Alibaba Pictures plans to increase its holdings of Taopiaopiao for the future, but is still “burning money” at the moment

Perhaps in response to the dark environment in theaters, Alibaba Pictures Group once again chose to make an announcement at night.

Zhonglian Shengshi, an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Alibaba Pictures, entered into an equity transfer agreement with six minority shareholders. Alibaba Pictures will acquire the equity interests in Taopiao Piao held by these shareholders, totaling approximately 9.12%, for a total price of approximately 1.333 billion yuan.

After the acquisition is completed, Alibaba Pictures will hold approximately 96.71% of Taopiao Piao, and the latter will be valued at 14.6 billion yuan.

Regarding the increase in holdings, the board of directors of Alibaba Pictures believes that "comprehensively increasing its holdings in Hangzhou Chenxi and striving to build Taopiaopiao into the core platform of the new infrastructure of the group's film industry can meet the needs of the group's medium- and long-term strategic deployment and business planning, and will be conducive to promoting the rapid development of the group's business and creating higher value for the company's shareholders."

The human version is: "Taopiaopiao is currently the core of Alibaba Pictures, and increasing its holdings can increase profits in the future." However, the author always feels that this statement can also be understood as reducing future losses and troubles.

Of course, although we have always talked about value and benefits, for now, there has never been any benefit in what Taopiaopiao has brought to Alibaba Pictures.

Burn money

Not surprisingly, these two words are still one of Taopiaopiao’s main contributions to Alibaba.

According to the performance announcement of Alibaba Pictures in February this year, the loss in 2016 was between RMB 950 million and RMB 1 billion, and the reason for the loss was Taopiao Piao, a marketing expenditure invested in order to "obtain more market share."

Of course, there are always rewards for investment, such as winning the first place in the market.

A recent report from data company Quest Mobile shows that among apps in the online movie ticketing industry, Taopiaopiao ranks first in terms of daily active users—unfortunately, Maoyan Movies still ranks first in monthly active users.

But this is a weird circle. Users who vote with their feet are very simple. Whoever has a subsidy and the higher subsidy will use it, while continued subsidy will continue to make losses. Alibaba Pictures certainly understands this situation and will not continue to do so, so Alibaba has launched a series of attempts such as cinema cards.

This path started out well, at least for users, if it hasn't changed recently. According to reports from some users, sometimes they encounter problems such as movie theater cards being not as cheap as ordinary users, or even the special price that movie theater card users cannot enjoy. For this reason, someone even opened a question on Zhihu "Taopiao Piao. Why do users with movie theater cards buy movie tickets more expensively than ordinary users during the same time period?" 》

I don’t know if this is an algorithm problem or a routine problem. Personally, I hope this is an algorithm problem. After all, Alibaba Pictures’ ambition is not to make such a small amount of money. This was mentioned again in the shareholding announcement.

In the announcement of the increase in holdings, Alibaba Pictures clearly stated: "In response to the general trend of the film industry and the rapid iterative evolution of consumer behavior, the Group will continue to focus on the layout and business upgrade of the entertainment industry ecology to create new infrastructure for the film industry." As the most important user-reaching platform of the new infrastructure, Taopiaopiao has established a solid business foundation in the fields of film promotion, distribution and ticketing, and has developed into one of the leading online ticketing platforms in China. ”

This paragraph is indeed a bit long-winded, but to put it simply: we believe that online ticket purchasing will be the norm in the future, and Taopiaopiao is Alibaba Pictures’ future layout. It has already achieved certain results in the fields of film promotion, distribution and ticketing.

Therefore, Taopiaopiao is the "core platform" for Alibaba Pictures.

And this may also be good news. Until Maoyan and Taopiaopiao merge, users should always be able to find deals.