Another Internet giant enters the financial field!
Recently, Qicai Finance noticed that Dingding, an enterprise-level smart mobile office platform under Alibaba, has launched a loan business. Open Dingding APP, enter the wallet-Alipay page, and a loan icon with a footnote of interest rate discount is impressively listed.
Related product information shows that Dingding loan is positioned as an employee loan, and users need to fill in their occupation, position and work unit when applying.
From the perspective of business logic, DingTalk lending at this stage is more inclined to the loan assistance model. It is only responsible for drainage and identity information collection, and financial institutions are responsible for qualification review, quota approval, loan lending and post-loan services.
Image source: Dingding APP
At the same time, under the fund service item, advertisements for CITIC Bank Yanbaijin Card, Avita, and the P2P platform Cheyirong for vehicle loans are constantly rotating.
In other words, DingTalk itself has not set foot in the loan business, and its role is still a "broker" connecting with third-party loan platforms.
But despite this, DingTalk's seemingly insignificant move still attracts strong attention and discussion from the outside world, relying on the Ali system and encumbering hundreds of millions of users.
01DingTalk can also borrow money! Is
unexpected? DingTalk is now able to borrow money!
Judging from the progress of the layout, there are only four financial institutions that Dingding cooperates with at present, including Xinwang Bank and Baixin Bank. The company's customer service also stated that the loan function is still in internal testing and has not been fully opened, which demonstrates its financial business And a more cautious attitude towards traffic realization.
But as a phenomenon-level Internet product on the enterprise service track, Dingding Xinyu is the first trial, and its own strength should not be underestimated.
public information shows that as of the end of December 2022, DingTalk has accumulated more than 600 million users, more than 23 million business organizations, and 15 million paid daily active users (DAU). There are more than 30 business organizations with more than one million people, more than 600 business organizations with more than 100,000 people, and more than 2,000 business organizations have contributed nearly 1/3 of DingTalk's activity.
For the consumer gold market, the traffic is equivalent to the land cultivated by the enterprise for food production, and it also determines the future vitality and harvest of the enterprise to a large extent. The active flow of potential realization is undoubtedly the strongest confidence for him to follow the trend, and it also helps him grasp greater bargaining power.
In addition, from the perspective of user portraits, according to earlier statistics, young people aged 18-30 and student parties under the age of 18 are the main force using DingTalk, and more than 30% are post-95s, including many young users They are corporate white-collar workers, company managers, administrative personnel, etc., and this group of people happens to overlap with the high-quality customer group of consumer finance.
But on the other side of the coin, DingTalk has obvious disadvantages in finance.
Compared with national C-end applications such as Douyin, WeChat, and Alipay, DingTalk is an intelligent mobile office platform for B-ends. This fundamentally defines that its user portrait dimension and consumption scene dimension will not be too rich.
Image source: DingTalk’s official website
Just like on Douyin, we can find various elements such as food, housing, transportation, travel, shopping, entertainment and learning, all of which have strong correlation and synergy with finance, but in DingTalk, including conferences Various functions, including storage, training, and operation and maintenance, are aimed at enterprise-level users, and the focus is on office scenarios rather than transaction scenarios, which is naturally not conducive to the expansion and deepening of the loan assistance business.
Secondly, after more than 20 years of development, the domestic mutual fund industry has already experienced a downturn in overall prosperity. Dingding’s increased loan assistance at this time is almost equivalent to entering the recession period, and the remaining "cake" is not much. Moreover, the period of centralized regulation at the national level that began in 2015, after several years of elimination of the survival of the fittest, the remaining mutual fund companies are all strong players competing in the same field. If Dingding wants to win a seat Bit, very difficult.
Furthermore, Internet companies end up as loan assistance platforms with a large business span. In view of their "amateur" experience in finance, they may cause a series of disputes due to lax review of lending institutions, which in turn infringes on the rights and interests of financial consumers, or, Disputes between lending institutions and funders will also affect borrowers.
