Author | Liu Baodan From performance to market confidence, Meituan is walking out of a three-year low point, but Wang Xing is not stopping there - he has even bigger plans. Going overseas has become a must for Chinese companies. Meituan, which has been warming up for 8 years, has finally made up its mind to put going overseas on the agenda. Recently, Meituan began recruiting senior engineers for international silver enterprise direct connection. After the model was successful in the Hong Kong market, Meituan officially kicked off its overseas expansion, accelerated recruitment and put the first stop of the overseas expansion in Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. Going overseas is a critical turning point, which means that after more than ten years of capacity accumulation, Meituan has to export its local life capabilities to the world, which is as significant as the replication of TikTok by ByteDance. In the wave of Internet companies going overseas, Meituan went overseas later because local life patterns are more important than social, e-commerce and other industries. However, Wang Xing must make this move. Against the background of intensified domestic competition and the shrinking of community group buying, he must find a new growth story. On his entrepreneurial journey, Wang Xing is still determined to create a new business legend in this global adventure. A must-have question. Meituan has fought a beautiful takeaway battle in Hong Kong. On May 6, Measurable AI, a market research firm, released the latest data showing that by March 2024, according to the number of orders, KeeTa, the takeaway business of Meituan in Hong Kong, has a market share of 44%, rising to the largest takeaway platform in Hong Kong. However, Hong Kong is only a stopover for Meituan's overseas expansion, and Meituan has set its real meaning of going overseas in Saudi Arabia. Wall Street news learned that Meituan has been recruiting people around the direction of going overseas in the past two months. The positions include engineers, overseas human resources and operation experts, international payment and transaction product managers, mainly responsible for payments, employee management and related products in overseas markets. More importantly, the recruitment of local talents. More than a month ago, Meituan posted relevant recruitment information on LinkedIn and the Middle East recruitment platform Baye.com, with Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, as the place of work. From the city selection, Meituan did not choose the United States with a larger market space, nor did it choose Southeast Asia where culture and food are more similar, but chose Saudi Arabia. It can be seen that Meituan's overseas expansion strategy still has a heavy experimental component and is more cautious. Wang Xing is not fighting an unprepared battle. For this overseas expansion, Meituan has been planning for many years. As early as 2016, Wang Xing began to consider the issue of going overseas and visited Silicon Valley, Berlin, Israel, Jakarta and other places. In 2017, Meituan officially laid out overseas accommodation business, first connecting hotels in nearly 100 countries overseas to the Meituan application. At that time, the domestic and foreign takeaway wars were in full swing, and with Meituan's listing in Hong Kong in 2018, Wang Xing's overseas strategy was forced to be shelved. Since then, Meituan has also made a series of international investments, including Swiggy in India, Gojek in Indonesia, and Opay in Nigeria, involving food, taxis, payments and other fields, to prepare for going overseas. Along with the frequent news reports of Meituan's victory in Hong Kong, Meituan's overseas plan was finally brought to an unprecedented strategic height in 2024, and Wang Xing once again rushed to the forefront. In February, Meituan put the home business group, the in-store business group and other businesses into the core local business sector, and appointed Wang Putong as CEO, while Wang Xing personally took charge of overseas business, which ensured the landing of the overseas expansion strategy in the organizational structure. In fact, before the confirmation of the overseas expansion strategy, Wang Xing personally visited the Middle East last May and met with members of the Saudi royal family, laying the foundation for Meituan's layout in Saudi Arabia.

Editor | Huang Yu More than half a year ago, e-commerce giants began to follow in the footsteps of PDD to launch "refund only". However, the drawbacks of "refund only" gradually emerged, and now Taobao is correcting its course. On July 26th, Taobao announced that it would optimize the "refund only" strategy, improve the seller's after-sales autonomy based on the new version of the experience score (store experience score), the higher the experience score, the greater the seller's disposal rights, and stores with a score of 4.8 or higher will receive more autonomy. The relevant policies will be officially implemented on August 9th. It's easy to see that Taobao is trying to strike a new balance between user experience and seller rights. Over the past few years, the biggest change in the e-commerce industry has been the rise of PDD. In addition to low prices, "refund only" is also a core factor in PDD's success. Therefore, e-commerce platforms have gone from questioning and understanding PDD to learning from PDD. At the end of last year, in order to strengthen consumer rights, Taobao began to support buyers for refund only, and JD.com also revised its guidelines to add standards for user refund only. However, while "refund only" protects consumers, it is also vulnerable to abuse by "wool party" and causes harm to seller rights. For example, during this year's June 18th promotion, many clothing merchants stated that the return rate can reach 80% or even 90%. Since consumers can apply for a refund without returning the goods for quality issues, a large number of merchants are experiencing significant losses. Insiders at Taobao told Wall Street News that Taobao is taking a beneficial exploration between users and sellers by optimizing the "refund only" based on the store experience score. "By guaranteeing consumer rights, it also significantly optimizes the business environment and forms a more benign and healthy e-commerce ecology." This also conforms to the current tone of Taobao's adjustment of the business environment. Recently, Taobao launched a round of scale modification for merchants, such as clarifying that "experience score" is the core basis for traffic distribution. In addition, from September 1st, Tmall will cancel the annual software service fee for the platform. However, Taobao's relaxation of the "refund only" rights of sellers is only to a certain extent. The premise for sellers to obtain autonomy is to continue to improve their service capabilities. At the beginning of the year, Taotian announced the upgrade of the new store comprehensive experience rating standard. After the upgrade, the rating focuses more on consumer-related indicators such as "refusal rate for refund" and "platform help rate." In addition, services that affect consumer shopping decisions, such as "return insurance", will also be a bonus for merchants. In other words, if sellers want to get high scores, they really need to serve consumers well. Of course, Taobao also provides practical rewards such as traffic to high-quality merchants, and this time it has also ceded some after-sales rights. Wall Street News learned that after the optimization strategy of "refund only" is launched, Taobao will not actively intervene through Wangwang or support refund only after receiving goods for sellers whose store experience score is greater than or equal to 4.8. Instead, Taobao encourages merchants to negotiate with consumers first. In short, Taobao will reduce or cancel after-sales intervention for high-quality stores, and the platform will give different degrees of autonomy to merchants according to the experience score and industry nature. In addition to giving merchants more autonomy, Taobao will also provide multiple after-sales service solutions for merchants to choose from, guiding merchants to continuously optimize after-sales services and reduce disputes and losses caused by "refund only". It is worth mentioning that Taobao has also optimized the appeal process for "refund only". After the user initiates an appeal, the platform will invite a third-party testing agency to sample the product. If the test passes, the platform will compensate the loss to the seller. As Taobao adjusts the "refund only" policy, it is time for the industry's grand "learning from PDD" campaign to reflect. In the increasingly fierce e-commerce competition, true innovation and differentiation can bring greater competitiveness than copying and learning from others.

