I have a thousand suites in Shenzhen

Chapter 258 Crazy money-burning battle

Of course, it is impossible for Ou Xiaolong to take over all the group companies under Yi Anguo's name. He does not have the courage or ability.

And Ou Xiaolong also knew very well that Yi Anguo was just talking, and it was impossible for him to really let him take over all the companies under his name.

In fact, what Ou Xiaolong was thinking was different? He just meant to say it.

He can hand over the company to his daughter Chen Xuejiao, but he will never hand it over to Yi Anguo. He can trust his daughter 100%, but he will not trust Yi Anguo 100%.

Because there is not only his daughter but many women around Yi Anguo.

Similarly, Yi Anhui not only has children with Chen Xuejiao, he also has children with other women.

And his Tenglong Real Estate can only belong to the children of Yi Anguo and his daughter Chen Xuejiao in the future. As for the children of Yi Anguo and other women, of course it is impossible to have a share.

At this time, the 3Q war has begun to intensify. With the advent of the mobile Internet era, all Internet giants are competing for traffic.

Whoever controls the traffic controls the right to speak. Everyone knows this truth.

The cause of the war was that Penguin first launched Penguin Doctor 1.0 and then Penguin Doctor 3.2. The interface and functions were similar to those of 360. It also announced a half-year trial of Norton anti-virus software. Later, Penguin Doctor took advantage of the 2010 Spring Festival period to promote it forcefully.

The sensitive 360 ​​quickly realized the threat of Doctor Penguin, and some employees who were on vacation were urgently recalled to deal with the emergency. 360’s rapid response, coupled with the fact that Penguin Doctor’s own products were immature and rushed into battle, many users uninstalled Penguin Doctor one after another, and its market share quickly dropped to less than 10%. 360 became the winner of this confrontation.

On May 2010, 5, Penguin quietly upgraded Penguin Doctor to version 31 and changed its name to "Penguin Computer Butler".

The new version of the software combines Penguin Doctor and Penguin software management into one, adds cloud Trojan killing, plug-in cleaning and other functions, covering all the mainstream functions of 360 Security Guard. The user experience is very similar to 360. Penguin’s move makes 360 and Kingsoft Antivirus Caught off guard.

However, Yi Anguo knew that this 3Q war had just begun, and 360 would never give up and admit defeat.

At the same time, the war between thousands of groups was also on the rise. With the birth of the first group buying website in China, at its peak, there were more than 6000 group buying websites in the country.

The trigger for this war came from across the ocean.

In 2010, something big or small happened in the American Internet industry. Google made an acquisition offer to Groupon, hoping to acquire the group-buying website for about US$60 billion.

To put it in detail, Groupon is just a start-up company that has been established for more than a year, but it is expensive because of its new ideas, and it is engaged in online group buying. A group is a group, and a coupon is a coupon. To put it simply, the more you buy, the cheaper it is.

The first group purchase they launched was a "buy one, get one free" deal with the pizza shop next to the company. The pizza shop increases sales and consumers get a deal, the best of both worlds.

This online group buying model will be familiar to everyone ten years later, but no company has ever tried it now. It is fresh and the key is that it has benefits. Therefore, it became very popular once it was launched and quickly developed into a global The United States has attracted millions of users, and many people think it is a highly imaginative market.

However, faced with 60 billion golden dollars, Groupon refused. The reason is simple, they think they are undervalued.

According to the management's thinking, the valuation of our family should be at least between 200 billion and 300 billion.

Soon, this matter spread to China, and countless entrepreneurs were excited, excited, and eager to give it a try.

There is a large gold mine right in front of you, standing on a track called "Group Buying". You are not allowed to go up and dig two shovels.

The first person to come out to eat crabs was Feng Xiaohai. In January 2010, Feng Xiaohai launched Manzuo.com, the first group buying website in China.

This is not the first time Feng Xiaohai has started a business. Before that, he also established the Aika Automobile Network.

Five years after its founding, it was acquired for US$1000 million. Two years later, he started his own business again and founded Manzuo.com.

He told the media that online group buying was not invented by Americans. In our country, online group buying can be traced back to 2001.

Like his previous entrepreneurial project, Aika Automobile Network, it is actually a group purchase of automobile services. At that time, this project was also interviewed by the American "Wired" magazine and a report titled "Car Group Purchasing with Chinese Characteristics" was made.

In other words, he had exported the group buying model to the United States as early as ten years ago.

Manzuo.com, the name comes from the idiom "a house full of friends". Interestingly, a few months later, the American Groupon entered the Chinese market and gave it a very suitable name, "Gaopeng.com".

Fate is so wonderful.

As a pioneer in group buying in the United States, Gaopeng had long planned to enter the Chinese market and take the lead.

However, after everything was prepared, the Americans were surprised to find that the domain name Groupon.cn had actually been registered in China!

