Cryptocurrency can’t save it? Capital doesn’t believe in Meitu’s tears

There is not much time left for Meitu.

Xiamen has two internet companies that were once very popular, one is Qudian and the other is Meitu. The two companies were listed on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2017 and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2016 respectively. Both of them had stories related to market capitalization of hundreds of billions. Now, after a significant reduction in market capitalization, they are struggling in the quagmire and are not having an easy life.

Qudian, whose latest market value is less than US$400 million and has obviously fallen even worse, is not the focus of our report. Meitu, which started out as the image processing software Meitu XiuXiu, although it is in a different track and its business is not comparable, and its market value is still more than HK$6 billion, but its old problems are compounded by new problems, and its current survival difficulty is no less.

How do tool apps make money? In addition to traffic business, what else can be derived? This is obviously not a problem faced by Meitu alone. Over the years, 360, Sogou, Xunlei, Baofeng, NetEase Youdao, etc. have done a lot of exploration in this direction, but these explorations are not very successful, let alone sexy. Meitu's attempts have not jumped out of this framework, such as hardware, community, and value-added services.

Selling advertisements based on traffic is feasible, and the threshold is not high after all. In the final analysis, what is being sold is the user's attention. If the user leaves after using the advertisement, the starting point will largely no longer exist. Therefore, how to keep the user engaged without disturbing him or her is itself a very difficult issue.

Meitu has been working hard in recent years to explore user attention and monetization possibilities for the C-end, but the objective results are not ideal.

The purpose of building a community through tools is to retain users, and then it is best to develop a business model that is comparable to Xiaohongshu. But it turns out that this is a self-satisfaction. No matter what kind of content you provide on the site, users basically have no interest in consuming it. Their rigid needs are to efficiently solve the problems at hand and to get in and out quickly. As for interactive social interaction, it is out of the question.

Meitu tried social products earlier than Duoshan, MaChong and Chatbao, but also failed. The product is called Meimo, which means Meitu + Momo. Its slogan is not too far-fetched if you don’t think too much about it: Meet the most beautiful stranger.

Making hardware started with making mobile phones. Meitu mobile phones were once highly anticipated, but after the mobile phones were made, they did not sell well and had a serious inventory. In the end, this business was cut off as a whole. The 30-year brand licensing cooperation with Xiaomi also ended a year later.

Meipai, a short video platform, was founded in May 2014. It originally had the opportunity to compete with Kuaishou and become one of the two giants of China's short video industry. However, its path dependence went in the wrong direction. Not only did it fail to become a powerful content ecological tool for killing time, but it was also overtaken by Douyin, a latecomer that appeared more than two years later. Subsequently, similar to Miaopai, it gradually fell silent after being taken off the shelves twice, although it still has dozens of employees maintaining its operation.

Online advertising, premium subscription services and in-app purchases, Internet value-added services, and others are the four major revenue sources of Meitu. Online advertising has always been its largest source of revenue, accounting for about 80% previously. Although premium subscription services and in-app purchases have grown rapidly recently, the changes are far from structural. The financial report shows that in 2020, Meitu's revenue was 1.194 billion yuan, of which online advertising revenue was 681 million yuan, still accounting for 57.0%.

The biggest risk besides force majeure is that, as a tool application, if Meitu cannot decisively expand into new businesses with sufficient space based on its existing advantages, then as alternative functions and alternative products increase and even become popular, its current revenue may be difficult to sustain.

It is not difficult to draw this conclusion from the decline in Meitu's monthly active users (MAU). When the prospectus was submitted in November 2016, Meitu had 456 million monthly active users, which gradually decreased year by year. By the end of December 2020, this figure had dropped to 261 million. The ban of several apps by the Indian government due to geopolitical factors cannot explain all the problems. Users are undoubtedly voting with their feet.

