There are already many strong competitors ahead - HEYTEA, which has infiltrated the lifestyle of young people, has conquered the Honey Snow Ice City of young people in the small town, and there are also teas from Tea Baidao, Guming, and Nayuki... Where is the market space for the new entrant Bawang Tea Lady?
Tesla and "Weixiaoli" come first, and it seems that new energy vehicles have already "rolled up" to the sky. Will consumers still buy Lei Jun's Xiaomi car?
A "small" company that has only been established for over a decade, operating MOLLY LABUBU， Why should these trendy toy IPs with strange names that make many consumers feel a bit unfamiliar be the "Disney" of the new generation of young people? Why can the market value of Bubble Mart, which has been listed for only three years, exceed HKD 100 billion?
New entrants deserve serious attention.
The current market competition is even more fierce than in previous years. Whether it is large companies or small and medium-sized enterprises, many industries are facing pressure from excessive competition. Not only is it promoting the extremely low price e-commerce, the "9 yuan 9" coffee subsidy war launched by Kudi and Ruixing has not only swept the instant tea market, but also physical businesses such as Wal Mart and Yonghui have rolled up their sleeves to join the battle group.
According to incomplete statistics, there are over 1000 merchants of all sizes in China's instant tea beverage market, competing for various consumer users in first - and second tier cities, as well as in remote county towns.
The war of extreme low prices, from e-commerce and catering to home appliances and automobiles, even the new energy photovoltaic and AI big model industries are not immune.
The production capacity of Chinese new energy photovoltaic companies has exceeded the global total demand, which is not only a reflection of the cruelty of the market itself, but also a result of irrational support in some places.
Data shows that in the first half of this year, only ten leading photovoltaic companies suffered losses exceeding 20 billion yuan. Just two years ago, driven by the frenzy of capital, the photovoltaic industry saw the emergence of over 10 billion dollar listed companies.
In such a competitive market situation, it is not easy for large companies to capture good business opportunities.
In the seemingly solidified market, Bawang Tea Lady and Xiaomi have found new market survival space.
Bawang Tea Lady chased Starbucks on the store opening, 'Wherever Starbucks is opened, we will open it'; Under the super single product strategy, Boya Juexian sold 230 million cups in a year, allowing Bawang Tea Lady to stand out in the fierce competition of instant tea drinks.
Xiaomi seems to be facing the most difficult market. Consumer electronics giant Apple had previously hastily abandoned plans to develop electric vehicles. In the Chinese new energy vehicle market, from leading brands such as BYD, NIO, Xiaopeng, and Ideal, to a large number of start-up brands entering, traditional car manufacturers such as Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz, and BMW have also increased their layout, with numerous market participants and increasingly fierce competition.
Xiaomi Auto, which only launched one main model, achieved a gross profit margin of about 15.4% in the first quarter of full delivery, finding a foothold in this cruel industry.
As Joseph Schumpeter once said, innovation is often an opportunity found in the flaws and deficiencies of existing mechanisms in the market.
The boundary between the real business world and the virtual market is becoming increasingly blurred. Consumers in daily life are occupied by mobile Internet, and their remaining time is cut, operated and sold. In 2024, the revenue of the global advertising market will reach a new high, breaking through trillion dollars, with more increment coming from mobile Internet and online.
In addition to harvesting the traffic value of hundreds of millions of people through Tiktok, ByteDance is also one of the most powerful big companies in embracing the sudden big model. The AI big model application Doubao APP developed by it has a MAU of 59.98 million, ranking second only to OpenAI's ChatGPT in the global monthly active AI product ranking.
OpenAI has always been at the center of the storm of big models, and through hardcore applications such as Sora and GPT-4o in Wensheng Video, it holds the discourse power leading to the future world.
With an annual revenue of $3 billion (ARR) and over 500 million monthly active users, OpenAI's valuation has reached $157 billion, making it the most valuable startup in the history of the AI field.
The big model is boiling, and the Internet is full of automatically generated text, pictures, and videos. At some point in the future, it will surpass the scale of data produced by humans.
All of this makes data storage and computation incredibly important, making Nvidia the world's largest company by market value. Investor Li Lu calculated that the market value of 3.36 trillion US dollars even exceeds the total market value of all listed companies in Germany, and exceeds the market value of all stocks in more than 100 countries around the world. In fact, based on current stock prices, only five countries in the world have a total market value of stocks higher than Nvidia's market value. This undoubtedly puts Nvidia under antitrust scrutiny from multiple regions around the world.
Virtual life is affecting a generation of young people. Insight into the needs of young people is the essence of future business.
