Leopard transformation
Leopard transformation
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This article is from WeChat official account: Baobian News (ID: Baobiannews), written by Chen Fashan, edited by Liu Yang, with the original title of "layoffs by flying books," must lose "?, and the title of the picture is from Visual China
Article Summary
Feishu is about to undergo a new round of layoffs, with a layoff rate of over 20%. Feishu missed the opportunity and attempted to compensate for the disadvantage of latecomers through strategies such as setting benchmarks and pursuing ultimate collaboration. Feishu is facing problems such as bloated scale, unfavorable revenue, and the possibility of whether to sell it.
• • Feishu will undergo a new round of layoffs, with a layoff rate of over 20%
• • Feishu attempts to compensate for its latecomer disadvantage through strategies such as setting benchmarks and pursuing ultimate collaboration
• • Feishu faces problems such as bloated scale and unfavorable revenue, and may be sold
On the basis of previous large-scale layoffs, Feishu is about to launch a new round of personnel optimization, with a layoff rate of over 20%.
On the morning of March 26th, Feishu CEO Xie Xin issued a letter to all employees, announcing the news of layoffs, stating that the organization has problems with its own team, which is not lean enough, efficiency is decreasing, and strength is not focused enough, which is not conducive to the long-term development of the business. The team size will be streamlined, and "some students will not leave because of this.".
Since last year, the flying book, which was commented by Liang Rubo, CEO of ByteDance, as "ROI" is not ideal, has been shrinking. According to 36 Krypton, its number of employees has decreased from more than 6000 at the peak to about 5000 at present.
In the "Three Kingdoms Kill" of collaborative office software DingTalk, enterprise WeChat, and Feishu, Feishu entered the game the latest. Feishu, who missed the opportunity, hopes to achieve miracles through a sea of people tactic. Among the three companies, Feishu is the one with the fastest growth in number and the largest team. However, due to missing out on the wave of digital migration of domestic enterprises, it is difficult to catch up step by step.
In order to compete with DingTalk and enterprises in a differentiated manner, Feishu Sword takes a biased approach, attempting to compensate for its latecomer disadvantage through strategies such as setting benchmarks, pursuing ultimate collaboration, and all in one. However, ByteDance, which is accustomed to "cultural output," overlooks the true demands of users: most companies prefer "top-down" control over collaboration among employees.
The consequences of sending the wrong message are also very obvious: although users have a good reputation for Feishu's document collaboration, it also brings troubles to employees such as endless meetings, endless group messages, and being crazily @ by external documents.
Can Feishu, who wants to start a new business, still be reborn in adversity?
1、 Further layoffs, resulting in a one-third reduction from peak levels
Although there is a premonition of layoffs, when this day arrives, grassroots employees still find it difficult to calm down.
On the early morning of March 26th, Feishu employees opened their email and received a letter from the CEO Xie Xin to all employees. Xie Xin stated in the letter that due to issues such as large team size, insufficient organization, low efficiency, and lack of focus, after repeated discussions and careful decision-making, the company has decided to make some adjustments and appropriately streamline the team size. "Some students may have to leave us as a result. At the same time, we will also provide compensation plans or job transfer opportunities to support the affected students and help smooth the transition.".
The management team of Feishu hopes to return to the "day 1" state of the startup company by adjusting the team size - with more focused direction, more efficient organization, and more combat effectiveness of the team.
Compared to the management's vision, employees on the front line are more concerned about the safety in front of them.
On a certain workplace social app, the news of Feishu's layoffs ranked first on the hot list. "After sending the email, we started. What do the affected brothers say about N+?" This dynamic attracted nearly 200 people to leave messages, with some headhunters digging online, some begging for "live water" private chat, and some reporting the condition of "N+8, ruthlessly abandoned by old employees", but was quickly questioned as "all those larger than N+2 are bullshit".
In fact, industry insiders are not surprised by the current round of layoffs at Feishu. The question is only when and to what extent adjustments will be made.
As early as the beginning of this month, Feishu had already shown signs of "optimization". According to a headhunter who follows ByteDance's dynamics, it was previously heard that there has been a delay in performance communication in the Feishu business. The performance communication originally scheduled to start on March 12th has suddenly been postponed, while performance communication in other departments of ByteDance is proceeding normally. This abnormal situation has already led many people to think about whether there will be significant internal changes.
