"in fact, I have heard the team say more than once why this competition is endless and when it will end," said founder and CEO Zhang Yiming at the ninth annual meeting of byte jumping, and expressed his attitude towards competition through a speech. "take competition as normal." "

Zhang Yiming did so.

Backed by the two "money printing presses" of Douyin and Jinri Toutiao, the byte beat expands without boundaries, launches "full" search ads against Baidu, opens Douyin e-commerce to challenge BABA, attacks Tencent in the field of entertainment, layout education, health, and challenges industry leaders. All the giants and giants we can imagine are fighting for jobs.

In 2021, the speed of byte jump expansion is still accelerating.

In an obvious change, Douyin began to carry the ambition of a larger byte jump, not only to develop e-commerce, but also to enter the field of local life, invading the hinterland of Meituan. In addition, its existing games, education, finance and other businesses are doing more and more heavily. In the field of hard-core technology, such as cars and chips, which have never been involved before, they are also beginning to end up on their own.

In addition, the pace of its outbound investment has also accelerated significantly. According to a report, there were 16 investments in byte jump before the end of the first quarter of 2021, half of the total investment in 2020. Among them, the proportion of entertainment has been significantly reduced, the proportion of artificial intelligence has remained high, and the proportion of e-commerce, new consumption and telecommuting has increased significantly.

After gathering users through the advantages of algorithmic distribution, byte jumping is wiping out the three major Internet traffic realization models of "advertising, games, and e-commerce". For education, health care, automobile, finance and other sectors with high barriers but large profit space in the future, there is also the ambition to break down one by one.

It is reported that byte jump will submit a prospectus on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in the second quarter. These intensive movements may be the preparation for a sprint before listing. By combing through the inventory, let's see, where did the byte jump jump in 2021?

Local life, money printing press Douyin is becoming more and more "crazy"

In March 2021, Douyin (including volcano, super-fast version) was exposed by the media that the average number of daily active users exceeded 600m, with a peak of about 700m.

This is not very different from the previously disclosed figures: Zhang Nan, CEO of Byte Jump China, revealed at an event in September 2020 that the number of daily active users of Douyin, including Douyin Volcano and Super Speed, had exceeded 600m. This figure is still used in the 2020 Douyin data report released on January 5, 2021, when disclosing the number of daily active users of Douyin. Between the two data disclosures, Douyin also carried out a series of customer acquisition activities such as "naming the Spring Festival Gala".

Many industry insiders believe that this means that Douyin has faced growth bottlenecks.

In the first three months of 2021, Douyin mainly did three things, first, to expand the social scene and emphasize instrumental functions, second, to vigorously become an e-commerce business, and third, to enter local life, all aimed at prolonging users' stay and expanding the commercial scene. Accelerate making money.

In terms of expanding the social scene and accentuating instrumental functions, Douyin APP has been revealed that it is testing a variety of new functions, such as friend singing, multi-person voice chat, and "watching video together" function, which enrich the way of playing on the site and increase the length of stay of users. At the beginning of the year, Douyin announced for the first time that the number of active users in its search had exceeded 550 million, showing initial results.

Compared with keeping users on Douyin, Douyin takes a bigger step in expanding the commercial cash scene.

Douyin held its first e-commerce ecological conference on April 8, 2021, and launched a new concept of "interest e-commerce", that is, according to users' preferences, with the help of big data and recommendation mechanism to stimulate consumers' potential desire to buy. In response to whether he would be an independent e-commerce APP at the event, Kang Zeyu, president of Douyin e-commerce, said that various forms would not rule out giving it a try. The reply is ambiguous, but you can also see the ambition of byte beating in the field of e-commerce.

Douyin e-commerce is not limited to live e-commerce, but has turned the traditional picture and text "people looking for goods" to short videos "goods looking for people", which is based on Douyin's existing algorithms and content advantages, and its positioning is clearer than before. However, it remains to be seen how many users can stimulate consumer interest in e-commerce and whether the conversion rate can balance the input-output ratio of merchants.

No matter whether the "e-commerce of interest" is a real demand or a pseudo-concept, according to Wang Chao, founder of Wenyuan think tank, the problem facing Douyin e-commerce is that "all kinds of infrastructure is not in your own hands." for example, express' four links and one reach'(ZTO Express, Yuantong, Shentong, Best Huitong, Yunda) have cooperation with BABA, and the relationship between Jilu Express and Pinduoduo is delicate. He warned that in addition to express delivery, return and exchange system, customer service system, quality control system, Douyin e-commerce still has a lot of room for improvement.