All In AI has become a consensus among technology companies. As a representative of the previous wave of AI in china, SenseTime is also fully turning towards the generative AI track.

On December 3rd, Xu Li, Chairman and CEO of SenseTime, issued a letter to all employees announcing the establishment of a new "1+X" structure, where "1" represents the core business. SenseTime aims to create an industry-leading AI cloud to achieve seamless integration of large devices, foundational models, and AI applications. In the field of CV (computer vision), it will build a general visual model and delve into various application scenarios.
"X" represents a restructured and split ecological enterprise matrix, including the smart automobile "Jueying", home robot "Yuanluobo", smart medical, smart retail, and more. At the same time, each ecological enterprise will appoint an independent CEO and be responsible for business development.

This adjustment is based on a re-positioning of the company's global strategy direction and core fields. With the completion of the strategic reorganization, SenseTime will be able to better respond to the opportunities and challenges brought by the AI 2.0 era and fully embrace generative AI.

In the previous wave of AI, SenseTime gained recognition as one of the "Four Little Dragons of AI" due to its technological advantages in facial and visual recognition, and successfully went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2021. At the end of 2022, with the wave of generative AI triggered by ChatGPT, SenseTime also began to increase its efforts in AI large model technology and applications.

Since the end of 2022, the SenseTime daily new large model has been launched with over 10,000 GPU computing power resources. In April 2023, SenseTime launched version 1.0 of daily new, which is one of the first large language models released by SenseTime. By July 2024, daily new was further upgraded to version 5.5, achieving comprehensive performance and real-time interactive experience comparable to GPT-4o, becoming the first multimodal real-time interactive large model in china.

Until this strategic reorganization, SenseTime has built an organizational structure centered around generative AI.

In October, on the occasion of SenseTime's 10th anniversary, Xu Li stated that the company believes in and looks forward to the arrival of the era of general ai. "Pragmatically, we have taken two steps: the so-called traditional AI 1.0 and generative large model AI 2.0."

In Xu Li's view, an important distinction between AI 1.0 and AI 2.0 lies in the change in AI cost structure. In the traditional AI 1.0 era, the primary cost of model production was the investment in R&D personnel. In the generative large model AI 2.0 era, the cost of model production mainly lies in the investment in computing power resources.

In simple terms, the popularization and commercialization of generative large model AI require efforts to reduce the production and usage costs of large models. This necessitates combining large models to iterate and optimize computing power while also iterating the design and application of large models based on the characteristics of computing power resources.

Therefore, in the field of generative large model AI, SenseTime's core strategy is to achieve seamless integration of large computing power devices (SCO), large models, and applications (CNI), driven by applications to optimize computing power through models. To this end, SenseTime has adjusted its organizational structure around strategy and core resources.

Xu Li emphasized the strategic significance of the new structure, which is to firmly establish core businesses represented by generative AI, accelerate profitability and stable cash flow; secondly, the synergy based on the group's infrastructure advantages is more conducive for ecosystem enterprises to quickly seize market opportunities in vertical industries; and thirdly, the independent CEO mechanism of ecosystem enterprises is more suitable for market-oriented development.

In the face of what is called the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" of generative AI, SenseTime's advantages lie in years of technological accumulation, AI infrastructure, and application ecology. According to the financial report, in the first half of 2024, SenseTime's generative AI business revenue reached 1.051 billion yuan, a substantial year-on-year growth of 255.7%, with the revenue proportion increasing to 60.4%, becoming the company's new pillar business.

However, SenseTime's challenges in the future should not be underestimated. AI is currently in a technology race, which is an unprecedented global competition, and there will still be a significant gap between the huge investment in AI and business revenue in the short term, representing uncertainty for the players involved.

After deepening in the AI industry for 10 years, SenseTime has finally embraced the wave of generative AI, and will start afresh, fully committing to this opportunity.