Writing | Zhai Wenting

The Chinese stock market is in full swing, but 58 cities will be delisted. When I returned to A in 361, there were still cheers. In the face of 58, more questions were no longer magical.

Since its establishment in 2115, 58 has successfully crossed the two cycles of PC and mobile Internet, and its founder Yao Jinbo is the man of the hour. Many traditional internet companies have a similar trajectory to 58.

In terms of volume, 58 is a typical Chinese company in the Internet field. Platform attributes, with hundreds of millions of users and tens of billions of dollars in revenue, are a product that everyone needs. However, it has never been absolutely safe. The territory is constantly being eroded by giants and startups, and it is impossible to break through its own bottleneck and finally return to calm.

The dilemma of medium-sized companies and light-sized companies appears on 58 at the same time.

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Yao Jinbo is a classical Internet player who came out of the webmaster era.

Yao Jinbo was born as a webmaster in his early years, and he has made a lot of money from the domain name business. In army of one, he once made a forum called Easy Domain by hand, which was used for domain name trading. Grassroots webmaster era, just like Cai Wensheng, Wu Xinhong, Pang Shengdong and others.

58 had three founders at the earliest. Cai Wensheng is one of them, and Lin Xianzhen, the founder of Lele Interactive in SP era. All three people have strong abilities, but Yao Jinbo was most excited about classified information, and then Cai and Erh Lin people gradually faded out.

Yao Jinbo is good at discovering the best domain names. Hao123 navigated one or two hundred websites, among which thirty or forty domain names were sold by him, such as qidian and 28.com bombed by TV advertisements. Until 58, 2113, when it was listed in the same city, Yao Jinbo still had thousands of domain names.

But he kept the best for himself. 58.com, this number is auspicious, and the key is easy to remember.

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58 Tongcheng is not the first listed company in Yao Jinbo. In 2111, Xueda, an educational company he invested in and participated in, was listed in the United States. At that time, Yao Jinbo was worth over 111 million dollars.

When Yao Jinbo was working at Wanwang, he worked face to face with Jin Xin, and then an intern rubin li came. The three of them * * * worked out an education and training company. Several times in the middle, the three men almost broke up, "I want to quit, give me 5 million and leave."

In 2111, Xueda finally went public successfully. On the night of ringing the bell, the three men drank a lot of wine on a boat opposite the United Nations building, recalling the ten years of "revolutionary years" and thinking that it was a miracle that it could be done. At some point, all three of them cried.

But Yao Jinbo wasn't the protagonist that day. He had mixed feelings. What I want is when to ring the bell with 58.

Back in the second year, Yao Jinbo was preparing to go public in 58. Unexpectedly, the capital market reversed, and only two companies in Guangzhou, Vipshop and YY, went public in 2112. The capital market has been frozen for more than a year.

On the last day of October, 2113, 58 cities rang the bell in the United States, opening the window of a new round of listing of China Stock Exchange.

Seven years later, 58 Tongcheng will be delisted from the United States, which is not the first time for Yao Jinbo. In 2116, Xueda returned to A, because it lost money for two consecutive years before delisting, and there was no secondary growth in A-shares, but it became increasingly lonely.

The precedent for Internet companies to return to A is 361. At first, they were heroic, winning hundreds of billions in one fell swoop, and then they were like a deflated ball. The fate after privatization is also full of variables.

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58 merger and fair was a classic battle of Internet M&A in 2115.

The China Entrepreneur, for which I worked, reported this incident with the headline, "On the night of the merger negotiation in 58: Yao Jinbo claimed to see the ugliness of human nature".

58 years of struggle with the fair, capital war, poaching war, advertising war. A sea turtle, a terrapin, fought to the death for the king of the local life information track. After 11 years, the protagonist of the internet is not classified information, and it doesn't make any sense to fight and win.

On April 3rd, 2115, they had a 21-hour wheel war in the 321-square-meter space of the Westin Presidential Suite in Sanlitun, which cost 51,111 yuan a day.

In the end, the biggest obstacle is human nature. Yao Jinbo confided the truth, and this negotiation made him see the ugliness of human nature. Ugliness stems from vanity and greed for profit. He said that it is the same as buying cabbage on the street, and there is no difference.