In the field of local life, the advantages and difficulties that Douyin has to overcome are also similar.

Now open Douyin, the first column of the interface is related to "eat, drink and play", click "discount group purchase", you can learn about nearby food and beverage, hotel accommodation information, including store selling points, merchant contact information, distance, etc., and click on the "Hot list" to get the rankings of nearby scenic spots, playgrounds and park squares, just like an implanted version of Meituan + Dianping.

"the video stream brings the most information, and it is more intuitive and stimulating than the picture and text flow of Meituan and Dianping, which is equivalent to a dimensionality reduction blow," said Wang Chao. Douyin has the advantage of using algorithms to complete the process from recommendation to consumption. When users browse Douyin, they can see nearby restaurant recommendations, where they can use Douyin to order food and get group purchase coupons, while merchants can get exposure opportunities according to content location through Doujia launch.

However, there are also a lot of problems facing Douyin. Local life business first needs a strong enough offline "push" army, Douyin is still under construction, and this is Meituan's strength. Secondly, it will take some time for the accumulation of the number of merchants and the mental cultivation of users' consumption habits, and finally, more importantly, like Douyin e-commerce, the conversion rate from recommendation to consumption is still a question mark.

In early 2021, at a conference, byte-beating CEO Zhang Nan interpreted the direction of Douyin's development over the past four years: "Douyin has changed from an initial form of entertainment to a social way, and then to a way of life." Douyin is becoming a reality step by step, and it may be involved in more business areas in the future than we thought.

Pan-cultural entertainment bites Tencent by buying

Pan-cultural and entertainment plate has always been the basic disk of byte jump, if this field is divided into upstream content IP, mid-stream film and television production, and downstream game realization, we can see that the layout of byte jump in the upstream and downstream is obviously accelerated, and the competition with Tencent has entered a white-hot stage.

First, let's take a look at the downstream that has changed the most. The latest news is that byte beats to buy game companies again. On April 13, less than half a month after the acquisition of Mu pupil Technology, Byte beat Lightyear, which is in charge of medium and heavy game business, acquired "Love and Mutual Entertainment". The company's product types focus on two major categories: RPG (role playing) and strategy (where players use strategies to compete with computers or other players), with outstanding performance in the Japanese and Korean markets.

The two new companies both play medium-to-heavy games, both are good at going out to sea, and both have disputes with Tencent, once again releasing the signal that the byte beat should be tough Tencent, but avoid their territory and expand their territory overseas.

Earlier, the media concluded that byte jump has 29 game companies, more than 10 game studios, four major distribution platforms and more than 2000 employees, starting with casual games and gradually increasing the size of moderate and heavy games, developing faster than the outside world can imagine. However, a senior investor in the game field told Shenjing that in terms of income, the byte-beating game is actually not comparable to Tencent or even NetEase, Inc.

Let's take a look upstream. For Internet companies, the purchase of Internet companies is an affordable business, grasp the lifeline of the source of IP, there is a great space for development in pan-cultural entertainment. In the second half of 2020, byte jump has been "throwing money", sweeping all the Internet text companies that can be invested: investing 1.1 billion yuan to invest in five mid-waist Internet article companies.

Its competition with Tencent in the field of online articles has become a competition between "palm reading + tomato novels + 5 middle waist online article companies" and "China Literature", and it is worth noting that the Tomato novel Network, which was launched in November 2019, has ranked first in the industry in the number of monthly active users, and byte beat has gained a foothold in the field of free reading.

However, it is easy to get traffic for free reading, but it is faced with the problems of "not making money" and "difficult to incubate IP". In IP development, byte beating has not yet proved its strength.

This is also the awkward place of byte jumping in the field of pan-culture and entertainment. From the perspective of territory expansion, the speed of byte jumping to gain a foothold in the upstream and downstream is astonishingly fast, but from a profit point of view, most of the investment still belongs to the layout stage and lacks the ability to realize immediately, and whether some of the investment can be realized in the future remains to be seen.

This is also related to the less layout of byte jumps in the middle reaches. What affects the speed of tour layout is closely related to the difficulty of realization and the high threshold in this field.