Mobile phones of various brands are now embedded with beauty features, while tool-type competitors such as B612, Faceu, and Wuta Camera are gaining momentum, not to mention that large-traffic platforms such as Tik Tok, Kuaishou, and Haokan Video have all developed and launched similar image processing functions, some of which have even been launched in the form of independent apps to a wider audience.

The sharp decline in market value and monthly active users reflects the difficulties of the business. So far, Meitu has not been able to come up with a countermeasure that is considered absolutely convincing by all parties to fundamentally reverse the decline, including its To B business. For this reason, its recent large investment of about US$100 million in cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Bitcoin and its announcement of so-called blockchain layout have attracted a lot of ridicule online. Cryptocurrency speculation, profiteering, and not doing business are already polite descriptions.

Meitu has reached a critical moment where it needs to prove itself once again.

What we want to know is why it has come to this and where it will go. On a rainy afternoon, Haike Financial reporter met with Wu Xinhong, founder and CEO of Meitu, as scheduled. In this conversation, Wu Xinhong talked about his helplessness, confusion, reflection, and the solution he himself was not sure about.

The following is the transcript of Haike Finance’s exclusive interview with Wu Xinhong (abridged).

Cai Wensheng and Cryptocurrency

Haike Finance: How do you and Cai Wensheng divide the work now?

Wu Xinhong: In 2013, I was working on the Meitu mobile phone business. At that time, mobile phones required a lot of funds, and the entire company needed financing. Since he was an investor at first, I asked him to be the chairman of the company to help with financing. The division of labor has always been that he is responsible for capital and I am responsible for all specific business. As for capital, it started with financing, and then IPO. After the IPO, there was not much to do, I mean on his side.

Haike Finance: Who is in charge of Meitu now?

Wu Xinhong: I am basically in charge now.

Haike Finance: Has Cai Wensheng moved behind the scenes?

Wu Xinhong: It’s hard to describe. Let’s put it this way, now I am in charge of everything, both on stage and behind the scenes.

Haike Finance: But Cai Wensheng obviously holds more shares than you and has more say.

Wu Xinhong: Yes. His is about 26%, and mine is a little over 13%. His is about twice as much as mine.

Haike Finance: Then how do you take the initiative?

Wu Xinhong: I can’t say anything about these operational matters.

Haike Finance: Do you two have many discussions at the company level?

Wu Xinhong: To be honest, not much. The company is currently managed by me and my core team.

Haike Finance: You and Cai Wensheng are very similar to Chen Rui and Xu Yi. Later, Bilibili simply became Chen Rui’s company.

Wu Xinhong: Chen Rui and Xu Yi are both my friends. I am more familiar with Xu Yi. I am not in a position to comment on the affairs of Bilibili, but I am gradually moving from behind the scenes to the front.

Haike Finance: When did it start?

Wu Xinhong: Probably from 2019 until now, gradually, I have participated in more and more external activities, including government-related activities, including interactions with the capital market, such as some small roadshows or regular communications, etc., which are all what I do.

Haike Finance: What happened that made you gradually replace Cai Wensheng?

Wu Xinhong: This is related to his personal interests and arrangements. You know, he has invested in many projects, big and small.

Haike Finance: Including some blockchain projects.

Wu Xinhong: Yes, he has invested in quite a few blockchain projects.

Haike Finance: This has affected his public opinion, right?

Wu Xinhong: To be honest, I am not very clear. But Meitu is just one of the companies he invested in. How should I put it? Investing is different from starting a business. Investing will always focus on some new hot spots.

Haike Finance: What does Meitu think about investing in cryptocurrency?

Wu Xinhong: This is the decision of the board of directors.

Haike Finance: It’s Cai Wensheng’s interest, right?

Wu Xinhong: I can only say that this is a decision made by the board of directors.

Haike Finance: Have you seen the ridicule of you online?

