Author | Ma,, Zhou Lei
Edit | Hu Zhe
There is a comparative phenomenon. In 2020, Didi's taxi driver's income will account for 79. 1% of the total passengers payable. The profit margin of online car service is only 3. 1%.
Many analysts believe that the low gross profit margin is an important reason for dragging down Didi's share price.
Of course, some media have expressed different opinions that Didi, as an online car platform, should only include the extracted commission in revenue, and the driver's income should not be included in the overall operating income. Only the self-operated mode can bring the full amount into revenue. Although Didi's move lowered the gross profit margin, it pushed up the scale of revenue and catered to the capital market's favor for scale.
However, from the results, this practice did not make the capital market pay for it.
3. The gross profit margin of1%is the core issue that Didi must face. So, why is Didi's gross profit margin so low?
We think there are four reasons for this result, among which the congenital deficiency of business model is the most important structural factor. In addition, Didi has obvious room for improvement and correction in dealing with industry competition, maintaining compliance, improving technical production efficiency and expanding new business models.
1
Subject to the business model, Didi is "too bitter" than Meituan.
To study why Didi's gross profit margin is low, we must first have a comparable object, and the US group we chose is also TMD.
A few years ago, Didi and Meituan were the top three TMD companies in China's new Internet economy, and now the gap between them is gradually widening. The total revenue and operating profit of Meituan are rising steadily, and the total revenue of Didi has not increased much in the past three years. In addition to the external causes of the epidemic, the difference in their business models is the main reason for the widening gap.
Meituan's revenue section mainly includes three sections: arrival, wine tour and food and beverage take-out. The income of these three sectors consists of commissions and advertisements. Commission refers to the draw after the transaction on Meituan platform, and advertising refers to the bidding ranking of restaurants, hotels or various offline service providers on Meituan platform. There is a ceiling on commission income. If a guest buys a service of 100 yuan on Meituan, Meituan will only take away all the transaction costs of 100 yuan. In fact, the commission for group purchase is mostly around 10%, and the commission for take-out of the US group is around 20%.
Especially when the user increment has bottomed out, the traffic price has soared and the stock game is fierce, the GMV of Meituan can still grow at a high speed, and the commission is also increasing, so merchants have to compete for bidding marketing. Taking the 2020 financial report as an example, under the influence of the epidemic, the annual income of Meituan increased by 17.7% compared with the previous year, and its operating profit increased by 6 1.6% year-on-year. In the same year, the operating income of Didi Travel decreased by 8% year-on-year, and the loss increased by 9%.
It can be seen that the revenue growth of Meituan is mainly supported by the growth of online marketing. Last year, the business performance of the store and the wine brigade was poor. Under the condition that the commission is reduced by 12.7%, the online marketing service income can increase by 4.8%. This model means that the US Mission has double support and strong ability to resist sudden risks.
To put it simply, Meituan's business model is a typical platform+traffic model, which belongs to the business model of lying and earning as long as it is sticky enough. We might as well call it "Ali mode of local life version".
In contrast, according to the prospectus, Didi's operating income mainly comes from three major businesses: domestic travel business, international business and other businesses. Among them, the domestic travel business includes China network car, taxi, driving and hitchhiking; International business includes international travel and take-away business; Other businesses include * * * two-wheelers, freight forwarding, autonomous driving and financial services. The contribution of China Mobile's travel business accounts for 90% of the total revenue, while the commission income is almost fixed. In public information, this figure is 20.9%, including 10.9% passenger subsidy and 6.9% enterprise operating costs (technology research and development, server, security, customer service, manpower, offline operation, etc.). ) and taxes and handling fees.
The front-end and back-end of Meituan are merchants and users; The front and rear ends of Didi are drivers and passengers. However, merchants have the demand for advertising, but drivers don't need to bid for orders at all-it turns out that capacity has always been a tight resource, especially in the case of competition from other platforms. If Didi bids for the driver, it can only drive the capacity to other platforms.
The above differences caused the share price of Meituan to rise again after the release of the 20 19 financial report, and closed at 125.8 Hong Kong dollars that day, with an increase of more than 6%, and soon became a member of the $100 billion club, but Didi was still far from the threshold of this club.
2
Didi has no "dynamic monopoly" caused by pricing power.
Generally speaking, enterprises are in a monopoly position, and one of the most direct benefits is that they have sufficient pricing power and even premium power.
For example, there is no upper limit for the advertising revenue of Meituan's bidding ranking, and the income level depends entirely on the demand of merchants for traffic. After Meituan became the largest local life service platform in China, no company in the market can compete with Meituan in terms of traffic, so Meituan has absolute pricing power over merchants in terms of traffic.
