Chapter 59 Ma Huateng "digging a well"

From the perspective of the industry, Ma Huateng's e-commerce has invaded Ma Yun's territory.The competitor that Ma Huateng declared for himself is still very strong.When Ma Huateng was concentrating on how his QQ could bring him wealth, Ma Yun seemed to be on the pinnacle of success. On July 17, 2000, Jack Ma from Hangzhou became the first Chinese entrepreneur to appear on the cover of Forbes in 50 years, on the grounds that Jack Ma created the best e-commerce website in the world.The magazine described Jack Ma this way: "Deep cheekbones, twisted hair, mischievous grin, and the appearance of a 5-foot-tall, 100-pound urchin." It added, "This weird-looking man has the stature of Napoleon. At the same time, I also have the same great ambition as Napoleon!" "After reading "Forbes" magazine, I realized how ugly I am." Jack Ma said.

Jack Ma speaks fluent English, but he doesn't understand technology at all; he is very eloquent but very fond of fighting with his peers in the media, and wins most of the time.Ma Yun is arrogant and arrogant. He said many Chinese entrepreneurs have never thought about it or thought about it but are too embarrassed to say it. For example, our company can’t find an opponent even with a telescope. For example, I want to be a 102-year-old company. For example, we are in How many years later, he will be one of the world's top 500 companies... This is such a person.He first hit the net in 1995.That year in Seattle, USA, Jack Ma, who had no concept of computers, went online for the first time.After surfing the Internet for a while, Jack Ma thought of doing an online advertisement for his translation agency.He put the advertisement on the Internet at 10:00 in the morning, and received 6 e-mails before 12:00 noon, from the United States, Germany, and Japan, saying that this was the first webpage about China they saw.

"There is a lot of business to do here!" Since then, the endless charm of the Internet has convinced Jack Ma.Ma Yun suddenly realized: "Collect the information of Chinese enterprises, express them to the United States, and let the designers make web pages and publish them to the world, and the profits will come from the fees charged to enterprises." A few months later, Ma Yun's first Internet The company - Haibo Network was established, and the product was called "China Yellow Pages".This is the earliest China-themed business information website on the Internet, and the earliest Internet business model to serve enterprises in China.Therefore, foreign media called Jack Ma China's Mr.Internet (the father of the Internet).

Ma Yun is like the male protagonist in his favorite Jin Yong novels: talented and intelligent, but has to go through many setbacks before he becomes a master.After failing the college entrance examination for the first time, Ma Yun pulled a tricycle, ran a small business, and applied for a waiter in a hotel but was rejected due to his height.After so many tosses and turns, Ma Yun took the college entrance examination again, learning a foreign language.Ma Yun's Internet experience is also full of accidents and magic.Ma Yun's Internet journey began in 1999. At the beginning of 1999, the author Negroponte came to China and gave a digital speech at the China World Hotel. Zhang Chaoyang acted as an interpreter for his teacher and investor. "The substantial growth of digitalization is not only reflected in entertainment and education, but also in e-commerce. I predict that by 2000, the e-commerce market will be a $1 trillion market, which is five times more than people estimate. He also pointed to the wave of e-commerce sweeping the world.At this time, in the fertile land of China's Internet, this field has just been cultivated.That year, on May 18, China's first B2C website for online sales of software books was officially launched. The founder Wang Juntao gave the newborn a strange name - 8848.This is said to represent the height of Mount Everest.Named after the digital pinnacle of Everest, it shows Wang Juntao's ambition to dominate the world in the e-commerce field.This is where the Chinese e-commerce dream began.

In September, 8848 carefully planned a 72-hour network survival test. The 12 contestants were locked in an almost empty room for 72 hours, only connected with the outside world through a computer and a network cable.In this sensational commercial farce, many people heard of online shopping for the first time, and many people remembered the term "8848", and 8848 became famous in one fell swoop. In the spring of this year, Ma Yun, who worked on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation in Beijing, had been in hibernation for a long time. He suddenly woke up from the depression and found the right direction.He led his team back to Hangzhou from Beijing, and established a B2B Alibaba (Business to Business—business-to-business, providing an online platform for business-to-business trade) e-commerce website in the lakeside garden on the outskirts of the city.In this humble house covered with newspapers, Jack Ma gave an entrepreneurial speech to all employees.He proposed three goals: "First, we want to build a company that can survive for 80 years; second, we want to build an e-commerce company that serves Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises; third, we want to build the world's largest e-commerce The company must enter the top ten global website rankings."