This "other me in the world" is called Tuanbao.com. Unfortunately, Groupon had no choice but to talk to Tuanbao, the meddling Tuanbao.com, about buying a domain name. But who would have known that Tuanbao.com doesn't accept hard or soft content, and doesn't accept oil or salt. No matter what conditions it offers, it just won't sell domain names.

Why is Tuanbao.com so domineering? Where does its confidence come from? Obviously, it is also a strong player that cannot be ignored in the group buying battlefield.

After all, it claims to be the only group buying website that achieved profitability in 2010.

The development momentum is so good, I still want to spread the word, what about cooperation? What about resale? If I preemptively register it, it’s mine. Just wait and see me killing people!
Just like that, Gaopeng, Mantuan and Tuanbao, each of the three companies has its own strengths. As soon as the starting gun was fired, they were half a step ahead of most of their competitors, bringing the new group buying thing to domestic consumers.

Although these three people all started early, have excellent backgrounds, and are all very ambitious, the Internet in China is a Shura field. If you don't pay attention, you will be attacked by opponents who appear out of nowhere.

In just six months after the establishment of Manzuo.com, the track quickly became crowded. Lashou.com, Wowotuan, Meituan, Nuomi.com, etc., sprung up like mushrooms after a rain and crowded onto the track. Come up, and behind these companies, there are thousands of similar companies that are catching up, and they are coming like thousands of troops.

And when entrepreneurs came in droves, capital also poured in crazily, and so the first round of eliminations began.

There is a group buying website that has gained the favor of capital and has even been given the position of Big Brother by capital. It is Lashou.com.

The founder of LaShou.com is Wu Bo, a returnee from overseas with a very flexible mind.

Lashou.com's ability to obtain large amounts of financing and dominate its opponents in the midfield is inseparable from Wu Bo's management and innovation.

For example, Lashou.com was the first to launch a check-in function, encouraging users to check in at a certain restaurant offline and share their location in order to obtain medals and even coupons.

This novel operation quickly became popular, attracting everyone to imitate it and deepening the user's stickiness.

When LaShou.com was founded in April 2010, it immediately received US$4 million in Series A investment, eight months later received US$500 million in Series B investment, and four months later received US$5000 million in Series C investment.

I was reluctant to accept the money, so I came up with Xiao Wu's words: "I just throw the money into the fire one by one, and I won't be able to burn it all in a year."

After receiving a large amount of financing, Lashou.com expanded wildly offline and continued to open cities one after another.

In big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, even if multiple tours are launched in one day, there are still a large number of merchants queuing up to put them on the shelves.

Therefore, Lashou.com simply launched Group Buying 2.0, allowing merchants to publish group buying information on their own.

Once this opening was opened, the merchants and categories on the platform expanded rapidly, and the scale of Lashou.com expanded unprecedentedly.

Under the devastating offensive of Lashou Net, the three swordsmen who were originally leading were suppressed and beaten one after another. Gaopeng adhered to its overseas experience and failed to make timely adjustments to its domestic market strategy. It was overwhelmed at first and its market share quickly declined.

Manzuo.com is a player who particularly loves first-tier cities and insists on its high-quality positioning.

It spends huge sums of money to place large-scale brand advertisements in subways, buses, newspapers, outdoor and other offline brands. The purpose is to occupy the commanding heights of big cities and reduce dimensions from high to low to attack opponents.

However, in order to do so, it is necessary to continuously invest huge amounts of offline advertising expenditures in first-tier cities, and at the same time, there is no huge return.

Soon, this veteran contestant who was partial to science could no longer bear it.

Tuanbao.com, the "tough guy" who grabbed the domain name and refused to return it, did not give up at all in the face of the storm of Lashou.com. It played a comprehensive role of attacking everywhere and expanding extensively. All large, medium and small cities wanted it.

When Lashou.com opened in about 200 cities, it announced that it had opened 324 cities, claiming to have the most cities covered.

It can be seen that Tuanbao.com's strategy is to win by scale, and it wants to take advantage of the Matthew effect of the strong getting stronger, to win a quick victory, and in the end the winner takes all.

But the problem is, the money you have raised is not as much as that of LaShou.com. Isn’t it a case of facing death by fighting with LaShou.com?
Sure enough, the faster it expands, the faster it loses blood, and eventually it can only run out of money and go bankrupt.

Just like that, just one year after the Thousand Regiments War started, the market situation has completely changed.

The early Three Musketeers obviously fell behind, and the latecomers of LaShou.com caught up, stepped on the dying Three Musketeers, and established their own empire.

However, the mighty offensive of Big Brother Lashou.com is not effective for all companies. There are always some strong bones that can survive, such as Honest Rice Tuan.

The founder of Mi Tuan is Wang Xin. It is customary in the world to say that Wang Xin is a serial entrepreneur, but this is a statement of high emotional intelligence. Another way to put it in terms of low emotional intelligence is that he is a serial entrepreneurial failure.