It is easy for employees to understand this idea. The team is bloated, but the human efficiency is low. This is a fatal bug in Internet companies that pursue ROI.
In 2021, the number of employees on Feishu was about 2000, with a peak of over 6000 in 2022. In less than two years, it has tripled in size, far surpassing DingTalk and Enterprise Micro. However, both in terms of user base and revenue, there is still a considerable gap between Feishu and DingTalk, as well as Qiwei. In 2022, the per capita annual recurring income (ARR) of Feishu was 12500 US dollars (approximately 90000 RMB), even lower than the average salary of 114000 RMB for non private urban employees nationwide that year.
If ByteDance had a high tolerance for Feishu's tactics of recruiting and hiring people in order to catch up with DingTalk and Qiwei, now Feishu is facing more and more challenges due to its bloated scale and poor revenue. At the full staff meeting in early 2023, Liang Rubo publicly said that the company invested heavily in flying books, no less than Tiktok and Tiktok, but the ROI was not cost-effective. In this case, when bytes start to "lose weight and fat", Feishu naturally becomes the focus of consideration.
According to reports from 36Kr, First Financial, and others, there are currently around 5000 employees at Feishu. This round of optimization plans to lay off more than 1000 employees, and the number of employees will be reduced by one-third compared to the peak. However, this number is still greater than the sum of DingTalk and Enterprise Micro employees.
2、 Is it necessary to lose?
The disadvantage of later development led Feishu to choose not to take the ordinary path.
Before Feishu, DingTalk had firmly occupied the traditional to B, government, and education markets; Enterprise WeChat relies on the unique advantages of connecting personal WeChat, and has a wide moat in the field of to C. That is to say, large enterprises with payment capabilities prioritize embracing the ecosystem of DingTalk and Enterprise Micro, rather than flying books on this track.
According to data from iResearch, as of February 2024, based on the monthly number of independent devices, DingTalk had 160 million units, Enterprise Micro had 97.45 million units, and Feishu had only 6.65 million units, accounting for 1/24 and 1/15 of DingTalk and Enterprise Micro, respectively.
In addition, office software is much more complex than chat software, often integrating chat, OA approval, document and other functions. Switching office software means that all processes need to be reorganized and tested, which is a huge hidden cost and potential risk for enterprises. Moreover, most enterprises are more conservative in trying new things.
Therefore, Feishu, which neither to B nor to C has an advantage, has put the chips for overtaking on the curve onto building benchmarks.
Whether on the official website of Feishu or in offline advertising, Feishu advocates "advanced team, use Feishu first" and brings in star companies such as Ideal Automobile, Xiaomi, and Yuanqi Forest as endorsements. The advantage is that these companies have a high level of public opinion, which can easily create momentum for the promotion of Feishu. On the other hand, packaging cases require real gold and silver, with high investment but low income, and may even not be profitable.
Usually, large clients with payment capabilities have strict requirements for services, and in order to ensure data security, they often require customized services and private deployments. Feishu has to match a team of hundreds of people, spending a long time on a single major customer, resulting in high costs and long cycles. However, the customer's budget is fixed, which can easily lead to Feishu's losses and unsustainable revenue.
Meanwhile, Feishu's understanding of "advanced" may not necessarily match the actual needs of the enterprise. Many users of Feishu have expressed that the document collaboration experience of Feishu is indeed good, but do enterprises really need such an ultimate collaboration experience?
In the eyes of many small businesses, using office software is nothing more than utilizing basic functions such as attendance, clock in, and payroll. For large enterprises, employee collaboration is just a branch of work, and more importantly, effective management from top to bottom. That is to say, Feishu pursues the ultimate collaboration, which many small businesses do not use and is not the focus of attention for large enterprises.
Even if a company purchases Feishu, it may not necessarily become as efficient as Feishu. Multiple Feishu users admit that overly open collaboration can also bring troubles. For example, inexplicably being pulled into a meeting group across departments, unable to finish the work at hand, and having to squeeze out time to attend; Frequently being @ in a colleague's document, requesting to report work progress, feels very tired.
