Yu Minhong had the idea of retiring, and Dongfang Selection lost more than 10 billion during the year

雷达Finance

2024-06-05 07:37Posted on the official account of Beijing Radar Finance

Produced by Radar Finance and Economics, edited by Li Yihui, Deep Sea

In the past two days, the speech of Yu Minhong, the founder of New Oriental, has aroused heated discussions in the outside world.

According to media reports, Yu Minhong recently appeared in the live broadcast room of Wumart founder Zhang Wenzhong, and said in the conversation that he has reached the age of retirement and is ready to stay away from business in the future. When Zhang Wenzhong mentioned learning from Yu Minhong's experience in live broadcasting, Yu Minhong said, "Dongfang Selection is doing a mess now, and I don't have any ability to make suggestions to you."

Yu Minhong's speech seemed to mean something. Just two days ago, the topic of "After Dong Yuhui left, the painting style of the Dongfang Selection live broadcast room changed" rushed to the hot search. Some netizens found that in the live broadcast room of Oriental Selection Beautiful Life, the anchor shouted the link on 321, which to a certain extent abandoned the previously sought after knowledge-based live broadcast style of bringing goods.

In the secondary market, Oriental Selection fell 9.92% on June 3, and fell 4.24% the next day, and the market value evaporated by about HK $2.6 billion in two trading days. Since the beginning of this year, the company's share price has fallen by about 43%, and its market value has evaporated by more than HK $12 billion.

Analysts pointed out that judging from the stock price, the number of fans and sales, Dongfang Selection is still in the throes of "de-glorification" after last year's "small composition incident", and it may take more time and efforts to completely solve these problems.

Yu Minhong has talked about retirement many times

Yu Minhong, who has not appeared for a long time, recently talked about retirement again.

It is reported that in a conversation with Zhang Wenzhong, the founder of Wumart, Yu Minhong said that he was born in 1962 and has reached the age of retirement.

In addition, when it comes to negative remarks about himself on the Internet, Yu Minhong frankly admitted that he chose to be relatively forbearing, and he has been abused, accused and even insulted on the Internet more times in the past year than in 100 lifetimes combined.

Despite this, he maintained a calm mind and did not let these negative voices influence his judgment and choices. "I can only treat it with the mentality of high clouds and clouds, high mountains and wide waters, and rolling clouds, and I don't care about the evaluation of the outside world, as long as I don't pay myself, I don't pay my heart, and I do things worthy of my conscience."

The peace of mind of the big guy is difficult for ordinary people to achieve. As the former "godfather" of education and training, Yu Minhong's success in the business field has also made him one of the most concerned entrepreneurs.

He resigned from Peking University at the age of 29 and founded Beijing New Oriental School two years later, and for more than 20 years, Yu Minhong built New Oriental into a leader in China's education and training industry, and extended its tentacles to K12 education, preschool education, book publishing and other fields, establishing a huge education and training empire.

However, it won the competition and lost to the times. Under the new policy of education and training, New Oriental K9 discipline training was completely shut down. In January 2021, Yu Minhong mentioned in his article that in the past six months, New Oriental's market value has fallen by 90%, its operating income has decreased by 80%, and its cash expenditures such as tuition refunds, employee dismissal N+1, and lease surrender of teaching sites have reached nearly 20 billion.

In the face of the crisis, transformation is imminent. Live streaming is one of the transformation paths identified by Yu Minhong, and he said on his personal account "Lao Yu Gossip" that live streaming is the third business revolution.

In this regard, on the one hand, New Oriental retains its education business, including universities, study abroad, quality education and other businesses; On the other hand, New Oriental Online transformed its live broadcast business across the board and established Oriental Selection Live Broadcast. Later, Dongfang Selection also relied on Dong Yuhui to get out of the circle and became the top stream of Douyin.

Entering the live broadcast e-commerce has helped New Oriental make a beautiful turnaround. Despite this, Mr. Yu seems to be less and less involved in the business world, and has spoken on several occasions about retirement.

In April 2022, Yu Minhong said in the article "The Expectation of Spring", "I have been doing my best to be New Oriental for 30 years. Perhaps, now is the time for me to stand a little further away and take a fresh look at New Oriental and myself. ”

This article was interpreted as Yu Minhong's "germination of resignation" and was widely disseminated and sparked heated discussions.

In a live broadcast in September of the same year, Yu Minhong once again expressed his retirement plan. He believes that he will definitely retire from New Oriental within 10 years, but emphasizes that retirement does not mean not going to work at all, but no longer getting involved in the specific affairs of New Oriental.

In March 2023, at the Yabuli China Entrepreneurs Forum held in Heilongjiang, Yu Minhong talked about retirement again.

"After I did the Oriental selection last year, many people asked me why I didn't retire? Why do you need the courage to recommit to it? Yu Minhong said that this is a question that does not need to be thought about.

He emphasized that because we are born to win, this win is not only because we want to win for our own enterprise, we want to win for the whole nation and the whole country, our investment in a sense, ostensibly for the survival of the enterprise, but in fact, behind the fact is actually united for the prosperity of the whole country.

At that time, Yu Minhong also suggested that the quality of life of entrepreneurs should also be improved in the future, so that they can live longer, which can inspire young people to be more and provide more resources for young people.

Dongfang Selection was accused of "making a mess"

Regardless of whether Yu Minhong really intends to retire, the current situation of Dongfang Selection may not be the right time for him to stay away.

On June 4, the topic of "Yu Minhong said that Dongfang Selection was a mess" rushed to the hot search on social media, attracting discussion from the outside world.