Wu Xinhong: I read every one of them, and it's quite depressing. First of all, I never make public statements on digital currency. I have my own interests, and my interest is Meitu's main business. In addition, this is a decision made by the board of directors, and I can't say how this decision was made. I think it's great for a company to do one thing well. Meitu is a company with beauty as its core. Whether it's our past imaging products, Meitu Xiuxiu, and Beauty Camera, they are all beautiful, virtual beauty, or our current cosmetics and medical beauty, beauty in real life, it's good to be able to do these well. I really don't have any ideas about other things.

Haike Finance: Do you have too much money that needs to be invested overseas and feel that investing in cryptocurrencies will yield higher returns?

Wu Xinhong: The money is not much. We have more than 2 billion in cash on our account, of course, and we have no debt. About 2.7 billion or 2.8 billion RMB. Once there is a breakthrough in the business, we will invest this money, so the money is not much. You know, nowadays, we have to raise a lot of money at any time.

Anyway, I personally think that the best investment is to invest in the company's main business, that is, to make the company a success. I have never made other investments, such as being an angel investor, setting up an investment company, buying stock funds, etc. If Meitu is a success, it will definitely bring rich returns. This is my value.

Getting closer and farther away from Xiaomi

Haike Finance: I see you have laid off a lot of people in the past two years.

Wu Xinhong: The company had the most people in 2018, with more than 3,000 people. Later, we experienced several major layoffs and gradually reduced the number to the current 1,300 people. The drastic layoffs occurred at the end of 2018 and the first half of 2019. Although there were more layoffs later, they were not as large. At that time, for example, the entire team was laid off.

Haike Finance: You gave up the mobile phone business because you couldn’t make it work anymore, right?

Wu Xinhong: Because it has reached the stage of competition based on economies of scale, every link in the supply chain, such as the procurement of parts, to software research and development and marketing investment, all require scale to spread out. As a small company, we cannot support the entire mobile phone chain.

Haike Finance: But when you first decided to do it, the competition was very fierce.

Wu Xinhong: We decided to make mobile phones in 2012. At that time, the competition was not so fierce. After we launched the phone in 2013, the mobile phone business was profitable in the following years, 2015, 2016, and 2017. It was not until 2018 that we entered into a fierce competition with scale effect. So it depends on the timing.

Why did Hammer and a bunch of other small and medium-sized mobile phone brands fail to survive? The hardware is indeed the same, but for the same thing, such as a camera module, a small company can only invest a dozen people, while a large company can invest more than 1,000 people. The difference is completely different. Such a gap in scale will lead to the large companies being very extreme and stable.

For example, ROM, I know that MIUI had 3,000 to 4,000 people at the time, while we only had a little over 100 people working on ROM, a gap of 30 to 40 times. As you can imagine, the ROM made by a small team must not be comparable in terms of stability, ease of use, etc.

For example, the most serious problems with Android phones are overheating and lag. At that time, only large teams were able to truly solve these problems because they involved a lot of investment. The costs of large companies will be much lower because of their higher sales volume. How can the cost of components be the same for selling 100 million units a year and selling more than 1 million units a year?

Haike Finance: How big is the gap?

Wu Xinhong: Ours may be more than 50% higher. This involves many aspects, because a mobile phone may have more than 1,000 components.

Haike Finance: And you didn’t study this.

Wu Xinhong: I studied art.

Haike Finance: How did you come up with the idea of ​​making mobile phones?

Wu Xinhong: The original intention was very simple. At that time, I saw that Casio had launched a selfie device, which was very popular. It was called the TR series at that time. I thought, it is just a camera, but it is not convenient to share the photos after taking them. Because in 2012, smartphones were not very popular. To transfer photos from a camera to a smartphone, you may have to copy them to a computer first, and then copy them from the computer to the phone. I thought I could just make a mobile phone that can take photos and share them directly. Ignorance is fearless. I was in that state at that time. I didn't think too much and just thought it could make money.

Haike Finance: But by that time, the iPhone and other products had already come out.

