By Zhao Chunyu
Edited by Zheng Luan
The "car cemetery" was exposed.
A piece of farmland in Wanmin Village, Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, is overgrown with weeds, in which hundreds of abandoned, unattended **** enjoyment cars are parked, known as " car cemetery" by local villagers. In addition to Jiaxing, Zhejiang Hangzhou, Tonglu, as well as Shandong, Chongqing, Xiamen and other places have also appeared similar *** enjoy car "cemetery".
In fact, the "car cemetery" is just the tip of the iceberg of the many problems in the ****shared travel industry, research institutions predicted that the ****shared travel market scale is as high as 30~50 billion yuan/year, but only a few ****shared car companies have been able to achieve profitability so far.
From 2017 onwards, the bankruptcy and closure of ****xian automobile companies, the difficulty of users to return their deposits, and delinquency in the payment of wages to employees have occurred from time to time. Youyou car, EZZY, muggle traveling, car2go and other companies have stopped operating or closed down, and the players on this track are rapidly decreasing.
"In 2019, we realized profitability in 25 self-operated cities and 29 franchised cities." On October 23 last year, Tan Yi, CEO of GoFun Travel (hereinafter: GoFun), a subsidiary of Shouqi, publicly revealed that GoFun had already achieved partial profitability.
How did GoFun do it?
Going to market again
"Diligent, careful, and buttoned up."
Tan Yi used a few words to describe GoFun's last few years.
He used to be a no-nonsense FMCG guy, starting his career in 1994 with a glittering resume that spanned Reckitt Benckiser and Coca-Cola. During his time at Reckitt Benckiser, in the case of Durex, a brand that couldn't advertise in traditional channels, Tan Yi helped Durex achieve great success in the e-commerce channel by exploring digital marketing.
Then later entered the e-commerce industry. The experience of foreign enterprises coupled with a deep insight into the Internet, so that he has a precise judgment and unique insight into the future trends of the Internet.
The two years he spent in Cambridge studying for his EMBA were an important point in his life and value transformation.
He realized that the Internet can greatly empower China's traditional industries, and that there is so much he can do, so he ended his career as a part-time employee. 2016, Tan Yi joined GoFun as a partner, serving as COO.
In Tan Yi's view, the ****shared mobility industry has considerable challenges, and he, as a person, loves challenges and enjoys the challenges they bring. likes challenges and enjoys the sense of accomplishment they bring.
GoFun is in the field of "'traditional +' industry". The time-share rental it belongs to is an asset-heavy, offline, operation-heavy and capital-heavy industry, just like the To B industry, which requires long-term patience and endurance, and can't have a geometric equivalent of explosive power in the short term.
"Looking at the *** enjoyment car industry, how to create a profitable business model, everyone is still in the exploratory period, and GoFun will be the one with the best chance of success." At GoFun, it took 16 months for Tan Yi to rise from COO to CEO and begin to really lead the company.
Enough about Tan Yi, let's talk about *** Enjoy Auto.
The story of ***XiangCheongAo starts in 2014, when ***XiangCheongAo was involved in the popularity of entrepreneurship. PP Rent-A-Car, Bump Rent-A-Car, and YouYou Rent-A-Car were established, and received more than 120 million dollars of investment in a year's time.
What attracts capital and entrepreneurs?
*** Enjoy, is the representative mode of the future mode of travel. As for the product, the user's choice of rental period is flexible, and the price is on the low side compared to cabs and online cars. The process of renting a car is simple, and the whole process is conveniently online. This all has enough temptation.
In 2015, the B2C model of time-share leasing took its place in the market. It should not be overlooked that this is an industry with a very high threshold, heavy assets, heavy operation and heavy technology. According to media statistics, by the end of 2016, there were more than 370 ****hearing car platforms across the country, with more than 100 in operation.
The data shows that by the end of 2017, the car ****shared trips covered 35% of the national population, with a penetration rate of 15%, which is equivalent to 15% of the mileage of all small car trips completed by the car ****shared trips, and "****shared instead of owned" has become a new life style.
