The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) submitted the offer

On the evening of Monday, Alibaba announced that it would buy maps, navigation, and location service providers, Germany's software, at a price of $21 per share of ads. The offer was then submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by the German software.

According to the offer, Alibaba currently owns 28% of the High German company, the deal is completed, the gold will become Alibaba 100% subsidiaries, the deal will involve the total amount of about 1.1 billion U.S. dollars.

From the first investment to a wholly-owned acquisition, just 9 months time.

Why did Ali buy gold at this time wholly?

There are three major causes of Tiger sniffing:

1 There is no strong major shareholder, except Ali.

The two main shareholders, Hou Jun and chief executive officer of the company, were Cheng Congwu, 16.7% and 11% respectively. Ali became the sole shareholder after Alibaba's investment in gold. and Hou Jun early out of business level, from Wu is not the largest individual shareholder, from the style of temperament, is not a strong arbitrary line. This is certainly not his personal style can decide. From the beginning of his investment in gold, he had the means to go.

2 He has proved himself a difficult way to transform independently.

Judging from his financial data for more than two years, he has seen a marked decline in profit indicators, and even severe losses in the third quarter of 2013, but the cost targets are rising. The main business in the car navigation revenue share drop, mobile location service growth, destined to leather his own life, from 2B company to 2C, this direction is undoubtedly correct, but the way out is not good, costly.

3 Ali needs high virtue, not deep integration.

2013 "Double 11", "Ade" both inside and outside the hope that this is a good time to prove the integration between the two sides, want to make a offline to online out, that is, through the map of the "Days of cat 1111 zone", will be online users through the map to the offline merchant, and then back to the day Cat brand shop to place a single. It turns out that this is an extremely awkward route with products.

Ali acquisition of Gold after how to integrate?

Tencent Science and technology reporter Liang pointed out that the two sides will be in the map search, product commercialization, data sharing, cloud computing and other areas of cooperation, especially in data sharing, Gould and Alibaba will build a large data service system. And Alibaba's Amoy point, Taobao local life and other services platform and the integration of the map and navigation applications will accelerate, these businesses are the previous Alibaba layout O2O focus.

Specifically:

On the one hand, according to the user's past local consumption behavior, push personalized service. For example, if you set a path to plan your navigation, you will be pleasantly surprised when you suddenly tell you that there is a coffee shop nearby that you like in the "Turn Left" guide. Of course, users can also set their own, choose to turn on or off, to achieve two-way interaction.

On the other hand, based on geographical location, the line will be through. The user can search the merchant by the gold map, the name of the commodity, will display the storefront of this commodity nearby, may also through the electronic payment, delivers goods home.

Ali buys gold after the internet three giants O2O war emergency

World Network merchants to the mobile map and navigation market of the whole industry chain layout, made a drawing note:

Figure: Mobile map and navigation market industry chain is divided into four levels: ① application layer, on behalf of the Enterprise, Kay, Baidu Map, ② Cloud services, on behalf of the enterprise Tencent, Baidu, gold, etc. ③ software layer, on behalf of Enterprises easy map, Kay, navinfo, etc. ④ data layer, on behalf of the Enterprise, Itutong, NavInfo and so on. Among them, Gould has the layout at four levels.

To send a Li Qingle editor to the personal point of view:

Ali chose at this point in the full acquisition of Gould, in addition to see the above industrial chain in the above key card position, the previous strategic investment in the integration of insufficient, more importantly by Baidu and Tencent's stimulation. Nearly one months, Baidu completed from the glutinous Rice Holdings to a wholly-owned acquisition, Tencent Micro-letter payment in the Spring Festival "Rob Red Envelopes" help push the rapid rise, so that Ali feel fear.

This creates a new situation. Baidu will map business and purchase business in-depth integration, glutinous rice is a good piece of landing; Baidu Diqin go where also will not stand idly by, lien Baidu lbs division, involved in mobile end of the online travel hotel, air ticket booking business. The front battlefield Tencent search map compared to Baidu map and the gold map appears to be weak, but in search and Sogou merger, Tencent independently retained the search map business, in the second half of 2013 the product also experienced a series of adjustments, as well as the expansion of the team; In addition, Tencent by micro-letter payment, from the back end to create consumer closed loop, And it poses a threat to Alipay.

Rely on Tencent, Ali two mountains of the tick-tock taxi and quick taxi, fierce fighting, let Ali more determined to buy the determination of the gold. From the overall situation, the big three O2O three important links: front-end information (buy, comment, taxi), the middle of the location (map) and back-end payment, the layout is basically completed. Finally, to say a digression, in the body under the O2O products, the public comment is the three big grab food object.