Game science companies have fulfilled a virtual dream for young people with "Black Myth: Wukong". Pop Mart's top stream IP blind box is selling well, and LABUBU is held in the arms of Princess Ubon Ratchasima of Thailand and hung on Princess Sirivanna's Herm è s bag. Essentially, it is also a projection of young people's virtual life in the real business world.
Virtual technology, AI big models, humanoid robots... Every technological change and switch in business scenarios gives birth to huge business opportunities.
With numerous players and fierce commercial competition, even the previous winners must consider how to overcome the threat of creative destruction from newcomers.
And all of this depends on the entrepreneurial spirit in a market economy environment, as well as the individual innovation and efforts of entrepreneurs in a stable and humid business environment.
This is the sixth consecutive time that Interface News has selected the annual scenery company, presenting readers with important memories of the past year in the field of business and finance.
Interface News Selection of 2024 Wind and Landscape Companies: New Entrants, "9.9" Market, and Virtual Life
#OpenAI: Standing at the center of the AI storm
In the past year, OpenAI has always been at the center of the storm of AI big models, holding the discourse power leading to the future world.
In February, OpenAI released the Wensheng Video Big Model Sora, a product that is amazing in terms of detail accuracy, diversity, and understanding of physical laws. At the beginning of the new year, it brought a huge shock to the field of big models, and the aftermath lasted for nearly a year. Not long after, the company launched GPT-4o, which significantly improved the multimodal understanding and generation capabilities, officially ushering ChatGPT into the "Her" era in voice interaction capabilities.
While leading the industry, OpenAI itself has also encountered numerous setbacks. In the second half of the year, GPT-5 skipped indefinitely, and the Scaling Law was accused of slowing down efficiency, leading to increasing public skepticism. It was not until September that the new model o1 was released again that it turned the tide.
It changes the technological strategy by incorporating reinforcement learning and thought chains to significantly enhance the model's reasoning ability, and shifts the training focus from pre training to post training - this is considered a key technological paradigm shift for big language models to lead humans towards AGI.
At the end of the year, OpenAI launched an unprecedented 12 day long press conference, creating an "AI Spring Festival Gala" that belongs to the technology circle: the complete version of o1, the official version of Sora, the official landing of ChatGPT on Apple Intelligence, and the final appearance of the new generation inference model o3 and the simplified version o3-mini, all of which announced that the core trends of technology and products in this field are still in its own hands.
During this period, OpenAI once again completed a new round of funding of $6.6 billion, with a valuation of $157 billion, becoming the most highly valued startup in the history of the AI field. Behind this, $3 billion in annual revenue (ARR) and over 500 million monthly active users are strong arguments for its market leading position.
Our mission is to make general artificial intelligence benefit all mankind. "No matter how noisy the doubts from the outside world may be, this company still emphasizes its vision and hopes to continue to uphold its legendary narrative in the coming year.
#Huawei: Providing the World with a Second Choice
In 2024, Huawei will no longer shout the slogan of "far ahead", but it will still be the "top stream" of Chinese technology companies.
Since the Mate 60 solved the hardware constraints, Huawei has followed suit in the high-end market and become the fastest-growing mobile phone manufacturer this year, forcing Apple to respond to the impact by lowering prices. At the same time, the successful mass production of the triple fold has made Huawei one of the few companies to innovate in the form of mobile phones. Although the commercial success of this product is still uncertain, the price of 100000 yuan in the second-hand market once again proves Huawei's appeal in the high-end market.
On the other hand, the rise of the original Hongmeng ecology is setting off a wave of replacement in China's software field, which also makes the former Internet companies stand in the same camp rarely.
In less than a year, Huawei has established a new ecosystem of smartphone operating systems that has taken shape and is completely independent of Android. So far, the number of native HarmonyOS applications has exceeded 15000. Huawei is accelerating its journey to provide the world with a 'second choice', which would have been unimaginable for Chinese companies a year ago.
The automotive industry has also been changed by Huawei. The Hongmeng Zhixing series has won the first place in the average price of Chinese car brands for seven consecutive months, and the Wanjie M9 has surpassed Mercedes Benz and Audi to become the sales champion of models priced over 500000 yuan. Huawei's intelligent automotive business has achieved profitability in the first half of the year, with both volume and revenue. In the automotive industry, doubts about Huawei's "soul sucking" argument are becoming weaker, and beyond the "four boundaries", there are still car manufacturers lining up to cooperate with Huawei.
Huawei's profit-making ability is also recovering synchronously. In the first three quarters of 2024, Huawei achieved a revenue of 585.9 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 29.5%. Excluding the significant increase in net profit caused by the divestment of businesses such as Honor last year, the net profit for the same period this year is also at a historical high.