From a global perspective, the level of development of auto ****x travel in China far exceeds that of the United States, although the development of new energy vehicles, autonomous driving technology and travel platforms in the U.S. is more mature, and the penetration rate of auto ****x travel in the U.S. in 2020 will only be about 3.5%, and more than 10% in 2025.
But the rise of this wind mouth, half because of business opportunities, the other half of the reason is: in order to new energy points, each host plant on a large number of new energy car production capacity, these capacity is difficult to digest, it flows to the *** enjoy the car industry.
The bigger problem is that there are hundreds of companies with very few people who know how to operate, and some of them are even "speculative ventures" that are purely waiting for capital to take over, and not many people care about the operating costs and profitability model. It's not hard to understand why a large number of companies stop operating when the environment cools down.
"In the last three years, we've been doing all this work that people don't want to do."
The original intention remains unchanged, and the ambition leaks out
This is something that GoFun has insisted on for 3 years.
This requires long-term investment, but also need to build their own hardware and software team, testing different models, is a piece of cost is not small. But GoFun instead reduced its operating costs through this.
Tan Yi said, the water in the car maintenance industry is very deep, *** enjoy the car business maintenance costs account for more than 50% of the total operating costs. With the record of the car machine, a car repair process, required accessories, repair prices can be standardized, there is no gray space. This is the original intention of GoFun to do car machine.
With the car machine, GoFun can also understand the driving habits of each user, the number of insurance, each failure caused by the user can be traced back to the person - relying on this function, GoFun successfully transformed the commercial insurance into a personal timeshare insurance, the company only needs to bear the compulsory insurance.
"The first year after you have commercial insurance is fine, the second year found that the insurance company does not play with you, why? Because the payout rate is too high."
"A car this cheap has a 30%, 50%, or even 100% premium for a year's insurance. For example, a $30,000-plus car has a premium of $17,500 a year."
A small car module has reduced GoFun's maintenance costs by 50 percent and insurance costs by 25 percent. This may seem like a simple innovation, but behind it is a precise analysis of the cost structure.
In the future, the data recorded by the car machine will show the long-tail value. At present, there are already several host manufacturers are reaching cooperation with GoFun, built-in car phone in some models.
Tan Yi's ambition is more than that, "In fact, to become an automotive asset management platform is GoFun's ultimate goal, but this is a high coefficient of difficulty of the industry, the upward speed will not be very fast, but also need time."
Learn to make trade-offs, reduce costs and increase efficiency
At present, GoFun travel has covered more than 80 cities, using the "one city, one policy" urban layout strategy, and Tan Yi said that this year, it will be expanded from 40,000 vehicles to more than 100,000 vehicles. In the face of this high-frequency expansion, GoFun how to control?
In terms of vehicle sources, GoFun adopts a "self-operated + franchise" approach to expansion. Up to now, the vehicles are half self-operated and half franchised. In 40 self-operated cities, Xiamen, Beijing, Foshan, Guangzhou and other 25 cities have realized profits; in 40 franchise cities, Nanchong, Suining, Dazhou, Guang'an and other 29 franchise cities to realize profits.
At the same time, franchising is more profitable than self-management. Because self-operated is a test bed for the franchise trial menu. In addition, the operators of self-owned cities have usually been operating in the industry for many years, and already have customer resources, maintenance services and other hard and soft facilities. And self-owned cities, are starting from scratch, the initial investment costs are higher.
Previously, GoFun also unapologetically admitted that there are still some cities with a distance from profitability, such as Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Wuhan and Chongqing. "But these cities are also close to profitability. We've been in Chongqing for a very short time, but by now we've seen a 78% improvement in gross margins." Tan Yi said, "The return on investment cycle is now shorter. In the past, cities that did well took a year and a half or two years to become profitable. Now some cities are almost flat in five months."
The cold winter of the car market, the traditional car 4S model has faced a great impact, last year, January to November, the national car sales fell 9.1% year-on-year. As the winter of the automobile industry is becoming more and more difficult to endure, there are also many OEMs door to door cooperation, began to join.
At the same time, GoFun also threw out an olive branch to private car owners, idle vehicles can be idle time hosting, "car for car" to earn extra income. Indirectly through GoFun to let the car "move", rather than parked depreciation.