Wu Xinhong: Our positioning at that time was to complement the iPhone.

Haike Finance: How to complement each other?

Wu Xinhong: iPhone is a global product, and all iPhones sold in different countries have the same standard. In the United States, people are not so keen on selfies with the front-facing camera, but they are okay with its pixels and various effects. However, the iPhone cannot meet the needs of many beauty-loving girls for selfie cameras. The rear camera of the iPhone is very strong, but the front camera is average, but it has been getting better and better.

We decided to give up because we were the first to launch the beauty phone market, but later many mobile phone brands, including Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo, also followed suit, constantly squeezing our space.

Haike Finance: When you were doing it, was the user demand very strong?

Wu Xinhong: We have done a survey on this. Women account for a high proportion of Meitu users, and more than 80% of active users are women. Take the Casio selfie camera for example. Girls are flocking to a camera that can only take photos. They are more willing to pay for better photos and instant sharing. Our performance from 2015 to 2017 also proves this. At our peak, we sold more than 1.6 million mobile phones a year, with sales of more than 4 billion.

Haike Finance: What are the price ranges?

Wu Xinhong: From more than 2,000 to more than 4,000. It’s actually quite expensive.

Haike Finance: Are the target users relatively low-end?

Wu Xinhong: In fact, there are not many people in lower-tier cities, but more in first- and second-tier cities, because people in first- and second-tier cities may care more about the effects of photos, videos, and live broadcasts, and are more willing to invest.

Haike Finance: Since it sold so well, why did you cancel it later?

Wu Xinhong: It was a huge loss. There were actually many problems. First of all, our mobile phone business had three series: M, T, and V. Each series had several corresponding products. The product line was too long. At that time, our mobile phone team had only more than 300 people in total, and we had to do what a company with thousands or tens of thousands of people would do. Each sub-project had insufficient investment, low quality, and serious resource dispersion. Anyway, there were many internal reasons, and there were problems with the strategy.

The mobile phone industry requires precision, otherwise it is easy to make mistakes one step at a time. If you make a few wrong moves, you may be in danger. Because it has huge inventory pressure, it is not a pre-sale system, but it is produced and then sold, so once the strategy is wrong, it will lead to unsale, forming inventory, and then a vicious cycle.

Haike Finance: It will take up a lot of funds.

Wu Xinhong: Not only the funds, but also the channels, many offline stores, national agents, and provincial agents. For example, if your popularity declines, your product strength declines, or external competition intensifies, there are more substitute products, etc., it will lead to inventory and pressure on channel partners, which will easily lead to collapse.

Haike Finance: Why not sell it to Xiaomi but license the brand?

Wu Xinhong: Actually, we first decided to cut the entire business internally, and then we talked to Xiaomi about cooperation. The order of priority was like this. This business had to be cut no matter what, so I cut it first. Before we contacted Xiaomi, we had already decided to cut it internally.

Haike Finance: Have you discussed with Xiaomi the possibility of selling to it?

Wu Xinhong: We didn’t discuss these things at the time, and Xiaomi itself didn’t mention it either. Maybe they thought they should first try out simple cooperation to see if it could be done.

Haike Finance: But the cooperation ended in failure. Didn’t you have to pay any cost for wasting this time?

Wu Xinhong: We are just a maintenance team, responsible for image debugging and so on.

Haike Finance: Your authorization does not specify how to compensate for idle losses?

Wu Xinhong: We have no way to raise this request with Mr. Lei because there is a big gap in the size of our two companies, and we have a very good relationship with Mr. Lei.

Haike Finance: Does this so-called authorization cooperation itself count as Lei Jun giving you face?

Wu Xinhong: When he signed the brand licensing agreement, it showed that he was very supportive of us.

Haike Finance: This means that during this period, Xiaomi has not produced any new Meitu mobile phones, and you have not received any returns from it.

Wu Xinhong: Yes.

