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.

As the 'N' after the split of Alibaba Group into six parts, the game business Lingxi Interactive Entertainment has always had a weak presence. Now, a series of remarks by Alibaba partner Fan Luyuan has allowed the outside world to glimpse the development situation of Lingxi Interactive Entertainment.

On December 6, during an internal award ceremony at Lingxi Interactive Entertainment, Fan Luyuan, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Entertainment Group and Chairman and CEO of Ali Pictures, expressed his dissatisfaction with the Lingxi Interactive Entertainment team. 'There is no international perspective, and there is completely no cultivation of talent tiers. There are factions, and they are still using outdated thinking in making games.'

After this statement, many netizens felt that his remarks were too self-righteous. On December 7, Fan Luyuan apologized on the intranet. 'I only cared about making snappy remarks and did not consider everyone’s feelings and might have unintentionally hurt everyone’s emotions.' He stated that he would self-penalize three months' salary for this.

Besides the inappropriate expression method, Fan Luyuan mentioned many key issues regarding Lingxi Interactive Entertainment for the first time in his speech. Rather than calling this a criticism, it is more accurate to say that Fan Luyuan gave a shot in the arm to Lingxi Interactive Entertainment, which is at a new stage of development.

Fan Luyuan joined Alipay in 2007 and has held several senior management positions, including President of Alipay and President of Wealth Management Business at Ant Group Co., Ltd. He has served as Executive Director of Ali Pictures since 2016 and President of the Entertainment Business Group since 2018. In January of this year, he was assigned to manage Lingxi Interactive Entertainment on behalf of Alibaba Group.

Lingxi Interactive Entertainment is a product of ali's strategic expansion period. In 2014, ali entered the game industry and laid out its distribution channels through acquisitions. In 2016, ali integrated its scattered game businesses, which were managed by ali big entertainment. In 2020, ali games launched a new brand, Lingxi Interactive Entertainment, which became a department alongside big entertainment.

After 10 years of development, Lingxi Interactive Entertainment has become a self-developed, operation, and agency distribution platform focused on mobile games. Currently, Lingxi Interactive Entertainment operates multiple games, including "Three Kingdoms Strategy Edition." In the 2024 fiscal year, among global game developers, Lingxi Interactive Entertainment ranks in the top five in total revenue in the mainland china market (iOS App Store).

Regarding the development pace of Lingxi Interactive Entertainment, Fan Luyuan feels it is still slow. "I have high expectations for Lingxi, and I hope that within the next 8 years, we can become the third-largest game company in china, behind Tencent and netease; within 12 years, Lingxi games must become the second largest in china."

Based on this future strategic goal, Fan Luyuan believes that Lingxi must possess international productization capabilities, which is a very important requirement for the game team as well as for the current management.

From his comments, Fan Luyuan's confidence mainly comes from the prospects of the game industry. He determines that in the next five to ten years, 70% of the income in the global game industry may come from chinese companies or products affiliated with chinese company partners.

In particular, games will become one of the main application scenarios for large AI models, and AI gaming is accelerating its arrival. On November 27, Musk announced that xAI will establish an AI game studio; on December 3, Li Feifei's team World Labs launched its first project, which can generate a 3D world from a single image, and many such actions will bring disruptive changes to the game industry.

Fan Luyuan believes that a new generation of game production models will soon arrive. "Within five years, Tencent and netease's advantages will no longer exist. They previously had a large number of excellent talents, such as art and planning teams, which are very outstanding, but due to our investment in AI digital pipelines, we will shorten the gap with netease and Tencent in this area."

He emphasizes that Lingxi Interactive Entertainment must integrate AI because the filmification of games and the gameification of films will definitely be the ultimate outcome of the future.

At the beginning of the year, Fan Luyuan represented Alibaba Group overseeing Lingxi Interactive Entertainment, which remained an independent operation within Alibaba Group as Company N. During this meeting, he bluntly stated that Lingxi Interactive Entertainment has become a company under the large entertainment division. "The investment in AI by the large entertainment sector will be equivalent to the combined investments of other video sites, and in this area, both parties need to fully integrate technologically in the future."

In this regard, the all-in commitment to AI by Alibaba Group will first bring technological empowerment to its various businesses, which is one of the biggest advantages behind Lingxi Interactive Entertainment.

The immense opportunity comes with challenges. Lingxi Interactive Entertainment currently faces at least two pressures: content capability and industry competition pressure.

Like the two sides of a coin, with Alibaba's support, Lingxi Interactive Entertainment can access more resources, but the gaming industry relies on content innovation. Alibaba's platform gene indicates that it is not good at content innovation. Fan Luyuan has been emphasizing Alibaba's culture, and whether this will impose limitations on the gaming business remains to be debated.

The gaming industry is highly competitive and has very high talent requirements. Besides the industry giants Tencent and Netease, ByteDance is also increasing its investment in gaming, and the recently emerged Mihayou and Game Science have shown strong innovation capability, which poses significant resistance for Lingxi Interactive Entertainment to break into the national top tier or even the second tier.

Fan Luyuan's remarks indeed lack empathy, but they have sounded the alarm that Lingxi Interactive Entertainment must start independently facing the harsh market competition.

In the context of Alibaba's overall strategic focus, Lingxi Interactive Entertainment must find its own path to survival.