8/12 TBC Insider Digest
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Insider Digest 8/12/21: What’s Up With Beike? Kuaishou’s Woes, Baibu B2B Textiles, and Basics of Cainiao
The big announcement is that we have started migrating to Discord! You need to go to bit.ly/tbcidiscord and sign in using your memberful email and password. You can always reset your password if you don’t remember it. This links your Insider account to your discord account!
If you don’t have a Discord account, you should make one using the same email address as your Insider account. If you are having trouble, just email us at team@techbuzzchina.com or message Freya / myself on WhatsApp and we’ll help you out! The WhatsApp group will be open for one more week, and then we’ll shut it down and everything will be in Discord :)
Weekly Chat will also move to Discord! Instead of Zoom, we’ll be using the voice chat function in Discord. We’ll still stick to the 6AM PST / 9AM EST / 9PM Asia Time for this Friday 8/13! We always find something fun to talk about, so do join us!
8/9/21 What's Up With Beike / Chinese Real Estate?
The most consistent question I get from all of you these days is -- what's up with Beike $BEKE, the real estate platform company that we did a podcast episode on a year ago when it went IPO? Since then, it lost its founder to lung cancer this May, and has experienced a precipitous decline in stock price, -62% in the last two months. Most people think it's because of downward pressure on the Chinese real estate market, as the government tries to rationalize property prices in an effort to solve the demographic crisis and slow growing social inequality. Well, I list all the things that I could find that could be weighing the business down.
I'd be curious what everyone is thinking re: Kuaishou these days, given that the company has lost 80% of its market cap in the last 6 months. It is now only ~50% larger than $BILI! It’s time to address some of the regulatory concerns, I guess, and also its mediocre international efforts.
Baibu - B2B Textile Manufacturing
Some of you might recognize the name from the nationalist VC Eric Li's speech (in Chinese) last year that was cited by Chairman Rabbit in his viral article explaining Chinese regulatory moves. Initially just a B2B platform where people can buy and sell fabrics, because factories were still using swatch books, and digitizing inventory into searchable photo-based databases already improved the experience greatly (in Chinese). Then, started building out other software, the first of which was warehouse management. (According to the website, they have ERP, MES which is manufacturing execution, and WMS which is warehouse management systems now, and also AIoT or artificial intelligence of things). Finally, they use this data to provide supply chain financing to users on the platform.
Alibaba's Cainiao China Smart Logistics Network
What does this logistics decacorn do? It is a logistics network! Logistics folk like to call it 4PL.
3PL is like DHL, Fedex, or JD Logistics etc. Specialized companies you outsource your inventory management, warehousing, and fulfillment to.
Whereas a 4PL, or 4th party logistics provider, manages 3PLs, and whatever other resources, technology, infrastructure, needed to design, build and provide supply chain solutions for businesses.
Other Links
There were a lot of excellent comments and links shared on Discord this week, here are just a few …
DavidEborall asked about Bilibili’s investment into the China Telecom IPO, which most of us seem to think is for government relations purposes. Des.wee reminded us that Tencent and Alibaba had done the same for China Unicom 5 years ago. It was not a good investment!
Anton reminds us to read BeijingChannel’s latest, which is on essays penned by Xi Jinping when he was party chief of Zhejiang. I browsed through it and found it somewhat helpful in furthering my understanding of Chinese policy goals.
On the “just for fun” front, Rob found out the truth behind the rumor that Hillhouse’s Zhang Lei was prevented from leaving the country … it appears that he was mixed up with another man of the same name.
That’s it! Please check the forums for amazing contributions from our members!
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