In August of that year, eBay was founded in Shanghai. Its founder, Shao Yibo, was known as a prodigy. He once declined the helicopter flight of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in his first year of high school. He was the first person in China to go to Harvard for an undergraduate degree with a full scholarship. Tempted by the high salary, he returned to the mainland to start a business.After Alibaba was founded, Jack Ma knocked on the door that created the myth.In the history of Internet in China, Ma Yun is very legendary: he rejected several million dollars of investment when he could not pay wages, got Softbank’s 20 million dollars within 6 minutes, and got 82 million dollars in the bathroom, which is the largest amount of money in China’s Internet financing...

When Jack Ma created the myth, China's e-commerce market was growing like mushrooms after rain. In November 1999, Dangdang Online Bookstore was established; in the same year, the B2B model Alibaba.com opened in Hangzhou; in May 2000, Joyo.com was officially released as a comprehensive e-commerce website; soon Bertelsmann settled in Shanghai; Sohu also entered the comprehensive portal On the basis of the first time joined the electronic mall service; Sina.com chose to cooperate with partners to launch the shopping channel. In 2000, home appliance companies including Qingdao Haier, Guangdong Midea, Chunlan Group and TCL announced their entry into e-commerce.By 2001, there were 1,345 B2B websites in China, with a turnover of 107.5 billion yuan, an increase of 40% from 76.77 billion yuan in 2000.Among them, the transaction volume of the home appliance industry has reached more than 21 billion yuan, the transaction volume of the oil industry has exceeded 16.5 billion yuan, and in the export of information products, textiles and clothing, and daily light industrial products, the transactions reached through B2B are also 10 billion yuan. around yuan.

At the same time, the area of ​​e-commerce development is also rapidly expanding, from the original almost limited to Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and other key cities, and began to develop to coastal and eastern and central cities.From 2000 to 2001, when the Internet industry bubble burst, more than 75% of the domestic first-generation e-commerce models had withdrawn from the market.Or close down, or be acquired by a professional e-commerce platform.Wang Juntao was also forced to resign from MY8848, a branch of 8848, on August 9, 2001. The B2C business of MY8848 came to a standstill, and 8848 was completely transformed into a technical service company.That is, since 2001, the e-commerce industry began to look for a new direction.At this time, the C2C model of e-commerce sites began to emerge.

In 2002, China's Internet was cold and cold, and Shao Yibo's eBay dominated the brilliance. The average monthly transaction volume of its computer and network products exceeded 10 million yuan, and the cumulative number of buyers distributed across the country exceeded 100,000.In order to build popularity, eBay has successively spent a lot of money to place a large number of advertisements on Sina, Sohu, Baidu, and Google. Relying on huge advertisements and marketing, eBay has developed a large number of customers. However, this method of exchanging funds for popularity is exactly the same as the method of burning money in the Internet bubble era. A large amount of internal friction caused eBay's capital operation to suffer serious internal injuries.In the predicament, Shao Yibo accepted the olive branch thrown by eBay. In March 2002, eBay invested $30 million in cash to obtain a 33% stake in eBay. In June 2003, eBay completed the wholly-owned acquisition of eBay, involving an amount of up to 180 million US dollars.