Haike Finance: Is the loss big?

Wu Xinhong: Not bad. Our imaging technology team only has a few dozen people.

Haike Finance: Are these dozens of people also serving Meitu’s other businesses?

Wu Xinhong: Very little. We did wait for Xiaomi for a while. After the authorization was withdrawn, we decided not to make mobile phones anymore, and we may not do it through cooperation in the short term.

Short videos fail due to “blind command”

Haike Finance: Why didn’t Meipai succeed?

Wu Xinhong: It was probably due to internal reasons. At the time, I was working on mobile phones, which took up a lot of my energy. In addition, my knowledge was actually very limited at the time. Because I started out as an image tool, I lacked the know-how for short videos, which are products that require high requirements for content operations and recommendation algorithms. I may have a lot of inertia in making tool products, and these inertias led me to develop some wrong strategies. For example, when we were making tools, we always pursued hot products and developed new functions and new effects. However, as a short video platform, the core of Meipai is content, not cool effects.

Content operations and recommendation algorithms are all about making short videos more valuable to consumers, but the effects I have been doing out of inertia are actually just a temporary novelty for users, and are not really focused on short video content consumption. I think it was my personal cognition at the time or my huge inertia of making tools that led to blind command.

Haike Finance: Have you ever thought about what you want to make it into?

Wu Xinhong: I always thought that Meipai, as the name implies, is about taking beautiful photos, and it is more of a tool. Meipai's success is also due to tools. In 2014, we launched the 10-second MV, which is the template that allows users to easily take a good video. This is the key to our success, but it also caused us to encounter bumps and bumps later, because we were too inertial and always wanted to use tools to attract new users and promote activation.

Haike Finance: Have you ever done a horizontal comparison of similar products, such as Miaopai?

Wu Xinhong: We both launched at about the same time, but our scale is larger than theirs. At that time, there were also Kuaishou and Tencent Weishi that were doing short videos. I have compared them horizontally, but to be honest, I didn’t analyze the competition thoroughly enough. I just aligned some functions on the surface. In fact, the reason behind it was the limitation of my cognition. The more limited your cognition is, the more superficial you will look at things. For example, when you look at Kuaishou, you may feel that it is low-class and rustic, just like many people, and you don’t see the real vitality of Kuaishou.

Haike Finance: Meipai and Miaopai seem relatively similar.

Wu Xinhong: They are similar, but I personally don’t watch Miaopai much, because I don’t think there is much worth learning from its products.

Haike Finance: The strategy of bundling Miaopai with Weibo to allow popular stars to bring traffic was once very successful.

Wu Xinhong: Maybe I was too ambitious at the time. After all, success came too quickly. I didn't settle down to study, for example, content ecology, how to operate, how to recommend, and how to understand the real needs of users in China's low-tier cities. Looking back now, it was indeed my own fault.

Haike Finance: There are regrets, right?

Wu Xinhong: Of course it’s a pity. There are many things, such as mobile phones. Would I do it again now? No. Would Meipai use the tools that it used to do? No. But it’s too late.

Haike Finance: If you could do it all over again, what would you do, Meipai?

Wu Xinhong: All in. Because we had the best chance to become one of the two short video giants. In fact, we were the two giants with Kuaishou. Our traffic momentum was greater than that of Miaopai and Weishi, and Douyin had not yet come out.

Haike Finance: What was the highest number of users?

Wu Xinhong: I remember that the highest MAU was over 100 million, but DAU was not that high. Our tool attributes are larger, so the gap between MAU and DAU is relatively large.

Haike Finance: What is the current situation of Meipai?

Wu Xinhong: We are still working on it. We have found a new positioning for Meipai and are now focusing on it and creating good content.

Haike Finance: Create a short video community?

Wu Xinhong: Yes, we build a community, but it is a community where women help each other.

Haike Finance: The audience is narrowed by half.