In terms of labor costs, GoFun has improved the employment system of maintenance personnel at various outlets, and introduced a "crowdsourcing" service in 2019, thus launching an order-grabbing software - GoFun crowdsourcing. Users can take orders to complete the GoFun platform vehicle cleaning, scheduling and other tasks and get paid. Only need to register, through the real name authentication and skills training test can officially become a member of GoFun crowdsourcing App. This is also a great way to utilize society's idle labor force.
In the face of increased market competitiveness, user turnover is also on the rise. Tan Yi began to research, and found that most of the user turnover is because the car is not clean enough and the experience is poor. He began to think of ways to ensure that the company "live", reduce costs, through some means to improve the user experience.
That's how Huawei came into his mind.
With Huawei's basic capabilities, including arithmetic, cloud services, and big data, it empowers all of GoFun's businesses to improve their business level and efficiency; and it adopts AI technology to take photos and upload them to the backend before getting on the bus, which guarantees the rights of users and gives the company effective data.
At the same time, GoFun will also be the data of the travel industry, the data provided by various ports will be converged in the cloud platform, used to empower Huawei, to help Huawei plough into the travel industry, providing a platform to realize the scene landing.
"In these three years, which thing do you think is the most difficult?"
"There is no difference between hard and easy, everything is equally hard." Tan Yi's unchanging response on the day of the interview.
In the course of small talk, Tan Yi said something "regrettable". Last year, he disposed of 13,000 old trolley cars, and at the time of purchase, he made the decision. In the face of the loss of disposal and the questioning of his superiors, he was also hard-headed.
"At that time also did not predict that the mileage of the cars required by the users would be updated so quickly, or else 13,000 would not have been procured. But if not dealt with, they will always be an asset and operations among is a negative effect."
After the cold winter, it must be a warm spring
"Last year, our time-share model has basically achieved revenue balance. If you look at the rental income, no flat. But if you count non-primary business income such as advertising fees and data revenue, it's already flat." Tan Yi semi-smugly cited Xiamen and Beijing as examples.
Xiamen has the highest operating margin. Beijing, on the other hand, took a year to move from a huge loss to the first cohort of profitable cities.
In addition, with the development of 5G technology, it also brings a lot of convenience to *** enjoy the car. Since the beginning of the previous year, GoFun travel has demonstrated to the public its important breakthroughs within the field of unmanned driving, and the automatic driving technology has been successfully applied to the production car, realizing the functions of automatic parking, formation scheduling and high density parking. In 2019, GoFun cooperated with Baidu to realize the trial operation of automatic parking in Baidu Park.
In addition, Tan Yi also said that blockchain technology is very helpful to the *** enjoyment of the travel industry, because there is no credit system in this industry. When blockchain technology appeared, our first reaction was that it can quickly record user behavior and data depository, and gradually form a good user system. At the same time, it can also grasp the complete and real vehicle information, since the chain, then driving records, maintenance records will not be tampered with. When GoFun has enough information on the inventory, it can also be exported to financial companies, insurance companies, used car companies and so on, empowering the industry.
With the corresponding car after-market services, also need to do up. Including the sale of car travel package, installed GoFun car machine, you can reduce its purchase price, and also support the "hosting" service, which in fact slowly also revitalized the dealer.
From heavy assets to light assets, from time-share providers to travel platforms, from traditional automotive services to technology companies. To put it more simply, GoFun is a platform, which is a bit like Taobao.
The difference is that merchants sell goods on Taobao; those who have idle vehicle resources sell the right to use the car on GoFun Mobility, which GoFun also calls "GoFun Connect". GoFun also called this model "GoFun Connect", and also launched the "GoFun connect" new system, to provide the community with cars, people, services, all linked to the driver **** enjoy the car service.
Industry experts also said, "The big travel data accumulated by the ****shared car platform can be the catalyst for the development of driverless cars. The combination of the two will lead to profound changes in the automotive industry, and the entire industry, including automotive OEMs, travel companies, driverless platforms, automotive finance and insurance, as well as the automotive aftermarket, will complete an ecological restructuring, and ****xiangqi automobile has become the best way for driverless technology to land."
Although the cold winter is a bit long, but after that it must be spring.