However, Didi is different. After the smoke of burning money on a large scale in the battlefield of online car, we found that online car is not like group buying, which can form a strong network effect at both ends of merchants and users. To put it bluntly, under the premise that consumers have no loyalty, Didi and drivers are far less sticky and controllable than Meituan and merchants.
If only from the perspective of market share, Didi's market share is as high as 80%, which seems to have an absolute advantage, but why can't such a strong market share be transformed into a stable pricing power?
This is because it is no problem for the network car to develop at a high speed by subsidies in the early stage. Because of the subsidized price as a cover, users' requirements for service quality are not so high, but it will not work during the stable operation period. The price of each platform is similar, and the service quality is not too far away. Therefore, Didi must maintain certain subsidies as long as it faces competition, which partly leads to the loss of pricing power.
Just as most brand businesses open stores in Taobao, JD.COM and Pinduoduo at the same time, online car drivers can also register on multiple platforms and take orders on each platform. Drivers can provide the same source of goods, so the service quality is similar whether it is Didi or other non-self-operated online car platform. As for efficiency, Didi may have a better infrastructure, but it is not strong enough to be oppressive.
In other words, because the war in the online car market will never go out, although the market share of aggregation platforms such as Gaode and Meituan is still very low, their traffic advantages and potential should not be underestimated. Therefore, Didi has been on high alert and must maintain a stable relationship between the driver and Didi, so that Didi can't squeeze more profits from the driver. In other words, it is similar to the user. As long as there is a choice, Didi will not dare to "say a word".
Because transportation capacity is always a scarce resource, Didi subsidies "medicine can't stop". In 20 18, meituan once launched a blitzkrieg against Didi, spending 300 million yuan a month to win two cities, Nanjing and Shanghai. Although for strategic reasons, Meituan did not take taxis all over the country, it proved that Didi taxi business was not stable. Therefore, it is impossible for Didi to raise the pricing, because it will soon lead to the loss of users.
On the other hand, online car rental is a point market, and small online car rental companies will focus on a few key cities, so there are many regional online car rental companies in China. Drop one, and the other will appear in another place. This is a game of whacking hamsters. You can never finish playing new hamsters. Didi is exhausted.
Therefore, Didi seems to be a monopoly, but in fact it is a "dynamic monopoly" formed by subsidies and suppression of pricing impulses. Meituan can increase the commission, pass the cost on to the merchants, and even increase the price for traffic, which is almost a sweet fantasy of Didi.
three
Didi lacks a high-profit unit to make up for the congenital deficiency of online car.
As analyzed earlier, it is difficult for Didi to make money from online car service (mainly special car and express train) because it has no pricing power, limited mode, no profit and no cost. This is the current fate of Didi. As for overseas markets, Didi will also face a contest with Uber, and there will be no results in the short term. Before its other businesses grow up, Didi's gross profit margin will always be very low, so its market value is unlikely to be greatly improved.
In fact, Didi has a very good profit module, which is a ride.
In the era of taxis, fare increases have long existed. However, this fare increase right is mainly controlled by passengers, such as adding a few dollars to increase the success rate of calling a car.
However, after the express train implemented the fare increase, the user experience became very poor.
Therefore, Didi taxi executives went to consult economist Zhou Qiren. Zhou Qiren told the other party that it is very simple to solve the problem of fare increase, mainly by using flexible transportation capacity.
Whether it is a special car or an express train, it is essentially a rigid transportation capacity. Rigid transportation capacity needs to occupy the high cost of traditional transportation enterprises, and there is another problem, that is, the transportation industry naturally has peaks and valleys.
Simply put, urban residents have only two travel peaks a day, that is, going to work and getting off work. For some big cities, there may be a small nightlife. The number of people calling cars during these periods is very concentrated, which brings great pressure to the platform capacity. Once the rigid transport capacity is insufficient, the demand for calling a car cannot be met. There are more people who are not satisfied, and the platform will be under great pressure-price leverage will be used to curse, and it will be even worse if it is not used.
However, if transportation enterprises allocate rigid transport capacity according to the peak demand, they will inevitably lose money, because the time in the trough is much longer than that in the peak. Peaks and valleys appear every day, causing Didi taxis to be scolded and challenged every day.
This actually points to an answer-hitchhiking.
To become an "elastic transport capacity", there must be several preconditions: first, someone and a car; Second, I am willing to drive during rush hours; Third, you can't overlap with special cars or some express drivers who are already professional drivers.
Based on the above factors, only a large number of self-driving office workers, that is, young and middle-aged white-collar workers in cities, meet these conditions. The base of this group is amazing, nearly 1 100 million person-times every day. As long as 10% and 100000 vehicles are moved, the service can be provided. Even if only 1% is moved, there are100000 vehicles that can provide services.
2065438+On June 1 day, 2005, Didi Taxi officially launched the carpool service "Drip Ride", which is also the first new product launched after the merger of Didi Taxi and Kuaidi Taxi.