He started a business once and failed once. Everything went wrong and he failed again and again.

From Youzitu and Xiaonei.com to Fanfou and Hainei.com, they all fell into disrepair after a slight improvement.

Before founding Mi Tuan, all of Wang Xin's entrepreneurial experience was in social products. He suddenly jumped to Mi Tuan, a track with heavy offline modules. To put it mildly, it was called cross-border, but to put it worse, it was called blind back then. Noisy.

Therefore, there were not many people willing to invest in Mi Tuan in the early stage, and the investment was very small. But fortunately, Wang Xin's entrepreneurial team, which had suffered repeated defeats, stayed together.

These people are all very capable and have gotten along very well in their past entrepreneurial experiences. Although they did not succeed, they trusted each other.

It is said that when Fanfou was shut down, only two people left the entire team, one of whom was Zhang Yiming, the founder of Bytedance.

On March 2010, 3, this highly cohesive team set off again and founded Mi Tuan.

And unlike previous history, Mi Tuan attracted the attention of Huanong Investment Company as soon as it was established, and took the initiative to invest a sum of money.

However, Wang Xin, who has experienced many entrepreneurial ventures, has become very cautious. When the company was first established, he did not feel that the more funds he raised, the better.

Because the more funds you raise, the more shares you have to sell out.

After all, you are a newly established company. Without that venture capital firm, they will give you a high valuation without seeing the development potential of your company.

Unlike his opponents who were racing wildly to claim territory, Mi Tuan's pace seemed unhurried.

Even with the financial support from Hualong Investment Company, Wang Xin was not arrogant and started frantically burning money for expansion.

Wang Xin first strictly controlled expenditures. He doubted the effectiveness of offline advertising and believed that the conversion rate was difficult to measure.

Therefore, Mi Tuan only invested part of its advertising online and spent its marketing expenses very restrainedly and frugally. This was in sharp contrast to other competitors.

After all, Tuanbao.com announced that it would spend 5.5 million yuan on advertising, Nuomi.com announced that it would spend 2 million yuan on marketing, and Dianping.com said it would spend about 4 million yuan.

At the same time, Mi Tuan is also very slow in opening cities. It only opened 90 cities more than a year after its establishment. It even took the initiative to close some cities midway to shrink its front.

At a time when all competitors are competing to deliver good news and compete to see who can open the most, Meituan’s initiative to close down inevitably gives the outside world a feeling of losing ground.

But retreat is sometimes for a better attack. There is always a clear main line in distributing rice balls, which is "rural areas surrounding cities".

This strategy is quite similar to Tian Ji's horse racing spirit. It puts most of its resources on third-tier cities, avoids the firepower of first-tier cities, and focuses on small cities that are not very popular. This strategy is very convenient.

At that time, rivals such as Lashou.com had already received several hundred million US dollars in financing, while Mi Tuan only had tens of millions.

If you compete head-on, there is no doubt that you cannot beat them. You will only accelerate blood loss and consume your own life.

The competition in third-tier cities is much lower, and Meituan does not need to spend crazy subsidies to seize the market. If you continue to work hard here and establish your own base camp, you may be able to build blood for the company and accumulate ammunition for future decisive battles.

Soon, the arena was no longer bustling, and all the surviving players were vaguely aware that the decisive battle was coming.

However, it is still early for the Thousand Regiment War to finally end.

Of course, Chen Xuejiao and Hualong Investment Group are also paying close attention to this thousand-group war.

But Chen Xuejiao also knew very well that now was not a good time to enter the market.

However, Yi Anguo has already chosen his team, focusing on and investing in Mi Tuan and Dianping.

Although Chen Xuejiao couldn't understand it, she even couldn't figure it out.

But he believed in Yi Anguo's judgment ability, and he believed that Yi Anguo must have his reasons for doing this.

After all, there are countless facts that have proven this.

However, Yi Anguo did not relax, even though he already knew the final result of the Thousand Regiment Battle.

That is, Mi Tuan finally merged with Dianping, and the two companies ended up in a tie at 5:5, completely ending this heaven-team war and becoming the biggest winner.

However, the biggest winner is Mi Tuan, because although it ended in a 5:5 tie, in the end it was Mi Tuan that merged with Dianping, not Dianping that merged with Mi Tuan.

And after the final merger, almost all of Dianping’s founding team were eliminated.

So in the final analysis, the founder of Dianping lost.

Although Yi Anguo knew the result, he was not sure whether the trajectory of history would change because of the flapping of his butterfly's wings.
"Nowadays, domestic group-buying websites are fighting to the death. Why doesn't our Fantuan.com take advantage of the situation and enter the group-buying market? Expand its market share and carve up this big cake."

After coming out of Chen's house, on their way back together, Chen Xuejiao couldn't help but ask when talking to Yi Anguo about the current situation of the group buying war.

(End of this chapter)