouth, which came back to life.

some experts said that this is Ali's low positioning of word of mouth, and he should set up the traffic platform first, instead of always thinking about closed loop at the beginning. Ali, who didn't grasp the real potential of word of mouth, could only miss this innovative business.

In 2111, Ali made two big moves in succession. One was to re-invest in the B round of Meituan, which was just established one year ago, and become its major shareholder; The second is to set up a cost-effective gathering.

for the former, it should have been a story that benefited both sides. However, in 2115, when Meituan spared no expense in the sincerity of 5: 5 share swap in exchange for public comments on giving up the dominance of Xinmeida after the merger, Ali sold many old shares of Meituan at a discount, thus obstructing the merger.

After this incident, Wang Xing and Ma Yun turned against each other completely. Ali lost the Meituan group, and all the local life scenes and offline traffic sources he wanted today. On the contrary, he gained a formidable enemy.

For the latter, when the dream of Meituan unifying the local life service market is constantly taking root, it is cost-effective to focus on physical group buying, and suddenly it kills Meituan's territory, and makes 811 million yuan in three months, exceeding the sum of Meituan and Handan.com in the same period! However, after a shot at the peak of the gathering, it quickly returned to the physical group purchase.

At present, this history is inconclusive. However, the general view is that this is Ali's intention to draw a line between local life service and commodity group purchase. There is a great meaning of "I am not unable, I am letting you go".

However, Ali never wanted to give up his local life. In 2113, Taodian was officially separated from Taobao's local life, and Lu Zhaoxi personally took the lead. Although it was backed by Alibaba's traffic portals such as Alipay and Taobao, Taodian failed to stand still in the local life service market.

This also proves that although the rich scenes and offline traffic of O2O are very attractive to Ali who has payment business, companies like Ali who want to be a platform and ecology still have great resistance to O2O. There have been many companies that have been advised to be retired for similar reasons.

In a word, Ali, who had so many first-Mover advantages in the early stage, did not reap the rich bonus of local life service in the later development. On the contrary, Meituan, which parted ways with Ali, has grown into the third largest platform with market value among Internet companies in China, which verifies Meituan Wang Xing's view that "a good local life service is equivalent to recreating a Taobao".

If you are hungry again, the sword refers to the US Mission

Since Ali's wholly-owned acquisition was hungry in 2118, Ali's local life sector has undergone several business and structural adjustments.

First, word-of-mouth was incorporated into Hungry, and the service scope was expanded from "home" to "shop". The initial layout of the offline local life service market was completed, and then both Gaode Map and Alipay began to drain the hungry. Hungry, they gained a series of advantages including larger traffic portal, richer merchant service tools and more complete digital management capabilities.

in 2121, with the arrival of the epidemic, the digitalization of local living services will be greatly accelerated. If you are hungry, announce the revision, upgrade from "delivery" to "life service platform to solve all the immediate needs of users", constantly broaden the business boundary and focus on developing "economy around you".

Nowadays, Hungry, Flying Pig and Gaode Qi Fei form a "flying high" Ali life service section, and more and more Ali consumers are transformed into hungry users.

Ali's intention to build a portal for local life services with Hungry as the center is becoming more and more clear.

As an open platform serving third-party merchants, the "New Service Partner Program" was launched on June 29th with the concept of "better service and more openness", which is an important step for Ali to upgrade from "new retail" to "new service" in the future. Hungry, as the entrance of local life service, is obviously its main battlefield.

Today's Meituan has formed a new pattern of fresh food from high-tier cities to home+flash purchase and community group purchase in low-tier cities in the same city retail field, and it is linked with food and beverage takeout and local life service through high-frequency fresh food flow entrance.

In this regard, Hungry also began to further strengthen the in-depth cooperation with fresh food enterprises, and stepped up the resource investment in the food shopping channel, which means that Hungry has made a further step in the digitalization of local life.

At present, the coverage rate of head fresh merchants in the nationwide grocery shopping channel is over 91%. Thirty fresh e-commerce brands, including Ding Dong Shopping, Qian Aunt, Daily Fresh, Box Horse Fresh, etc., have joined the "New Service Partner Program" and will receive personalized customized services provided by Hungry.

Take Aunt Qian as an example. Now, if you are hungry, the number of online stores on the platform has exceeded 1111.

Despite the digital upgrade of Hungry, Ali's intention of "dancing the sword in Xiangzhuang, with the intention of repeatedly paying tribute to the public" has become clear. However, there is still a big gap between the number of users and the number of businesses.

From take-out to local life, are you hungry? I am reunited with the US Mission, which is also diamond cut diamond.

replacing Chloe Wang and empowering Yu Yongfu,

Ali's "flying high"

"flying high" is a process, and "flying high" is a beautiful result that Ali expects.

At the beginning of the second half of this year, Ali underwent surgery at National Taiwan University and made a series of organizational restructuring, so as to speed up the competition for local life services again!

In terms of personnel changes, Chloe Wang, the former CEO of Ali Local Life, who had been tied to Hungry for four years, was removed and replaced by Li Yonghe, the former president of Alibaba's same-city retail business group, and Yu Yongfu, the chairman of Gaode Group, further expanded his power and accepted reports from Hungry, Gaode and Flying Pig.

Since the local life service company was officially announced, and Hungry merged with Word of Mouth, Chloe Wang has been the leader of Ali's local life and concurrently served as CEO of Hungry, and has made many achievements in his three years in office.

For example, the "new service" strategy put forward in October 2119 has completed the overall upgrade of the organizational structure and embraced Alipay in an all-round way, which is widely regarded by the industry as a strong signal to start a new pattern of industry competition.

However, in the past three years, Meituan has won the absolute superiority in the local life field. It once boasted that Chloe Wang, which wants to raise its hungry market share to more than 51%, has finally become a joke in the industry.

In the past three years, Ali has made many adjustments to local life, but he has never shaken the position of Chloe Wang. Now there is nothing Zhang Yong can do, so he has to move the knife from the root. As a veteran of Ali, Yu Yongfu is duty-bound to shoulder the greatest responsibility this time.

In terms of business, Hungry, Gaode and Feizhu, who are also based on geographical location services, are all in charge of Gaode Group where Yu Yongfu is located, because they all have the genes of local life services.

Flying Pig is included in the life service section for the first time. As a leisure and holiday brand for young people, it makes up for the lack of wine travel business in the original Ali life service section. In the past two years, Gaode has achieved rapid breakthroughs in the fields of travel, hotels and scenic spots, or it will become an important entrance to life services.

Ali's organizational restructuring has been frequent since last year, and this time it's really from the beginning.

For this inevitable move, perhaps we can use Zhang Yong's internal letter, "Facing the rapidly changing and highly competitive market, our organization must become more agile. The construction of agile organization must start from the top of the group.

Conclusion

On the trillion-dollar market track of local life, the infighting between Ali and the US Mission has never stopped. Some experts in the industry analyzed that Ali's local life this time brought the whole ecological members to "fight with the US Mission".

And a series of changes around the life service sector is a road of exploration without any reference. As Zhang Yong said in his internal letter, "In the face of uncertain future, we must make bold assumptions and carefully verify".

Therefore, whatever the result of this contest with Meituan, Ali's organizational restructuring has opened up a new track for life service beyond homogenization competition and a new growth curve.

In the sword and shadow, the two giants face ten years of "enmity", and I don't know what kind of cards they will play ...

Author: E-commerce Jun.