In 2023, Huawei's annual revenue has exceeded 700 billion yuan, making it one of the highest revenue private enterprises in China, but it has not yet surpassed the historical high of 891.4 billion yuan in 2020. This company still faces extremely complex geopolitical challenges and has to find the most suitable way of survival under the normal sanctions, which to some extent sets a growth example for Chinese technology companies: facing difficulties head-on, innovation is king.
#ByteDance: the latecomers of the big model rank first
In the face of the big model in 2024, ByteDance is not the fastest moving company, but the most significant results.
On the global AI product monthly activity ranking in November, its Doubao APP MAU reached 59.98 million, ranking second only to OpenAI's ChatGPT. On the domestic ranking list, the top three are Dou Bao, Wen Xiaoyan, and Kimi. The last two months have similar monthly activity, both around 13 million, with a significant difference compared to tofu buns.
When the big model boom last year, ByteDance once wavered between self research and foreign investment, and its action was slightly slow. In the same period, Alibaba, Baidu and other Internet giants have invested a lot of resources and achieved some results.
In the end, the world's most valuable unicorn company decided to conduct its own research and adopt a comprehensive layout from the model layer to the application layer, with a multi legged walking model. It has successively released multiple large-scale models of Wensheng images and Wensheng videos to the public, and has also established a new AI department, Flow, responsible for the research and development of application layer products.
ByteDance officially released the big model of Doubao in May this year, and its layout of the big model has also become clear: basic model research and development, enterprise side and consumer side businesses should be focused.
Among them, the Bean Pack Universal Model Pro has been fully aligned with GPT-4o. In terms of enterprise level business, through its cloud computing platform Volcano Engine, it has taken on the landing of the Dou Bao big model. When comparing the number of parameters and text length across the industry, it was the first to lower the pricing of tokens by an order of magnitude, entering the era of fractional pricing and triggering a wave of price reductions for big models.
For ordinary users, ByteDance has developed AI dialogue assistant "Doubao", AI application development platform "Button", and AI creation tools such as "Star Painting" and "Dream", and has connected the large model to more than 50 businesses such as Tiktok, tomato novels, flying books, and huge engines.
In the view of many professionals, among all byte products, the most promising one to undertake the landing of the ByteDance AI model is clipping. This is also the business that Zhang Nan, the former CEO of Tiktok Group, has spent the most energy at present. Byte is also planning to improve the priority of dream products, trying to create the "Tiktok" in the AI era with a new path.
#Game Science: Chinese companies open 3A doors
Many people remember the name of game science because of a domestic 3A game - "Black Myth: Wukong".
This game company, founded by Feng Ji, Yang Qi, and others, quickly gained a huge amount of attention from the release of its first "Black Myth: Wukong" PV short film. From project initiation to launch, "Black Myth: Wukong" took seven years to rewrite the history of Chinese gaming with a team of over 100 people and a cost of 300 million yuan. Until August 20, 2024, the 'Great Sage' descended.
As soon as the game went on sale, the globally renowned game publishing platform Steam experienced a server crash and set a record for the first regional pre order sales in Steam history. The first month sales reached 20.9 million sets, with a total revenue of over 1 billion US dollars, quickly achieving cost recovery.
Not only that, "Black Myth: Wukong" has reached a peak of 3 million simultaneous online users on all platforms, and the peak online number of single player games on Steam is 2.41 million, ranking first in peak history. A series of peripheral products have also become popular, with search volume for related products such as PS5 game console and Nvidia Black Wukong co branded graphics card skyrocketing by 1379%. For a time, the "whirlwind" of black mythology swept through the cultural tourism, consumer, and secondary markets, with its influence far exceeding that of a game, becoming the most iconic event of 2024.
Not long ago, this game also won two awards, TGA's Best Action Game of the Year and Player Voice.
Game science has opened the door to 3A masterpieces for domestic games, and has also shown Chinese developers and players the enormous potential and value of Chinese culture in the gaming industry, providing experience and confidence for other game developers to go global.
Feng Ji himself participated in the filming of the short film "Love Spray Planning: Wild Grass Producer (Yuka)" in his early years, which was accompanied by the following voiceover: "This is a rapidly changing China. It is like a high-speed train carrying dreamers all the way, but there is no time to pay attention to those who accidentally slip off it, and these people are often trampled and crushed by newcomers, and then turned into dust
The dream of game science continues, and after enjoying the highlights, the road ahead is not always smooth. But at least, it has taken the most important step.
#Xiaohongshu: Against the trend, it has grown into an "encyclopedia"
When other Internet platforms worry about traffic growth, Xiaohongshu is an exception.
