Chapter 148: Not exploiting the driver!
"Regarding the online taxi booking service standards, we are now soliciting public opinions. "

The next morning, a document was updated on the homepage of the official website with a simple page design, causing waves in the market.

Two hours later, the 'Shenzhou Youche' APP quietly reduced its subsidy levels.

Two hours later, Mr. Ma posted on Alibaba's own social platform "Laiwang": I am not afraid of burning money, nor am I afraid of competition, but I am most afraid of harming the interests of users.

Whether it was actual action or public statement, both parties tacitly surrendered and stopped fighting, except Didi, which remained silent.

The eyes of the industry and the outsiders were focused on this moment. At noon, Xie Jingxing shared a photo of his lunch on Weibo, announcing that Ele.me was launched in 18 cities simultaneously, launching a marketing plan of " people, promotions, giving users choices."

Users can nominate and vote online to recommend which merchants to join Ele.me. The voting period is half a month. If the subsequent merchants successfully join, the nominating users will win a mysterious prize.

From this, we can confirm that the war of online ride-hailing may not be gradually coming to an end, but the war of food delivery will surely be fierce.

[When the stars of the Internet market are shining, Xie Jingxing rises like a meteor across the sky. I hope he will not fall in disgrace, and I also hope his opponents will continue to shine. ]

——Someone answered this way under a related question on Zhihu.

"It's time to board the plane." Song Anli reminded softly.

Xie Jingxing nodded slightly, and quickly tapped the screen to type a line of comments: [Thank you, I am honored to share an era with you. ]

"Hubby, if you retire and write a personal biography, it will definitely be a big hit."

Concubine Pei put down the chicken soup for success book in her hand and said, her face hidden under the mask and hat was proud and infatuated.

Xie Jing Xing weighed his backpack and said, "Write in our story, as well as Xiao Ma's medical recovery miracle."

"Ah, that's too embarrassing, can you cut it down a bit?"

"Yes, if I can leave my name in the business and financial history textbook, the author will help us ignore these insignificant little things."

The conversation was gradually drowned out by the roar as the plane soared into the clouds and headed towards the capital, which was the center of the stage for the two wars.

At the same time, Li Ming was standing on the edge of the cliff, silently counting down the time until his cardiac arrest.

It gets dark early in Beijing in winter. When darkness covered the skyline, Xie Jingxing arrived in Beijing and went straight to Didi headquarters.

Concubine Pei and her agent Feng Guiyue returned to the studio, where the marketing director of Dianping was waiting for her to sign the contract.

From Didi to Dianping, wherever Xie Jingxing invested, there would be an endorsement contract offered to him, which added a little envy and laughter to the circle.

Some people think that this is the nature of rich kids who are stingy and take advantage of small opportunities, but no one can deny the capital power shown in this, especially after receiving the message from Feng Guiyue...

In the Four Seasons Hotel suite, Li Ming sat naked and cross-legged on the bed, staring at the screen of his mobile phone over and over again with bloodshot eyes.

"What's wrong, a nightmare?"

The charming young girl sat up with her arms propped up, lifted her hair lazily, hugged him from behind and rested her chin on her shoulder, her warm and sweet breath brushed past her ears.

"Snapped!"

The slap hit the young girl's face loudly, and her fair skin suddenly became red and swollen. She blinked stupidly and couldn't speak.

Li Ming scratched his hair in annoyance and cursed, "How many times have I told you to stop looking at my phone?"

"I didn't want to see it, I just..." The young girl's eyes turned red.

"Okay, go away and don't come to see me again."

Li Ming jumped out of the car and waved his hand to interrupt, then pulled out a suitcase from the closet, which contained dozens of bundles of US dollars and RMB, a large number of document bags, and a small number of luxury watches and jewelry.

He took out a brown paper bag and stuffed more than a dozen bundles of RMB into it. Then he thought about taking out another brown paper bag and stuffing a few bundles of US dollars and some famous watches and jewelry into it.

He threw two paper bags onto the bed: "Hurry up, don't just stand there, do you think it's too little?"

"I just want to hug you." The young girl forced a smile and looked at him blankly.

Li Ming's momentum stagnated. He licked the corners of his cracked lips, looked around with evasive eyes, bent down, picked up a pack of cigarettes from the ground, took out a cigarette and put it into his mouth.

The copper lighter gave off a smell of gunpowder, and a flickering flame shone before my eyes.

Li Ming raised his head and followed the slender hand holding the lighter, looking up inch by inch at the young girl's face.

"I can't give you the role you want now. I have been in the industry for so many years, so I have accumulated some connections. If you believe in me, someone will naturally give you a chance in the future."

After a while, Li Ming dressed neatly and whispered, "Remember, you don't need to find out who helped you, and don't think about repaying the favor. No matter who asks us when we leave this door today, we are not familiar with each other and there is no relationship."

"Or you can go abroad. My sister's boyfriend is very powerful and can help people immigrate." The young girl cried with hope in her eyes.