The reason for the incident is that in the recent live broadcast, Zhang Wenzhong hopes to learn from Yu Minhong's experience in live broadcasting. Yu Minhong said that Dongfang Selection is doing a mess now, and he does not have any ability to make suggestions. At the same time, Yu Minhong does not recommend Zhang Wenzhong to become an anchor, but he can invite friends to chat in the live broadcast room and introduce products.

From the perspective of the secondary market, Oriental Selection Hong Kong stocks fell sharply against the trend for two consecutive days, with the latest stock price of HK$15.82 per share and a total market value of HK$16.3 billion. In the long run, Oriental Selection has fallen by about 43% year-to-date, and its market value has evaporated by HK $12.3 billion.

In addition to the stock price setback, according to Blue Whale News, the third-party data platform shows that since the official launch of the company on January 9, 2024, the number of fans and sales of the main account of Dongfang Selection have declined to varying degrees, with a total of 1.12 million fans.

On the Douyin platform, as of June 3, Dongfang Selection's account had 30.381 million followers, and the followers of the account with Hui were 19.198 million.

In terms of sales, according to Feigua data, on June 2, the number of viewers of Dongfang Selection was 5.441 million, and the live broadcast sales were 7.5 million yuan to 10 million yuan. In comparison, the number of viewers with Hui was 5.697 million, and the live broadcast sales were between 25 million yuan and 50 million yuan.

What's more, Dongfang Selection was exposed to a sudden change in the style of live broadcasting, giving up the characteristics of bilingual live broadcast and knowledge live broadcast that were previously sought after by netizens.

Looking back on June 2022, Dong Yuhui, who calls himself the "deserter warriors and horses in the world", relied on the particularity of "bilingual delivery", as well as his deep knowledge reserve and talk show-like program effect, so that Dongfang Selection made a breakthrough in the live broadcast track, and the stock price soared by as much as 5 times in just half a month.

However, recently, Dongfang's selection of 618 live broadcast style has caused widespread controversy. The related video shows that in the live broadcast room of Dongfang Selection Beautiful Life, the anchor shouted at his own products, "You are here, buy an order and then go" "321, on the link!" "There is no intellectual style of the past.

Some netizens think that they are too anxious and ugly, this is the "true face" of the live broadcast room. And most people want to return to the original style, and begin to miss the days when Dong Yuhui was still there.

And this style is also far from the form of selling goods in Yu Minhong's heart. At the 2023 Yabuli China Entrepreneur Forum Annual Meeting, Yu Minhong revealed when talking about topics related to the style of the live broadcast room that he looked down on the howling noise of "buy, buy, buy" in the online live broadcast, and the live broadcast in his heart should be to calmly explain the product and spread knowledge.

Since then, since most of the anchors under Oriental Selection have transformed from the original teacher team of New Oriental, the follow-up has also continued this way of bringing goods that focuses on knowledge and cultural atmosphere.

In this regard, some people ridiculed that the live broadcast room of Dongfang Selection has become a hateful appearance for Yu Minhong.

It is not easy for Dongfang to select and copy "Dong Yuhui".

In the eyes of the outside world, Dong Yuhui has contributed a lot to the transformation from education and training to live broadcasting, and Dongfang Selection's exit from the circle. New Oriental has successfully transformed, and Dong Yuhui has also become a new iconic figure in the anchor industry, and the two sides have achieved a good story of mutual achievement.

However, the sudden "small composition" storm broke this situation. On December 16 last year, Dongfang Selection issued a notice of personnel appointment and dismissal, and Yu Minhong concurrently served as the CEO of Dongfang Selection, removing Sun Dongxu from his position as CEO.

Immediately afterwards, Dongfang Selection gradually realized "de-Hui" by creating a personal account for Dong Yuhui to "walk with Hui".

And Dong Yuhang, who reopened his account, once again proved the value of his top IP in the live broadcast e-commerce industry. At present, although the number of fans selected by Dongfang is more than that of "Walking with Hui", its purchasing power is not as good as the latter.

According to media statistics, the sales of the "Walking with Hui" live broadcast room in the first three months of this year 2024 will be 889 million yuan, 450 million yuan, and 626 million yuan respectively; On the other hand, the sales of Dongfang Selection Live Room in the same period were 557 million yuan, 228 million yuan, and 286 million yuan respectively.

In April this year, "Walking with Hui" topped the monthly list of Douyin with 580 million yuan, and Dongfang Selection ranked ninth with 190 million yuan.

Yu Minhong once revealed in the live broadcast that the income generated by the "Walk with Hui" account will be included in Dongfang Selection, but if Dong Yuhui leaves Dongfang Selection, the ownership of the account will belong to Dong Yuhui.

In other words, Dongfang Selection has completed the "de-Dong Yuhui" while avoiding the impact on the company's overall performance.

However, this does not mean that Oriental Selection will not be affected in the slightest. The head anchor's ability to bring goods is outstanding, just when the outside world is expecting Yu Minhong to copy more "Dong Yuhui", half a year has passed, and Dongfang Selection seems to have failed to give birth to the "next Dong Yuhui".

According to media reports, some netizens even speculated that after Dong Yuhui left Dongfang Selection, the style of knowledge-based live broadcast with goods could not be replicated, so Dongfang Selection's live broadcast began to "let go of itself and return to the ontology".

Some industry insiders believe that it is not easy for Dongfang Selection to replicate the success of "Dong Yuhui", because it needs to combine personal talent, traffic accumulation, brand influence, market changes, team strategy and personal experience and other factors.

And Dongfang Selection has changed from the previous knowledge-based sales to a more direct and radical sales model, has this style been effective? Radar Finance will continue to pay attention.

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