Former Walt Disney Company CEO Robert Iger once said that the most successful thing in office is investment, the company's life is a lifetime investment, the game between big companies is no boundary, now the cooperation is good, the two sides complement each other, but soon the two sides may be at loggerheads.

When talking about Internet enterprises and contemporary Chinese business history, an unavoidable topic is BABA's investment.

When emerging companies are targeted by giants like BABA, some choose to obediently fall into the arms of Jack Ma's father, while others continue to be capricious and do not want to listen. But their fate is like a fork in the road, not the same.

Meituan who freed himself

On July 29th, some users found that the option of Meituan payment no longer existed. For a while, the feud between Meituan and BABA was brought up again. In Meituan's early stage of rapid growth, because of the war of thousands of regiments, Meituan sold 12% of his equity and the right to give priority to financing, and obtained BABA's $50 million B round investment.

The timely rain quickly warmed up the relationship between the two sides.BABA not only gave money, but also gave Meituan Alipay Taobao flow, and let his capable general Gan Jiawei join, directly pull up Meituan's ground push offensive.

Under the double blessing of BABA's capital and flow, Meituan rises rapidly.In 2011, Meituan ranked fifth in the industry. four years later, Meituan occupied 60% of the market share of local life services, with a transaction volume exceeding 46 billion yuan.

Unexpectedly, when WeChat Pay entered the battlefield, BABA hoped that Meituan would pay as the only payment channel, and the war of payment would begin at one time.

With Alipay as the main payment channel, Wang Xinglai said that such a layout is not in line with Meituan's business interests-the rate offered by WeChat Pay is lower than the fees paid by Alipay.

Since then, Tencent came into Wang Xing's line of sight and invested in Meituan.Then the relationship between BABA and Meituan gradually broke down.In 2015, Meituan merged with Dianping, becoming the "freezing point" of the relationship between BABA and Meituan.

Wang Xing once said that after merging comments, Meituan hopes to get the support of BABA and Tencent at the same time. Wang Xing, who lost the support of BABA, was not too sad.

Meituan founder Wang Xing's personal wealth increased by $1.8 billion (12.6 billion yuan) on Aug. 4, due to the rise in Meituan's share price, according to the Forbes Real-time Rich list.

And made it into China's top 15 richest list with a fortune of US $16.9 billion, far higher than Lei Jun (US $14.9 billion) and Liu Qiangdong (US $14 billion).

From the beginning of payment to local life, Meituan's boundary grows at will.

The loss after obedience

When it comes to BABA's acquisition, it is also a round-up of many star companies.

Word-of-mouth was once the strongest competitor of Dianping. BABA bought it on October 26th, involving about $5 million to $6 million.

BABA Group wants to acquire word-of-mouth network because of the strategic direction of promoting the development of e-commerce with information and community as a tool.

BABA's vision of acquiring word-of-mouth is beautiful. He hopes that it can connect and complement BABA's e-commerce business and become a localized life information community platform closely integrated with e-commerce business. finally, it brings user stickiness and information interaction to all kinds of services under BABA Group.

In 2004, Li Zhiguo, a former employee of BABA, left to set up WOM. Com.

In the past few years, it has developed rapidly, with more than 1 million users. At that time, BABA happened to adjust the structure and set up 2B and 2C business groups. Jack Ma hopes to integrate the word-of-mouth network and strengthen the 2C side.

In 2006, Jack Ma approached Li Zhiguo and asked: "do you want word-of-mouth to be listed independently, or do you want to go back to BABA to do something for 2C?" Li Zhiguo did not hesitate to choose the latter.

In that year, BABA invested US $6 million in WOM. Com. Two years later, word of mouth was wholly acquired by BABA. In the following years, word-of-mouth once became Dianping's biggest competitor.

In 2009, BABA upgraded the "big Taobao" strategy, and word-of-mouth was incorporated into Taobao.Originally thought that Taobao can introduce enough traffic to word-of-mouth, but it is not.