After a period of 100 million months of wandering, Xiaohongshu has continued to grow into a community platform with a scale of 300 million since 2020. From beauty to home decor, from food to travel, countless hot topics have emerged and become popular on Xiaohongshu. This young platform is adept at identifying trends and hot topics, and is often referred to as an "encyclopedia" in the minds of many people.
At first, many people thought that Xiaohongshu could only stay at the stage of being "small and beautiful", but as its user base expanded, it began to intensively explore its own commercial value and embarked on a different path.
Entering 2024, Xiaohongshu will accelerate its commercialization and continuously launch various product tools. In addition to fast-moving consumer goods brands that match the genes of Xiaohongshu, the decoration, housekeeping, and even education industries have all started marketing on Xiaohongshu. A clear breakthrough signal is that the search volume of Xiaohongshu users has grown rapidly. According to a report by "Zhoutian Finance", the daily search volume of Xiaohongshu reached about 600 million times in the fourth quarter, nearly half of Baidu's, demonstrating great potential to attract advertisers. According to the Financial Times, Xiaohongshu achieved its first profit in 2023, with a net profit of $500 million and revenue of $3.7 billion. To achieve this, the brand's advertising efforts are indispensable.
At the same time, Xiaohongshu has positioned itself as a "lifestyle e-commerce" for the first time. When the e-commerce industry continues to push for low prices, Xiaohongshu e-commerce is clear that "low prices are not its core competitiveness". A group of anchors who have achieved good results in the field of live streaming sales have emerged, and Dong Jie, Li Dan, and more bloggers have begun to attract consumers as "buyers". During the 618 Shopping Festival, the number of orders and users purchasing from live streaming rooms on Xiaohongshu increased more than fivefold compared to the same period last year.
From a PDF format overseas shopping guide to a popular app that covers different contents today, Xiaohongshu has gone through 11 years. The support of capital speaks for itself: In July 2024, Xiaohongshu received investment from Russian venture capital firm DST Global, along with other investors such as Sequoia China, Hillhouse Capital, and CITIC Capital, with a valuation of $17 billion. According to Bloomberg, Xiaohongshu is expected to double its profits this year, reaching over $1 billion.
Little red books are also full of competitors. Up to now, many Internet companies, including ByteDance, NetEase and WeChat, have developed similar applications, but so far no "second little red book" has appeared. But how far Xiaohongshu can go in the future, how high its ceiling will be, everything is still unknown.
#Xiaomi Auto: Successfully Enters the 'Most Difficult Market'
Before the official launch of Xiaomi's first car model SU7 in March this year, capital markets, industry analysts, and most car company employees had little confidence in the performance of this model. Not only because it challenges the fiercely competitive 200000 yuan pure electric vehicle market with a sports car model, but also because the timing of its launch is no longer the most beautiful era for new cars.
But the success of Xiaomi SU7 exceeded everyone's expectations. More than 50000 orders placed within half an hour of listing preliminarily indicate the popularity of Xiaomi Auto, while the expected annual sales of over 130000 vehicles prove Xiaomi Auto's ability to break through barriers and its level of manufacturing and delivery.
Xiaomi Motors achieved a gross profit margin of approximately 15.4% in the first quarter of full delivery, surpassing Tesla, which is known for cost control. Wall Street investment firms have repeatedly raised the target price of Xiaomi Group and estimated that the valuation of Xiaomi's electric vehicle business will reach 120 billion yuan, surpassing Xiaopeng and NIO.
The market is already saturated, it's just a comfort word written by losers to themselves. Xiaomi Motors has found a foothold in this cruel industry with only one model. It has a strong brand influence, strong financial support, and a user centered product development mindset. Its launch of the third round of car manufacturing is rebuilding the development model of the automotive industry.
Xiaomi Auto did not introduce exaggerated styling designs or feature settings that challenge user thinking, and the SU7 was evaluated as a moderate pure electric sedan. But it is precisely this pragmatic development model that benchmarks Tesla Model 3, avoiding risks and improving efficiency. One of the reasons why another consumer electronics giant, Apple, gave up developing electric vehicles this year is the difficulty in implementing cutting-edge technology concepts.
Xiaomi's marketing strategy is being imitated, as it accurately addresses the pain points of users' needs in an effortless way. Xiaopeng Motors CEO He Xiaopeng is learning from Lei Jun's emotional marketing, and his presence can be seen in multiple product launches he hosted in the second half of the year.
In the middle of next year, Xiaomi Auto will release its second model YU7, and expectations for it are completely different from when SU7 was released this year. Goldman Sachs is optimistic that Xiaomi YU7 has the potential to become one of the best-selling high-end new energy SUVs in China.