Securities Times reporter Wang Xiaowei
The "hidden tide" of the first founder of the Internet giant is constantly emerging.
JD.com recently announced that President Xu Lei will be the CEO of JD.com Group, responsible for daily operation management; Liu Qiangdong will devote more energy to long-term strategic design, major strategic decision-making and deployment, training of young leading talents and rural revitalization.
Previously, the retirement of younger groups such as Huang Zheng and Zhang Yiming also caused heated discussions.
Dismantling the retirement paths of the founders of Dachang include at least the following: some founders adopted the "true retirement model", and Huang Zheng was approved by the board of directors to resign from the position of chairman of Pinduoduo in 2021. At that time, in his letter to shareholders Said that the increasingly fierce competition and even alienation in the industry made him realize that the traditional competition mainly oriented by scale and efficiency has its inevitable problems. To change, it must find the answer in the core technology and its basic theory.
After resigning as chairman, Huang Zheng will combine more personal lifelong interests and devote himself to research in the fields of food science and life science, so as to explore a new space for high-speed, high-quality and in-depth development for Pinduoduo in ten years.
There is also a certain proportion of the "semi-hidden" mode that sits behind the scenes.
Taking Liu Qiangdong as an example, because he masters major strategic decisions and deployments, he still has decision-making power over JD.com's important strategies, which is regarded by the market as Liu Qiangdong's control over JD.
There is also a path that has a passive meaning.
Under the pressure of the highly tense capital chain, last year, Zhang Jindong, Suning Holding Group, etc., reduced their holdings of the company's shares through block transactions and agreement transfers. .
From the current point of view, a considerable proportion of the first founder's retirement cases have the feature of "retirement without rest".
This can be seen from the shareholding ratio of the head platform.
For example, the proportion of shares in Pinduoduo controlled by Huang Zheng is still over 20%, indicating implicit influence and decision-making power.
According to statistics, these retired founders are not very old, which was originally the "year of fighting" in the private enterprise world, but finally chose to "do not fight".
Liu Qiangdong is only 48 years old this year; Huang Zheng was only 40 years old when he stepped down as CEO of Pinduoduo; Zhang Yiming is a young representative in the ebb tide. Born in 1983, he is only 39 years old this year and has not arrived yet.
This retirement age level is even more striking in comparison with other brick-and-mortar entrepreneurs.
Compared with the cases of Fuyao Glass Cao Dewang, Wahaha Zong Qinghou, Nongfu Spring Zhong Suisui, etc., who are close to or even in their 70s and still choose "Old Ji Fuzhen", the line of retirement of the founder of the head factory is obviously more outlined. clear.
Why did the first founder of Dachang choose to "retreat"?
Regardless of whether it is stated clearly or not, "can't move" should be an important reason for not getting rid of it.
Counting down the founders of big factories, many of them are platform companies.
In the past ten years of Internet dividends, the goal of traffic and even profit growth can also be reached by continuously reaching out, so that these giants can build their own oligarchic framework among thousands of people, so as to enjoy the disorderly expansion of capital. "Golden Decade".
Pinduoduo, ByteDance, Meituan, Kuaishou, they have all fought their way in the most reckless and radical era of China's mobile Internet, and have grown fiercely into giants in the ever-changing arena.
But with the peak and fall of Internet dividends, the traffic growth feast is disbanding.
Taking the e-commerce industry as an example, the growth rate of online transactions has also begun to slow down. Coupled with the strengthening of supervision, the entire industry is learning to dance with low speed.
Judging from the financial reports for the fourth quarter and full year of 2021 released by the three e-commerce giants a few days ago, low growth rate has become a consistent keyword, and the growth rate of receivables on some platforms has dropped to single digits for the first time.
Coupled with the repeated epidemics and weak consumption, how to find their own new growth logic is a new test that these giants have to face.
More important is the change of the Internet ecological pattern.
For quite a period of time, Baidu, Toutiao, Tencent, Ali, and Pinduoduo have all shown staged "pinching each other", which is like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other overseas Internet giants falling in love and killing each other Fighting is similar.
However, with the changes in the industry iteration, the boundaries between the various head platforms tend to be clear, and the competitive landscape tends to be balanced.
Each company has a major market share in its own field of expertise. Although they are eager to try, they often do not easily and aggressively step into the dominant territory of other platforms. This is regarded by industry people as the Internet industry is entering the spring and autumn era of mutual checks and balances.
In this new stage, the mission of the first founder will also face a turn, and it is also necessary for the Internet platform to rely on the professional strength of professional managers, in order to achieve "guarding the country" after "struggling the country".
However, with the end of the dividend of the era and the imminent arrival of the next-generation Internet dividend season such as the Metaverse, the difficulty of "defending the country" is no less than the initial stage of "defending the country".