Vertical business education, finance and enterprise services are becoming more and more important.

In addition to the pan-cultural and entertainment field, most of the byte jump into the vertical long-term business with great prospects and more investment, which can be roughly divided into finance, enterprise services, education and medical care, and these areas are showing a more and more "heavy" trend.

The launch of Douyin pay on January 19th once sparked a heated debate. In fact, the byte-beating financial business has quietly formed a complete territory.

At present, byte jump has obtained insurance broker license (June 2018), securities investment financial license (August 2019), online small loan license (July 2020), payment license (September 2020), four financial licenses gathered together. It also applied for registration of a series of English trademarks such as BYTECREDIT (byte credit).

In terms of payment, byte Jump has launched Douyin pay and United pay, and has taken a big step forward in expanding online and offline payment scenarios. In the field of online small loans, with reference to BABA's way of playing in the financial field, byte Jump tested "rest assured flowers" in Douyin, launched "Dou stages", and set up "word Jump Business factoring" (guarantee agent) to enter TO B.

In terms of securities, there are also a lot of byte jumps. In 2021, according to media reports, Byte Jump plans to launch a brand prefixed with "Star" to carry out securities business in China. Prior to this, its first financial product, "Na magnesium Stock", has been renamed "Dolphin Stock" to provide brokers with technical services for information release and jump links, with the intention of branding. As early as the end of 2019, byte beat applied for the trademark of "Squirrel Securities", specifically for the Hong Kong market.

Various signs show that the byte jump is still adding weight to the financial layout, with the ambition of the Standard Ant Group and JD.com. According to Wang Chao's guess, "it is necessary to get a license, but with reference to the situation of Ant Group, in the case of Internet financial policy uncertainty, in the second half of this year, the byte-beating financial business will remain secretly observed and will not enter on a large scale." "

In 2021, the sector where byte jumps will be a big bet is education. In February, byte beat once again announced the recruitment of 10,000 people, covering teaching and research, products, design, community head teacher, tutor and other positions to continue its vigorous story.

In February this year, Byte Jump released "Why does Byte Jump do Education?" In the article "this is our answer", it focuses on four products: Guagualong enlightenment for preschool children, Qingbei online school for K12 students, English for adult students, and powerful smart lights for preschool + K12 hardware products. Previously, the main one-on-one GoGoKid did not have the following, the standard "get" knowledge paid APP to study hard, was closed by the official.

"these four business models have all been proven successful in the market," Wang Qiang, vice president of Beita Capital Investment, who pays attention to education, told Shensheng. "the way the byte jumps in the education sector is much more mature than it was when it first entered the market. all that is left to do is to continuously improve efficiency and give full play to its operational and traffic advantages. "

This is the biggest difference between it and other educational institutions, but also the difficulty it has to face, "whether it is to do enlightenment, or adult education, this is a business with low human efficiency and emphasis on service, while the hardware part, if assessed by DAU, powerful smart lamp is a good product, but it is easy to be controversial in the concept of education, which is also the reason why smart lamp will be questioned by the industry before. "he said.

Although the enterprise service does not hold as high as the education sector, it is still a major focus of the byte-beating layout. In March 2021 alone, byte Jump has invested in two video conferencing services, Blue Cat Weihui and Human efficiency online, to pave the way for the upgrade of Flying Books.

At present, Byte Jump has two brands: Flying Book and Volcano engine. The former started as an enterprise communication collaboration tool used within byte jumps and took off during the 2020 epidemic. The latter helps enterprise customers to achieve organizational intelligence in the process of digital transformation, which is still in its infancy.

However, the byte jump towards TO B still needs some data to prove itself. The competitors of Flying Book have all occupied the top of the mountain. WeCom relies on Wechat and has user stickiness that other similar products are difficult to reach. Nails have accumulated for many years to achieve the coordination of office scenes, so it is not easy to catch up or even surpass.

The current sense of market presence of the volcano engine is not strong enough. From its "spark plan" of investing 2 billion funds to subsidize small and medium-sized enterprises, we can see that the business is still in the stage of "earning and shouting". Enterprise customers value the comprehensive strength of project implementation, delivery and stability, and the newly developed volcano engine still needs some accumulation and achievements.