And what overwhelms many users is the charging model that Feishu launched more than a year ago. In February 2023, Feishu updated its charging standards. If not paid, user rights will be reduced, including the reduction of document cloud storage space from 50GB to 10GB; Chat records are only kept for 180 days, and previously these services were permanently free.
At the beginning of 2020, Feishu relied on a free policy during the epidemic to attract a group of seed users. With changes in pricing policies, price sensitive users had to consider whether to stay or not.
3、 Where are you flying to?
The direction of Feishu's layoffs has attracted much attention from the outside world.
In the letter from all staff, Xie Xin stated that she will serve to B customers well, enhance AI capabilities to enhance product competitiveness.
However, according to industry insiders, Feishu may consider selling after layoffs, and potential buyers include Baidu, Kingsoft, and others, who are currently in the inquiry stage.
Moreover, the document collaboration function that Feishu excels at is not an irreplaceable product, and office software such as WPS can be easily implemented. For example, when selecting a paragraph in WPS, you can choose "WPS AI" to automatically implement functions such as continuation, expansion, editing, and editing.
On the other hand, in the industry, the reason why enterprises and micro enterprises can break through the "blockade" of DingTalk and occupy a place in the to B market is because they have found the unique advantage of "linking personal WeChat", which Feishu currently lacks.
Feishu, which is not ecologically dominant, is not as open as it appears. For enterprises, collaborative office, human resource management, and performance management are one of the core functions and essential services for purchasing office software. In the past, with the support of ByteDance's "banknote capability", Feishu filled its shortcomings in the B-end by acquiring office software such as Chaoxi Calendar, Heipaiyun, and Tower, and launched its own Office and People modules.
Industry insiders in the collaborative office industry have expressed to Leopard Transformation that Feishu's all in one strategy is to do whatever it takes to make money and is unwilling to give ecological partners the opportunity to make money. The relationship with the industry is relatively tense, and the future landscape needs to be opened up a bit.
In addition, what is suitable for ByteDance may not necessarily be suitable for users, and Feishu needs to be more grounded. According to the news of "Tech Planet", in the early promotion process, FlyBook organized several offline promotion conferences. Zhou Hanlin, the CIO of China Gold, who attended the conference, said frankly that FlyBook is more suitable for Internet companies, especially content companies, but not for China Gold.
According to "Late Posts", around the end of 2020, Feishu and DingTalk competed for orders from Ningde Times. DingTalk participants said, "Feishu may think its documents are the best in all of China and must replace them with its documents. We didn't mention this from beginning to end, we are the second party. You can't say you're awesome, you teach them how to do things."
It can be seen that major clients have their own tone and may not necessarily agree with ByteDance's culture and values. At present, the whole society is emphasizing cost reduction and efficiency improvement, which is also the top priority for office software to consider customers, rather than letting customers do things according to Feishu's thinking. This may be exactly what Liang Rubo called "big company disease".
At the ByteDance annual staff meeting held in January 2024, Liang Rubo, who comes from an HR background, admitted that his biggest sense of crisis is that he is worried that as an organization, he is becoming mediocre and unable to make new breakthroughs. ByteDance now has "all the big company diseases that should have", and the organization has a trend towards mediocrity, including inefficiency, sluggishness, and low standards.
Looking at the entire enterprise service industry, almost all are facing similar difficult challenges. Beisen, which has been deeply involved in enterprise services for more than 20 years, is a leading enterprise in the industry. It landed on the Hong Kong stock market in April 2023 and is known as the first HR SaaS stock. Surprisingly, the stock price has dropped by a total of 46% in the three trading days of listing, and has now dropped from HKD 29.8 per share to HKD 5 per share, a decrease of 83%. It can be seen how difficult it is for B-end customers to earn money.
At Tencent's annual conference held on January 29th this year, Ma Huateng said, "I heard that enterprise WeChat has already made profits. Congratulations, it is very difficult to compete in the B market." "We still have many products below the surface, and in addition to important strategic products and basic investments, we must go ashore and surface as soon as possible, which is endogenous pressure.".
Can Feishu still fly when its already leading competitors take the lead again?
This article is from WeChat official account: Baobian (ID: baobiannews), written by Chen Fashan, edited by Liu Yang
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