eBay occupies 70% of the market share, has a good brand advantage and user base, eBay EachNet thus occupies an absolute advantage in China's online stores.However, Jack Ma's new Taobao, relying on the two sharp teeth of "free" and "Alipay", continued to erode eBay's share, and finally completely defeated eBay EachNet. During the "SARS" period in 2003, someone in Alibaba was infected with SARS. More than 600 employees of the company were quarantined at home, and their phones were also transferred to their homes.At that time, only eight or nine people were exempted from isolation because they had secretly arrived at Ma Yun's home in the garden by the lake in advance. One day in March, they were called into Jack Ma's office, and there was a thick stack of contracts in English on the table.Ma Yun said that if he signed this contract, he would immediately "disappear from this company" and had other things to do, but this matter could not be disclosed to anyone, not even to his parents.Of course, anyone who doesn't want to can leave now.After finishing speaking, Ma Yun handed each of them a contract, and told them truthfully: as long as you sign your name, you must guarantee that there will be no leaks within 10 months, and if you sign the contract, it means that you have left our company , Everything about the new company cannot be told to others.After roughly reading the English contract, these people signed one by one. The thoughtful Jack Ma chose to secretly create C2C Taobao (Customer to Customer——person-to-person, which provides trade between individual sellers and individual buyers. Internet platform), several people at that time, including Sun Tongyu, Wang Shuai and others.

When Taobao was first established, there were no products on the Internet, and there was not much popularity.In order to gather popularity, Ma Yun and others had to collect products by themselves, and then buy and sell each other online.After a while, an article appeared on Alibaba’s internal webpage, written by an internal employee. He called on the company’s senior management to pay close attention to a newly established small company, which may become Alibaba’s future rival. It is Taobao Net, the idea is very strange, and its conception is very similar to our Alibaba. The staff of Taobao began to follow the post, saying that they had noticed this company.Later, someone posted that they had tested the IP address and found that the company was located in Hangzhou, near Alibaba. On July 10, Ma Yun announced that Taobao is our own, which made everyone cheer. Ma Yun once commented on eBay and Taobao: "eBay is a shark in the sea, but I am a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the sea, I will lose, but if we fight in the river, I will win." With its advertising campaign, free business strategy and in-depth understanding of Chinese users, Taobao, which was launched in 2003, caught up after a few years, and its market share once surpassed eBay, which formed a monopoly. The "sharks" and "crocodiles" tried their best, and the result was that eBay and eBay went from bad to worse, becoming another victim of the multinational Internet company's "headquarters control" strategy in China. In December 2006, TOM Online and eBay EachNet jointly announced the establishment of a joint venture company. The Chinese name of the new company is TOM-EBay, with Wang Leilei as CEO.Wang Leilei said boldly: "It is necessary to find a feasible profit model within half a year." But Wang Leilei's dream did not come true: at the end of March 2008, the just-announced 2007 results of TOM Group (02383.HK) showed that the company's five-year The first loss, the loss amounted to 297.4 million Hong Kong dollars. One side is the loneliness of eBay, and the other side is Ma Yun's infinite scenery.His Alibaba was selected twice as an MBA case by Harvard, setting off a research boom in the United States; he was selected as a "future leader" by the "World Economic Forum"; more than 400 media in more than a dozen languages ​​around the world have never stopped tracking and reporting on Alibaba Yes! Even when British Prime Minister Blair visited China in July 2003, he asked to meet "China's Jack Ma" by name, because "he is changing the way global businessmen do business"! When Jack Ma finally won his own market with a "grassroots" business model, made Taobao a popular community, and brought out his own instant messaging product "Taobao Wangwang" to increase the viscosity of the community, Tencent also felt the corresponding pressure.So Ma Huateng started the pat in his mind. Although Ma Huateng had no e-commerce experience before, Tencent had nearly 400 million registered users at the time, just like Tencent’s current important profit model "QQ Show", which was originally adopted by Netease Ding Lei in China, but because of the lack of Ma Huateng also jokingly referred to his friend Ding Lei as, "The well was half-drilled, and he ran away without water."—And in this C2C well, can Tencent get water? Ma Yun once used "crocodile" to compare himself.However, when Tencent, which is also a "crocodile", enters this market, Jack Ma will not be so confident about whether he can maintain his advantage over Paipai.Because as far as it is concerned, this opponent has achieved success in almost all the fields it has entered. Chen Tianqiao, the richest man in China's IT industry, once said with a smile: "Ma Huateng has a great way of attracting stars. If the opponent has any good ideas, Tencent will immediately copy them." With hundreds of millions of QQ user bases, I am afraid that Jack Ma, who has just settled eBay, will start to get busy again.