BABA once turned off word-of-mouth, but with the rise of Meituan, BABA merged word-of-mouth with ele.me to counter the impact of Meituan.BABA acquired Youku Tudou in 2015, when Youku and Tudou were the first and second largest video sites in China. The move was called "the first merger and acquisition of the Internet in China" at that time.

The main reason why BABA acquired Youku Tudou is to expand its own Internet culture industry chain and add a new perspective to achieve its own diversified development.

Judging from the plans announced by BABA in his early days, BABA tried to launch a series of cultural industry products, including digital set-top boxes, Internet TV, Ali Pictures and Ali Literature.

BABA's hope is very good, but the revenue source of video websites is advertising, and the main source of revenue of mobile video is patch advertising. At that time, major video websites made no progress in paying video business. The mobile patch advertising model is applied to mobile phone fragmented application scenarios, which extremely challenges the patience of users.

At the same time, the adverse effects of frequent coach changes eventually spread to the business level, due to the failure in the field of copyright competition for films and TV dramas and the "slow" step of self-made and exclusive content.Youku Tudou finally continued to decline.。

There are also successful cases.

Amap, a travel navigation software founded in 2002, was listed on Nasdaq in 2010 and was acquired by BABA for $1.1 billion in 2014.

After the acquisition, Amap ushered in the second spring.In BABA's ecological chain, it provides closed-loop location services for takeout and tourist vehicles; in the automotive field, it has become an Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and other 27 domestic and foreign automobile manufacturers to provide navigation data products; in terms of mobile navigation, according to the monitoring data of IrimUserTracker, Amap's mobile client has about 29.8319 million daily active devices in 2018, ranking first in the map navigation category.

BABA has made a start in the financial field because of his strong customer resources, but there are still some deficiencies in the docking of his online business and offline business. The future shopping mode should be triggered anytime and anywhere, and mobile shopping based on social network services (Social Networking Services, referred to as SNS) and location-based services (Location Based Service, referred to as LBS) is gradually becoming the mainstream.

In terms of SNS, Tencent seized the opportunity to seize this entrance, while in terms of LBS, Baidu, Inc. already had the important entrance of map.At that time, in the face of the two strong enemies, Tencent and Baidu, Inc., BABA also took corresponding measures.

Ali Yun under BABA has tried to make maps, but what the map industry needs most is not only surveying and mapping qualifications, but also a large number of accurate data that can be accumulated for many years. This is difficult for BABA to do in a short period of time with his own technology.

BABA finally found that the map industry is not what he is good at, and it is a better choice to buy a well-developed and reputable map service provider than to build it from scratch, and Gao de is the map service provider BABA needs.

Therefore, BABA quickly won Gaode by buying shares before acquiring, and opened its mobile entrance, so that its online and offline business can be docked. Gaud's core value lies in having a large amount of location information and data, navigation and map market first market share, in the current mobile Internet era, this is not only a mobile portal application. It is also a bridge between people and people, people and commodities, people and merchants, commodities and merchants.

The commercial value that Gao de brings to BABA is self-evident, especially on the mobile end, after the resources of both sides are fully integrated, a complete closed loop of mobile commerce will be built from merchant information, geographical location, commodity information, payment verification and even logistics and distribution.

Today, after Gao de enters BABA's pocket, he can clearly see the framework of BABA's strategic layout of "finance + mobile Internet". The same role is played in BABA's acquisition of ele.me and uc browser, which respectively realize the link between payment and local life, and the connection between payment and information platform.

We also see that BABA emphasizes values and corporate philosophy, and requires people to maintain the consistency of these values. It is not easy to integrate into BABA, but not all BABA's investments have failed.

In short, the large enterprises that BABA acquires or invests not only reshuffle the founding team, but also upgrade the original flow products and expand the enterprise on a large scale, which is good or bad, can not be generalized.