Wu Xinhong: It is quite narrow. Of course, the female half of the sky is not that narrow in absolute numbers. The main reason is that there are no opportunities in the big track, which is dominated by TikTok and Kuaishou. If we want to make a breakthrough in short videos, we must find opportunities in the vertical track, and women are our advantage. We also see some unmet needs in the vertical field.

We have been doing verification for a long time, and it is basically working now, but we need to make some adjustments in the product form and underlying design, so it will not be that fast.

Haike Finance: Is it very likely that a user will shoot a video with a mobile phone and then share it on Meipai?

Wu Xinhong: Not high. Meipai is obviously no longer a destination for video sharing. When we talk about video sharing, we think of Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, etc., not Meipai. So our entry point is not conventional video sharing, but women opening their hearts to chat and help each other. It is based on the aggregation of a topic, which can also be regarded as a group, but it is not a group chat.

Haike Finance: A group, right?

Wu Xinhong: It’s a bit like Douban, Jike or Zhihu. For example, Zhihu is based on a question, and we are also based on topics that girls are interested in.

Haike Finance: When did you turn to this direction?

Wu Xinhong: I started trying it in 2020.

Haike Finance: Many people thought that Meipai was gone long ago.

Wu Xinhong: Yes. At this stage, we also want to have a relatively high popularity, but the difficulty is indeed increasing. In the current situation where the Internet competition is so fierce and the products are so abundant, the threshold of user excitement is getting higher and higher. It is difficult for them to be impressed by a simple and common thing. That kind of screen-sweeping effect and high popularity will put higher demands on your abilities in all aspects.

Haike Finance: How many people are there in Meipai now?

Wu Xinhong: Dozens of people.

Haike Finance: With so few people, basically no one does it anymore.

Wu Xinhong: We are now taking a step back to advance. We want to return to a small scale and vertical positioning first, seek better data feedback from some of the experiments we conduct, and then gradually increase our investment.

Storytelling is no longer useful

Haike Finance: Some people say that Meitu is too old-fashioned and has been abandoned. Do you think it is old-fashioned?

Wu Xinhong: Objectively speaking, it is old, because it is a 13-year-old product, but we are not willing to admit that we are old, and we are constantly making breakthroughs for young people. Now there is a function called Meitu Recipe, which allows users to share recipes by themselves. For example, the steps and materials used in photo editing can be saved as a recipe and shared with everyone. Everyone can reproduce the method of photo editing and apply it with one click. Many young people are playing with this now.

That is to say, let young people create and design some gameplay, including the UI inside. Many things are constantly being made younger. It actually needs a process. We also constantly emphasize internally that we should not repeat the past and should not have inertia. No matter at which stage, only by seizing young people can you have a chance. Young people are the most active group of people on social platforms.

Haike Finance: What do you think is the difference between Meitu XiuXiu and other emerging apps?

Wu Xinhong: There will definitely be more and more competitors, but I think Meitu Xiuxiu's functions are still very powerful, and many users have already formed their usage habits here. I think our research on portraits in the past 13 years is very deep and has accumulated experience. This is our strength. As for weaknesses, there are indeed some, such as not being trendy enough or young enough. Also, from a technical perspective, our framework originated from a long time ago, and some functions are not very good in terms of performance. We are constantly refactoring, that is, iterating the framework, and there may be some shortcomings in the experience due to performance.

Haike Finance: What is the age structure of your employees now?

Wu Xinhong: The main operators are all born in the 1990s, and those who are now proposing some new ways of playing are basically born after 1995.

Haike Finance: Are there any situations where you feel that your ideas are too new and you dare not put them into practice?

Wu Xinhong: We are not so radical in core products like Meitu XiuXiu. We will not make such a big leap that old users will not recognize it at all or completely change their usage habits. We will continue to iterate and will not make sudden changes.

Haike Finance: What are Meitu’s chances of success in the next step?