For example, in 2019, Huarong Consumer Finance and Aiyoumi fought a "war of words". The former claimed that due to "Aiyoumi"'s unilateral reasons, it had stopped "Aiyoumi" and its related parties from withholding loan repayments from borrowers The authorization of funds will directly withhold and repay the borrower's loan repayment funds. The latter emphasizes that the two parties are still cooperating, and consumers must repay through the Aiyoumi APP. However, in the verbal wrestling between the lending agency and the funding party, many consumers were involved and repeatedly deducted.
02All for profit!
Judging from the current situation, the deep-seated reason for Dingding's entry into loan assistance is still forced by "money scene".
DingTalk was established in 2014 and officially launched in 2015. Initially, it quickly opened up the market with a free model. In the past 9 years of growth, the number of users has continued to expand, and the market share is close to 50%. But so far, profits are still in sight. Biggest problem.
2023 is the beginning of the year, and Zhang Yong will be in charge of Alibaba Cloud to personally supervise the cloud computing business and Dingding business, highlighting the determination of Alibaba Group to solve the Dingding crisis.
However, a large number of users does not mean that there are many customers, and a large share does not mean that it is easy to make profits. On the contrary, DingTalk is increasingly falling into a loss situation.
On the one hand, although online office has developed by leaps and bounds during the epidemic, the benefits induced by emergencies are often very short-lived. ", very few people are willing to pay for online office software.
data shows that in 2021, the payment rate of office software in my country will be less than 15%. In contrast, the payment rate of office software in the European and American markets has exceeded 70%.
DingTalk President Ye Jun also said that less than 1% of companies buy professional, proprietary, and exclusive software on DingTalk.
On the other hand, as the scale of users expands day by day, DingTalk's cost-side expenses, such as network bandwidth, server, storage and other technical resource costs and R&D, sales, management and other labor costs, continue to soar.
According to a report by Caijing magazine, in November 2022, the monthly cost of DingTalk's audio and video technology resources will be about 250 million yuan. More than 70% of this is network bandwidth costs, and more than 20% is server and storage costs. In the past three years, DingTalk's annual network bandwidth cost was 1.5 billion to 2 billion yuan, and in extreme cases it exceeded 2 billion yuan.
is reflected in the performance. In the past two years, Alibaba has not disclosed the loss of Dingding. However, in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2020, Dingding’s profit loss was as high as 3.063 billion yuan, an increase of nearly 60% compared to 1.932 billion yuan in the same period of 2019. , Its embarrassment of losing money and making money can still be seen.
In addition, under the "cloud and nail integration" strategy, Alibaba Cloud's pace of revenue generation has slowed down, which has made DingTalk feel anxious. The
financial report shows that in the four quarters of fiscal year 2022, Alibaba Cloud's quarterly revenue increased by 29%, 33%, 20%, and 12% year-on-year respectively, and the growth rate in the last two quarters slowed down significantly.
This means that even if Ali boasted that there would be no upper limit on DingTalk's investment, it would not be possible to keep transfusing it with blood. What's more, the strategic positioning of all competitive formats in the free market should be independent profit. Under such a background, making money has become DingTalk's mission.
In this regard, the company has issued three commercial "prescriptions".
The first is the "three specialization model", that is, on the basis of the free standard version, an annual fee is charged for the three versions of the professional version, the exclusive version, and the proprietary version, which are 9,800 yuan/year, 100,000 yuan/year, and 100 yuan Starting from 10,000 yuan/year; the second is the platform commission model, through providing an open platform to partners to sell SaaS, and collecting commissions; the third is the hardware open license authorization model, that is, partners develop hardware products based on DingTalk base and charge related fees .
At the same time, DingTalk is also doing its best to explore more ways of commercialization. For example, in the latest version of DingTalk, it launched the "DingSelect" enterprise service aggregation platform. In addition to providing business expansion, financial and tax management, office leasing and other services, Also under the corporate procurement column, it cooperates with Tmall to put rice noodles, grains and oils, leisure snacks, household goods, household appliances, 3C digital and other products on the shelves, and sell them like other e-commerce companies.
I have to say that in order to make money, DingTalk is doing everything possible. In view of this, although Dingding's move to launch the loan assistance business is unexpected, it is also reasonable.
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