Education, finance, and corporate services are all times to test the patience of byte beats.

Bet on "building cars" and "building cores" into hard science and technology in the future.

In 2021, the byte jump sends a signal to enter hard technology. However, compared with the expansion of vertical fields such as education and finance, and entering hard technology, the intention of byte jump to pay for the future layout in advance is more obvious.

The first is the automobile field. At the beginning of 2021, two pieces of investment information related to cars were revealed. In March, 2021, the news of investing in the self-driving company "Light Boat Zhihang" came out, and the media confirmed that byte jump was a joint leader, with a capital contribution of more than 25 million US dollars. On April 19, Byte Jump Associated Company invested in the establishment of Chongqing Vientiane excellent car Technology Co., Ltd., the business scope includes used car brokers and so on.

Before that, byte jump had three important moves in the automotive field: the creation of car content platform understanding car Emperor by byte jump in 2017, a $30 million investment in Li Auto Inc. in 2019, and the formal establishment of a car networking team in May 2020.

"this is a very natural business expansion," automotive analyst Zhang Xiang told Shensheng. "in the future, cars will develop towards autopilot. Car owners do not have to drive and can make time for information and entertainment. Byte jump is an Internet content provider. Now the terminal exit is a computer, mobile phone, tablet, and may be a car screen in the future. In his view, the threshold for building a car is high, the investment is large, and the current intention of byte jumping is not to build a car, but to take a fancy to the interface for the output of future content.

Also in March 2021, byte jump was also exposed in the self-developed cloud AI chip and Arm server chip, the latter news was confirmed by the person in charge of byte jump. This is not a "whim". As early as April 2018, Byte Jump Vice President Yang Zhenyuan told the media that Byte Jump has the largest number of videos uploaded by users in the world that need to be analyzed, understood and processed. The platform recommendation engine also needs strong machine learning and computing power, has a large number of chip procurement and applications, and is actively seeking breakthroughs in chip-related fields.

Previously, in the field of scientific and technological intelligence, byte Jump invested in AI's "hundred training Intelligence", as well as hard-core technology enterprises such as Cloud Whale Intelligence, Smart Intelligence, Zero rhinoceros Technology, Nuts Cloud and so on. According to enterprise survey data, there have been 15 public investments in artificial intelligence projects since 2019, including 4 in 2019, 6 in 2020, and may reach a new high in 2021, with 5 as of April 22.

Zhang Yiming once said that the core technology is the hard competitiveness behind the company. For this algorithmic company, the importance of technology is self-evident. For example, AI technology can help it to extract key data from a large number of text, pictures, videos, games and other information on the content supply side, and outline the user profile on the user side, so as to complete the matching of supply and demand and give full play to the space.

For byte beat, both car building and core building are at an early stage, but it is a good "weapon" to tell a new story on the market. In the final analysis, both are areas with a long time period, a large investment and no revenue effect in the short term, and also need byte-beating patience.

In 2020, a research report related to byte jump was circulated, which showed that the annual revenue of byte jump 2020 will be close to 240 billion yuan, advertising revenue will reach 175 billion yuan, live streaming will have 4.5-50 billion yuan, e-commerce business will reach 6 billion yuan, game section will create 40-5 billion yuan, and education track will have revenue of 20-3 billion yuan. Although the official response to the byte jump later was "the report information was inaccurate", it also gave a glimpse into the general revenue situation of its various business sectors.

People marvel at the company's money-making speed and organizational ability, and capital is using rising valuations to express its optimism for the burgeoning giant. According to a recent report, the byte jump launched the listing process in Hong Kong, valued at about $400 billion. If the news is true, the size of this giant ship is enough to challenge Tencent and BABA. At the end of March, Zhou, a former XIAOMI executive, was invited to the post of byte-bouncing CFO, which was also seen as preparing for IPO.

In his ninth anniversary speech, Zhang Yiming said that he likes watching videos of sailing in the sea on Douyin. He wants "ups and downs on the outside and peace of mind as usual." "the byte beat he has created, people who like it, think that this is a fearless young man in the Internet world, who expand their territory by virtue of their efficient organizational skills and technological advantages, and do not like it. I think this is just an ambitious but emotionless money-making machine.

But it is undeniable that the giant ship he is driving has become a fierce rival that the Internet giants can not ignore. Its enemies don't usually feel at ease.