Wu Xinhong: Meitu is a technology company with beauty as its core and artificial intelligence as its driving force. In the next 10 years, we hope to help users become more beautiful in all aspects through imaging products and appearance management services, and to help the digital upgrade of the beauty industry through SaaS services. Doing only these two things is actually beauty, which is divided into To C and To B.

Haike Finance: Will you directly engage in cosmetics or medical beauty?

Wu Xinhong: We have not yet provided products directly to users, such as making a skin care product or opening a medical beauty institution. We are still focusing on services, helping C-end users to become more beautiful and B-end customers to upgrade digitally. Of course, in terms of specific services, for example, B-end customers need to be directed to offline stores, etc., which is also part of our future commercialization.

Haike Finance: Meitu has also created a community, but it was similar to the communities created by tool apps like Moji Weather, and it was not successful. Where do you think the problem lies?

Wu Xinhong: We have readjusted our positioning. We wanted to build a community before, but it was very difficult, so we are now retracting it. After the retraction, it has achieved very good results. In fact, it is still a community framework, but it serves Meitu's tools. Users can find many recipes and templates here. In this way, everyone knows what value the Meitu Xiuxiu community can provide to them.

The problem in the past was that the community and the tools were separated, which was contrary to the user's mindset. Users came to Meitu Xiuxiu to edit photos and videos. They would not consume the content you gave them, but they would find the recipes and templates you gave them very useful. This made things go smoothly, and there was no more twists and turns.

Although we cannot compete with serious communities like Xiaohongshu and Zhihu, the formula we have developed is valuable to users and users recognize it. We will see if there is an opportunity to further extend it to user sharing and interaction through Meitu Xiuxiu. I know it is not that easy. In many fields, users can only remember the top ones. If I want to join in the fun, I will probably fail.

Haike Finance: Have you tried to cooperate with Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, etc.?

Wu Xinhong: I hope that we can complement each other with other companies in the future. We can do what we like and are good at, and there will be a good synergy effect. It’s just that Meitu is still in the process of transformation. Its value needs to be further verified and improved through our continuous efforts. Now is a rather awkward stage. In addition, there are indeed various negative factors outside. During this period, I have to solve some core problems inside first, and then seek some larger external cooperation when the time is right. How should I put it? It needs a certain time window. It’s not that I can do it immediately if I want to.

Haike Finance: How high do you think the threshold for Meitu is?

Wu Xinhong: To be honest, the threshold for what we do is not too high. I have always told the internal staff that we should not even think about building a moat. There is no such thing as sitting back and enjoying the fruits of one's labor. The difficulty coefficient will be greater every year. Only by thinking clearly in terms of strategy, being quick, accurate and ruthless in terms of tactics, and making the team stronger and stronger, can we cope with the increasingly fierce competition. I think in the past, even if we have been doing it for 13 years, are these accumulated things a threshold? Actually, not. The threshold is not high. A small team, maybe less than 10 people, can also make a hit product and instantly grab a lot of users.

Haike Finance: Large companies can completely do it themselves based on technology and demand.

Wu Xinhong: In theory, it is, because it has more traffic, but you also know that although big companies are strong, they can't do everything. There are many examples. We are a company that only does this, at least in the field of imaging, we are extremely focused, I think we are more or less competitive. We were too scattered before, and now we are gradually sorting out our business.

Haike Finance: It seems that you don’t talk much about the three major strategies of platformization, internationalization, and commercialization now.

Wu Xinhong: That was a term used in the past. It was too empty. What is platformization? It was too empty. We are much clearer and more focused now. This is also the growth path of me as a fool.

I started my own business right after I graduated from high school. During this process, I also obtained a college and a bachelor's degree through self-study, but my ability and knowledge were limited. I often look back at what I did and find it a little ridiculous, but of course it's also good, which means I've made progress. Now we should talk less and do more. Because the capital market no longer believes in Meitu unless we really do something and achieve good results.