Didi Shunfeng is located in the city "* * * Enjoy Travel", and uses big data algorithms and advanced matching technology to connect every car owner and passenger who is willing to travel together one by one. After the launch of Didi Shunfeng, the data was shocking: it reached 6.5438+0 million car owners in one month, and quickly broke the order of 6.5438+0 million after the launch. With more than 5.5 million owners in three months, it successfully incited 5% of the private car market.
One year later, Didi Shunfeng will make a profit of nearly 654.38+0 billion.
However, due to the fact that the way Didi hitchhiked the flexible transport capacity relied too much on social factors, after two vicious incidents occurred on 20 18, the hitchhiker went offline indefinitely. A few years later, when it went online again, it was not the style of the year-many restrictions were added for safety, which made "Xinjia" no longer have the original profit magic, and this business could not escape the fate of "if you don't catch it, you will be chaotic, and if you catch it, you will die".
I have to say that in addition to the ride, the difficulties faced by the network car are also related to compliance. Behind this is actually a pair of internal contradictions, that is, although supervision can improve safety and compliance, it will inevitably increase costs; If the supervision does not act, the profit of the enterprise will look better, but if there is a problem, it is necessary to bear the responsibility in many ways. In addition, as a "new thing", the network car is bound to face supervision from multiple angles, and the supervision of the network car is not the same in different places, which leads to the compliance construction of Didi in various regions, which is an important part of the rigid cost that has to be paid.
four
The technical ability to control costs needs to be improved.
It is not difficult to see from the above analysis that the low gross profit margin of Didi Special Vehicle is caused by many factors. So, can Didi optimize the cost structure through technical means?
The answer is yes, but it needs a lot of investment. A former executive of Didi's technical system told us that Didi still has a big gap with an international giant like Uber in terms of technical level and system capability.
For such an order of magnitude platform as Didi, it is actually not just a capacity scheduling platform, but an industrial Internet platform. Among them, the factors that can effectively control the cost include route planning, dynamic pricing, intelligent matching, security governance, real-time pricing and so on. Hua Song has great relevance.
It can also be said that basically the main technologies of the industrial Internet, including AI, big data and cloud computing, have taken root in the Didi system, but there is still a long way to go to optimize it to the best state. To some extent, this is closely related to the overwhelming stability demand-a former technical executive of Didi wrote that for a platform of this magnitude, the technology choice is overwhelming. For example, gcc and linux kernel are very basic and key things. In Internet companies, the latest version of the patch is basically not used, just keep understanding and follow-up, and introduce some patches and functions into the online environment in a controlled manner. When they go online, they will go through a long gray scale verification process to ensure stability.
An example that can be cited is that Didi has set up an intermediate account to facilitate drivers to withdraw cash, and put some money in it, but not too much-mainly because Didi has a good reputation, and few drivers withdraw cash every day. However, for some reason, there was a large demand for cash withdrawal. A very honest engineer of Didi set the inability to withdraw cash as "insufficient balance of Didi", which led to a crazy run-Cheng Wei made more than 20 phone calls overnight and credited more than 65.438+million cash into his account before stopping running. Cheng Wei called it "the last death of Didi", which shows that Didi still has room for technical optimization.
five
label
It must be said that the low gross profit margin of the network car is caused by many factors. Therefore, Didi's natural business model with the network car as the core is to make hard money, and there is basically no possibility of changing this model. If Didi wants to "lie down and earn", it must brew a new model. Now it seems that Didi's territory expansion in Xinjiang is still very immature.
In order to expand revenue sources, Didi is actively expanding new business. The income of "other innovative businesses" in the prospectus will increase by 65,438+08.2% in 2020. It is speculated that this includes car service network, * * * enjoying bicycles and motorcycles (* * * enjoying two-wheeled vehicles), freight transportation in the same city, group buying in communities, financial services, and autonomous driving.
Community group purchase, * * * enjoy two-wheeled vehicles, and the competition of the track itself has been extremely fierce. In addition, autonomous driving, Didi began to enter the market from 20 16, but whether the robotaxi market itself is mature and whether it has ushered in large-scale commercialization remains to be discussed.
Relatively speaking, the future of freight transportation in the same city is relatively clear. By the end of June, 5438+February, 2020, Didi Freight had completed 1 1 10,000 orders in eight cities in China in less than six months. This market is considered to be still in the blue ocean and is in urgent need of integration. If Didi can successfully migrate its platform technology, operation mode and brand effect to this industry, it may have a good performance.
In fact, the competition that Didi is currently facing is still low-intensity and it is difficult to shake its dominant position. Is there any new opponent who can put more pressure on Didi? Please read the next article, "Will Didi and Uber meet again? 》。