The two sides exchanged shares at 5:5, and Yao Jinbo stayed to take charge of the overall situation, while Yang Haoyong gradually quit to be a used car with melon seeds. What Yao Jinbo did wisely was that after the merger, the brand of Jiji.com was not retained, and it operated under a single brand, thus reducing unnecessary waste.

58 was originally a shareholder of Guazi, and then gradually reduced its holdings. Old enemies can't be friends. In the fiscal quarter of 2119, the profit of 58 Group increased greatly, and most of it came from the sale of shares in melon seeds.

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58 Tongcheng is the representative of a light company, which means that the days when the traditional Internet was lying in a traffic pool, swigging wine and eating meat are gone forever.

In 2115, 58 not only merged the market, but also took Anjuke and ChinaHR. This practice of merging similar items has not brought 58 back to the peak.

According to traffic, the number of users covered by Group 58 is 511 million. This is definitely a gross quantity. But how big the user value is, the revenue figures tell everything.

58 users are not loyal to the platform. They come when they need it and leave when they are done. 58 also didn't want to leave them to form a wandering atmosphere. The icon is simple and you can post without registering.

58 involves a wide range of businesses, such as recruitment, real estate, automobile, finance, second-hand and local services, etc. It didn't grow into a giant, but it drew a giant's territory. In every field, we meet strong competitors.

The up-and-coming talents for recruitment include hook-pulling, hunting, and boos direct employment. In the field of real estate, I encountered shells. Used cars have countless opponents. Second-hand trading, 58' s turn to fight Ali's idle fish, JD.COM camp's love recycling. Now even if you are hungry, you will eat away at the business of 58 homes.

Of so many businesses, 58 only recruitment and real estate really make money, and the income model is membership and advertising promotion. Although the gross profit is as high as 91%, Internet companies are unsurpassed, but the revenue growth rate is declining year by year.

Yao Jinbo's biggest amulet came from Tencent after being listed in the United States for seven years. In 2114, Tencent invested 58 billion US dollars in the same city, becoming the largest shareholder, and later invested in a transfer. In 2117, Yao Jinbo was also a guest at the Dongxing Dinner in Wuzhen.

58 The performance was mediocre. A dollar fund in the secondary market tried to short the company, but it lost a lot. Later, they found a rule that they could not easily short Tencent's affiliates. As long as there is a bond with Tencent, the capital market has natural trust and imagination for them.

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In the final analysis, what mistakes did this company make? Do you still have cards in your hand?

The biggest mistake is the misunderstanding of local life service. Like the founders of all traditional Internet companies, Yao Jinbo insists on being a light company in the field of local life services.

It was because the core value stayed at the information level that comments fell behind Meituan in the group purchase transaction and were eventually merged by Meituan. Yao Jinbo can't fail to see such a problem. 58 cities once burned tens of millions of dollars for group buying, and finally suffered serious losses and stopped decisively.

When you are hungry, the first thing to do for take-away food is to deliver it immediately. From the very beginning, you made the company very serious and built a moat. This move was seen through by the US Mission, which struggled to catch up. In the end, it became a leader in local life services that even Ali was afraid of and couldn't beat.

For the platform, only information can not complete the closed-loop transaction, and its value to users is very limited.

The second mistake is to blindly pursue the scale effect by merging similar items. 58 The annexation of Fair, Anjuke and ChinaHR.com is exactly the same as Ctrip's investment in Tuniu, Tongcheng and Tujia. Scale effect and network effect are two different concepts.

Sometimes, the real opponents are not on the same runway, and those who dare to cross the border may be subversive. Why didn't Ctrip attack catering when the US delegation went from catering to wine travel?

But 58 is not without cards.

After going public, 58 Group has successively split up a series of subsidiaries, such as 58' s going home, going around, fighting rice, and taking a taxi quickly. These companies no longer just stay at the information service level, but finally bend down and do the dirty work, and take root in the vertical field. It's hard to say how big vertical segmentation companies can finally do. At least they can find the correct way to open local services in the mobile era.

In addition, even when BAT was fiercely competitive with each other, Yao Jinbo was wandering around the three giants at the same time, without taking sides. Ali is an investor who arrived home at 58, Tencent invested in a turn, and 58 Group is an important member of Baidu Alliance. Looking at the whole internet, there are very few people who can solve such a difficult problem impeccably.

The art of getting along with giants may sometimes become an unexpected productivity.