Alibaba Wants To Build A Huge Business Ecosystem

In recent years, Alibaba has been making big moves and buying enterprises in many fields to build a huge business ecosystem.

In the Alibaba IPO prospectus, Ma mentioned the "ecosystem" 24 times. From the actual takeover action, we can see Alibaba's imagination and ambitions.

The intention is to jump out of the scope of the electricity supplier, take big data, cloud computing, payment network, intelligent logistics network as the foundation, absorb various fields such as culture, education, medicine, entertainment and sports, expand business boundaries, and build business forms that competitors can hardly imitate.

A business model may be profitable in a short time after being innovated, but it will not be evergreen all the year round.

Because the change of consumer demand is faster and more elusive, showing the characteristics of individuation and centralization, only the circular business mode of eco business can make enterprises survive and develop.

Alibaba's results in the first quarter of 2016 also fully demonstrated the tremendous productivity released by the Ali ecosystem: in less than three months in 2016, Alibaba's retail ecosystem Trading (GMV) had reached 30920 billion yuan.

Alibaba realized in 13 years.

54 years of achievements, which means that the world's largest retail entity shifted from offline to online.

Alibaba has constructed an e-commerce ecosystem based on Taobao, Tmall and Juhuasuan, and is developing rapidly, and the market is becoming bigger and bigger.

But what Alibaba is offering now

The main content of the service is to solve the problem of asymmetric information, which connects the sellers and consumers. The efforts made mainly focus on the repair of the existing business ecosystem.

On the other hand, as China's consumption upgrading and consumers' attention to customer experience become more and more important, the simple platform mode will sooner or later withdraw from the stage of history. It is only a matter of time.

Like a roller coaster in a playground, when the car gets higher and slower, it often means that the car is reaching its peak, followed by the rapid drop of weightlessness.

Alibaba is building an eco business model. Let's discuss the development of Alibaba business model from the perspective of ecosystem.

"Succession" and "evolution" of ecosystems

In nature, the evolution of an ecosystem from the embryonic stage to the mature stage is usually experienced from the simple to the complex, from the low to the advanced. The essence is to form a relatively stable and orderly state from the initial unstable and unordered state, and the complexity and order are increasing gradually.

The key role in this process is the heritability and variability of ecosystems. This is also an important reason for the diversity of species on the earth today.

The heredity of the ecosystem creates the "succession" phenomenon of the ecosystem.

Under normal conditions, the ecosystem tends to achieve a relatively stable and conservative equilibrium state through self organization and self adjustment succession process. Any change of the ecosystem will be reduced to the original equilibrium stable state by the process of succession.

The variability of ecosystems has created the "evolution" of the ecosystem. This is also the most critical element for the continuous development of many natural ecosystems on earth.

According to the theory of dissipative structure, when the ecosystem deviates from the equilibrium state to a certain threshold, the system will be at the critical point. Beyond this critical point, the system will mutate and evolve to a completely new stable and orderly state. The farther off the equilibrium state is, the more likely it will be to enter more and more stable and orderly states.

After understanding the process of "succession" and "evolution" of the ecosystem, we turn back to look at some problems existing in the Alibaba retail ecosystem.

The heritability and variability of the ecosystem mentioned above can correspond to continuous innovation and radical innovation in business mode.

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Under the trend of consumption upgrading, Ali continues to innovate passively and passively.

At present, the trend of domestic consumption upgrading is becoming more and more obvious, and the national pursuit of brand consumption is an important prerequisite for the rapid rise of vip.com's e-commerce platform.

In January 2012, Alibaba separated Tmall from Taobao and signed an internationally famous retail platform, such as Costco, Metro and Messi department store.

At the same time, the rapid rise of vertical electric providers, cross-border electricity providers, self operated B2C and other new types of electricity providers are constantly disrupting the platform advantage of Ali business providers, which are plagued by fakes.

Ali's electricity supplier's traffic dividend era has gone, and the new brand is hard to find. Once the Amoy brand came to the market or became an entity.

Although Ali has built an e-commerce retail ecosystem with hematopoietic function, it acts as a platform in the entire retail system.

Under the situation of being caught in the back and belly, Alibaba can only make passive sewing and continuous innovation on the basis of the original platform mode.

For example, the establishment of Tmall supermarket is to deal with the No. 1 store (the latter has been acquired by Jingdong); the separation of Tmall electric city is to deal with the aggressive Jingdong mall, but consumers still prefer to buy electric appliances on Jingdong. When the cross-border electricity supplier is rising, Tmall has made great efforts to build "Tmall international", claiming to supply overseas consumer goods directly for domestic consumers, but most of the overseas brands of Tmall are still managed by the domestic generation operation companies.

Throughout the process, the Ali business has been in a passive state, struggling to deal with all competitors, pursuing the red sea strategy, no time to detonate the next business hotspot to take the lead in the electricity supplier mode innovation.

Thus, the long-term "succession" state of the whole retail ecosystem results in the problem of innovation and passivation.

The ecosystem of semi open ecosystem is difficult to evolve.

In order to be in an evolving state, an ecosystem needs to meet three conditions: the system must be open; the system must be far from equilibrium; there are nonlinear interactions between different elements in the system, and energy needs to be continuously input to maintain.

Alibaba has been improving its business ecosystem through continuous cross domain mergers and acquisitions.

If you look closely at the ecosphere of Alibaba, you will find that it is very comprehensive, and the layout of every move is foresight, but only the important node of social interaction is missing.

Although Ali has social networking tools such as Wang Xin, Qian Nu, and Tao Tao as mobile social entrance, these social tools only focus on specific areas of Ali and perform their duties.

If Wang letter and thousand cattle serve the electricity supplier paction, the "micro-blog" for Ali has its own obvious social tendency. It can not form enough effort to get Ali's comprehensive social skills.

It can be said that the ecosystem currently built by Ali is still half open.

Social networking has always been a field that Ali wants to win but has always had a headache.

From Ma Yunqiang's "go to" to the Spring Festival red envelopes war, and then to Ji Fu game, nails, Ali has been heavily invested to expand its social sphere, but WeChat has been unable to fulfill its expectations with good emotional experience and social attributes.

Why has Alibaba been so persistent about social networking? In my view, social networking has great power to increase traffic flow, improve customer stickiness and enhance activity.

The success of the light social networking model, such as beauty and mogujie.com's interest oriented, is enough to illustrate this problem.

Moreover, from social business to micro business to net red economy, there are indications that the community electricity supplier may be the next electricity supplier's outbreak point, and the current ecosystem of Ali is still scarce.

In addition, the fierce competition in the electricity supplier industry and the rapid changes in the market and technology have led to the development of e-commerce enterprises, such as going against the current.

The current Ali business ecosystem has made it an unshaken giant in the field of electricity, and its normal succession of ecosystems can still maintain its hegemony and remain unchanged for several years.

But a few years later, it is a "succession" to maintain the status quo or a constant "evolution" and forge ahead, which is a problem for Ali ecosystem.