"If you really care about me, you will do less stupid things in the future."

Li Ming smiled, picked up the two brown paper bags on the bed and sealed them carefully: "These days, there is no such thing as unspoken rules. No director will give you a role that can attract hundreds of millions of dollars in investment just because you sleep with him."

"If you can't beat capital even if you fight to the death, how can you possibly beat it in sex?"

He stuffed the brown paper bag into his bag. "I can't leave and I don't want to leave. The Pony is mine. It will be mine until the day I die."

The young girl walked away with her heavy bag, without looking back, and she was determined not to make such a stupid mistake again.

Li Ming stood by the window and looked out. The sky outside had just turned from dark to black, and scattered lights could be vaguely seen on the ground above the tall buildings.

If he jumped from the 20th floor, he would probably be imprinted into the concrete floor. He felt a little dizzy thinking about it, and his vision was blurred. The scattered lights were like ghost lights, flickering and dim.

[What does he want to see me about?] Li Ming picked up his phone and replied to the message.

Feng Guiyue replied immediately: [I will lend you three days of life.]

[Playing tricks! ] He replied with four words.

…………

The large conference room at Didi’s headquarters was brightly lit. The meeting had just ended and many executives were chatting in low voices as they walked through the corridor back to their work stations.

I don't know who shouted "Mr. Xie", and then the noise disappeared and greetings began one after another.

The tall and thin young man had a handsome face with a kind smile on his face. With an ordinary backpack on his shoulders, he looked a little weak and bookish.

Watching him nod and walk calmly into the conference room, the regional marketing manager who had returned from another place to attend the meeting whispered, "Why is he here in person?" "Just go ask him yourself," another out-of-town marketing manager joked.

The one who spoke first disagreed: "I really want to go in and listen to what he and the boss are talking about. If they want to fight, just beat the quick one to death. When will this f*cking fight stop?"

"Don't worry about it. We'll just do whatever the boss says." Another colleague took over.

The first person to speak was disgusted: "This group of investors are amateurs who guide professionals. They are the ones who say that money is being burned and they are also the ones who say that it should be stopped. They only know how to shout slogans and pretend to be cool. We are being ordered around in circles."

"You're the old woman at the entrance of the village? Idiot."

A female manager with bright red lips cursed in a neither loud nor harsh tone. People around her couldn't help but look at them sideways, but no one said anything.

The regional marketing manager who spoke first blushed. The woman's name was Liu Chen, the marketing operations manager for the Hangzhou region. She had been fighting hand-to-hand for several months in Kuaishou's headquarters and was ranked at the top of the performance list.

"Some time ago, she was the only one driving on 318, in the same car with that guy." Someone tried to smooth things over.

Everyone looked at each other in silence, then quickened their pace and dispersed.

Several executives who came back from the 318 self-driving trip some time ago were not quite normal. They were extremely united internally but showed an evil and ruthless attitude to the outside world, which they achieved at the cost of their lives.

"How long will it take?" Cheng Wei sat at the head of the empty conference room with a solemn expression.

Xie Jingxing closed the door casually, sat opposite him, opened his backpack and took out his computer: "Baidu can't hold it anymore."

"No, you have to give us a definite answer." Liu Qing was not going to reason.

Xie Jingxing shrugged: "I really don't know the exact time."

"Mr. Xie, do you know how many employees Didi has now? 3273! We completed 370 million orders yesterday, and we are about to break four."

Liu Qing tapped his fingers on the table and emphasized: "This is the result of burning 23 billion in cash."

"So you should be more cautious. Didi burned so much money and Kuaidi did the same. There is no point in you talking to Lu Chengwei now." Xie Jingxing projected the computer screen.

It shows Uber's approximate operating data in markets around the world. When you scroll through it with your mouse, the most eye-catching piece of information is that Uber is profitable in half of the world's top 30 cities.

It can provide Uber with $4 million to $5 million in profits each year.

This data is an estimate made by a third-party consulting company using models and surveys. The accuracy is not very high, but anyone with an eye can tell.

Compared with several domestic peers that are still far from profitability and have burned through 20 to 30 billion RMB in a few months, Uber is the highest mountain and the longest river that makes one dizzy and insurmountable just by looking at it.

Xie Jingxing believes that when the industry is panicking over the policy crisis and has unanimously reduced its spending on competition, there is also the external crisis brought on by Uber.

Either there is no negotiation, or the final decision is made, forcing Didi and Kuaidi to come together as soon as possible to jointly resist various uncontrollable crisis risks.

Uber's entry into the Chinese market will not be too late. First of all, it is an open secret in Silicon Valley that Uber is seeking huge special financing from the Saudi sovereign fund.

Kalanick is more powerful than Cheng Wei and Liu Qing combined. He can be regarded as a first-class hawk in Silicon Valley. He will definitely not wait for the smooth merger of Didi and Kuaidi.

This in turn means that the more entangled the negotiations between Didi and Kuaidi become, the faster Uber will come in.

Secondly, Baidu's mobile payment team started recruiting people in September, and now even though they are a bunch of useless people, they should have been able to produce a good product.

Think with your toes. Li Yanhong, holding a mobile payment baby in his hand and seeing the daily transaction volume of Didi Kuaidi, an excellent offline mobile payment port, is 3 to 4 million orders, he would be immortal if he was not envious.

Based on this, Uber and Baidu are a match made in heaven. Xie Jingxing believes that Uber will definitely enter China by May next year at the latest.

Because the deadline for soliciting opinions on the draft for online ride-hailing services is March next year, it is almost certain that the policy will be released in June after completing the subsequent procedures.

Before that, there are other key points that are likely to accelerate Baidu's role as a guide to lead the best players into the game.

Yidao Travel can no longer hold back and is resorting to internal strife. Its founder Zhou Hang is a highly idealistic person who actually doesn’t want to exploit drivers!
Some time ago, Ctrip invested in Yidao Travel, providing Yidao Travel with massive travel order resources.

Liang Jianzhang, the founder of Ctrip, kindly suggested that he reduce the average price per customer for drivers to the lowest level. He rejected the suggestion on the spot by saying that drivers on our platform have a guaranteed monthly income of 20,000 yuan.

Someone in the company suggested to him as a second best option that if he didn't want to push it to the lowest level directly, he could use saturation dispatching to estimate how much money the drivers earn every day.

The money is almost at this level. The subsequent average customer price can be reduced to the lowest level to barely cover the costs. As long as the driver is worked hard to death, the business will be done.

As a result, Zhou Hang said that he wanted to give drivers dignity and work them to death, so that they would go back to driving taxis.

Employees should also have dignity. Looking around the company, all the female colleagues are wearing high heels, spraying perfume and having exquisite makeup. The bathroom sink is specially placed with disposable toiletries for overtime employees.

He spends all day thinking about what kind of playlists to let the private car drivers use, recharging their batteries, reading books and cultivating hobbies, and making it easier for them to chat and communicate with passengers...

Given that Zhou Hang's tricks did help Yidao Chuxing become the number one in the private car market in the early days, many investors and members of the company's founding team had to accept it with a pinch of their teeth.

Now the situation has changed drastically. Lu Zhengyao cannot control Didi and Kuaidi in the field of online car-hailing, but relying on CAR Inc., he can squeeze the shit out of the idealist Zhou Hang in the field of private cars!
Didi and Kuaidi were also not idle. Liu Qing launched a counterattack against her biological father in the tourism and transportation sector, and Ctrip was affected and suffered some injuries.

After a series of combined efforts, Yidao Travel's order volume dropped sharply this month. Li Yanhong, who has always been gentle and easy-going, was so anxious that he went to Beijing to have a heart-to-heart talk with Zhou Hang.

No one knew what the two talked about, but the next day Zhou Hang posted a message on his WeChat Moments criticizing Didi Kuaidi for being "big, not necessarily good," and reiterated that he would rather use the money to buy luxury cars to enhance the passenger experience than burn it in vain.

LeTV's godfather Jia once again jumped out to join in the fun, clapping his hands in agreement and disdaining Didi and Kuaidi's money-burning subsidies, which are not in line with market rules and will cultivate bad habits among users.

If Yidao Travel needs financing, he is willing to work with Lao Zhou to change the current situation in the industry.

Lao Zhou once again played the role of an idealistic veteran who never dies, and bluntly said that he could not understand the current logic of capital burning money in the industry. Yidao was very short of money, but would never take too much financing to affect the company's control.

Godfather Jia was suddenly torn. Many early investors and members of the company's founding team were showing signs of exploding. They didn't want to exploit the drivers, but were hostile to capital. Do you really think of yourself as a people's entrepreneur?
A few days ago, there were rumors in the Beijing venture capital circle that at a Yidao Travel team-building dinner, a company executive got drunk and started swearing.

So Xie Jingxing suggested that Cheng Wei and Liu Qingshen hold back and not rush to find a quick peace talk.

Didi can reduce the high-price subsidies at the national level, relying on the long-term "10 billion subsidies" high-base subsidies, and superimpose regional high-price subsidies.

They forced Kuaidi and UCAR to join them, focused on several key cities and beat them to death, in order to completely destroy Yidao from the outside.

If Yidao collapses and Baidu loses its last foothold in the online car-hailing market, it will naturally be more eager to pursue Uber and accelerate the real negotiation process among all parties.

Either Yidao compromises internally and adjusts its strategy to start burning money.

"Generally speaking, the goal can only be achieved by bringing down Yidao. If we fail to do so, the intensity of money burning that has been reduced with great difficulty will become uncontrollable again." Cheng Wei frowned and repeated the key points.

Xie Jingxing helplessly spread his hands and shook his head. He had no way to prove that Zhou Hang would most likely be defeated. This was the result of a real social simulation experiment that only existed in his mind.

(End of this chapter)