Alibaba, Wanda, Tencent, the four giants have made any bets on sports

China's sports industry has never been so hot. Alibaba, Wanda Group, LeSports, and Tencent are currently the four most eye-catching giants in the sports industry. Based on their different genes, strategies and capital volumes, the four companies are on the common track of the sports industry.

On September 16, LeSports CEO Lei Zhenjian confirmed on Weibo that LeSports has recruited another heavyweight "cadre". Cheng Yizhong, a senior media person who once founded "Southern Metropolis Daily" and "Beijing News", officially joined LeSports as CEO of LeSports Le Sports HK. In addition, there is even news that what LeTV Sports Weibo said: "A big event" on September 22 means that LeTV won Hong Kong's Premier League copyright for the next three years for US$400 million.

Only a week ago, Alibaba just announced the establishment of Alibaba Sports Group and officially entered the sports industry. Also in September, another giant, Wanda, acquired two Italian sports companies after acquiring Swiss Infront Sports Media Group, the world's second largest sports marketing company.

China's sports industry has never been so hot. Alibaba, Wanda Group, LeSports, and Tencent are currently the four most eye-catching giants in the sports industry. Based on their different genes, strategies and capital sizes, the four companies have different running methods on the common track of the sports industry: Alibaba: "Find partners", how can one Evergrande Taobao be enough!

Ali's inherent advantages in layout sports need not be overemphasized: e-commerce retail platform + big data + capital.

Before the establishment of Alibaba Sports Group, Alibaba, which was born in e-commerce and lacked sports genes, had a simple strategy-"find partners". Alibaba first put the entry point at the downstream of the industry. Its logic was: use the "fan economy" to quickly cut in, select clubs and stars with global influence and fan base to cooperate, and select the sports company with the most event copyrights to invest: In June last year, Alibaba strategically invested in Guangzhou Evergrande Football Club and obtained a 50% stake in the latter for RMB 1.2 billion. The team changed its name to "Evergrande Taobao Team"; in May this year, Jack Ma's Yunfeng Fund led the investment. Investment in the A + round of financing for LeSports, obtaining 7.3% of the latter's shares, ranking second among controlling shareholders; On May 27, Tmall International announced a strategic cooperation with Bayern Munich, Germany. Bayern's 2015 season star jerseys will be launched to 90 million Bayern fans in China through Tmall International. In the future, limited edition jerseys and related products for big-name stars will be released at the same price around the world. Bayern became the first football club to cooperate with Tmall International; in July, Tmall International reached a strategic partnership with La Liga giants Real Madrid Football Club, and Real Madrid's overseas flagship store officially settled in Tmall International. Alibaba will also help Real Madrid Develop a series of business plans in the China market; In August, NBA star Kobe Bryant announced that he would license his autobiographical documentary" Kobe's Muse" to Alibaba's Tmall Magic Box for exclusive release, and would cooperate with the entire Alibaba Group to develop Kobe-related derivatives.

On September 8, Alibaba announced the formal establishment of Alibaba Sports Group, which is controlled by Alibaba Group and jointly funded by Sina and Yunfeng Fund. Alibaba Sports's first move is to form an exclusive strategic partnership with the American University Pac-12 League. In the next two years, Ali will not only cover the live broadcast and ticketing of the Pac-12 China regular season games, but will also sell the Pac-12 League's team-related products online on the Tmall International platform.

Regarding the establishment of Ali Sports, some media articles also pointed out: "The sports industry is nothing more than upstream sports copyrights, broadcast control platforms, terminals and sports peripherals. However, Ali has no genes in these aspects and has not yet shown advantages. The advantage is e-commerce, services and cloud.

Although Ali also has cooperative relationships with SMG (Shanghai Oriental Media) and Youku Tudou, after all, they operate independently and are not under its control. Of course, Ali can also sell sports peripheral products, but after all, what they sell are other people's homes." From this point of view, Alibaba is eager to occupy territory in the sports industry market by establishing a sports group."

There is not much detail on Alibaba Sports 'future plans yet, but the general direction will be to continue to apply e-commerce platforms in the sports industry through copyright, sports media, event operations and ticketing.

However, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, Ali's layout of sports is more based on the strategic considerations of the entire Alibaba Group. At present, the Ali ecosystem already includes Alibaba Pictures, Alibaba Health, Cainiao Network, Ant Financial, Suning Yunshang, Intime Commercial, Haier, Rishun, Yuantong, Weibo, Youku, Meizu and other companies, as well as a series of overseas investments such as Singapore Post. Now that the sports industry has become a national-level strategy, Ali must not be absent. Moreover, Ali has always intended to enter the content industry, and sports is an important branch of the content industry.

On the other hand, and most importantly, Ali is trying to further internationalize the industry through sports. According to Alibaba Group's second-quarter earnings report released in August, Alibaba's domestic revenue accounted for 83% of total revenue in the second quarter. Overseas business development is urgent, and the sports fan economy is Alibaba's efforts to build cross-border e-commerce. A breakthrough.

Wanda: The fastest way to be number one in the world is to buy! Wanda is a company with a sports gene.

From joining the Dalian Hualu Football Team in 1994 and establishing the Dalian Wanda Football Club, creating eight consecutive championships, to now acquiring a large number of good sports companies, teams and events in overseas markets. For more than 20 years, the leader Wang Jianlin has never missed his concern for the sports industry either personally or commercially. At the same time, he also understands the development laws of the sports industry. The sports industry is an important branch of Wanda's "big culture" industrial layout. Now Wang Jianlin's goal is to build Wanda into "the world's largest sports company." Wanda values the scarce event resources in the upstream of the industry. His strategy is-buy, buy: In January this year, Wanda acquired a 20% stake in Atletico Madrid, one of the three giants in La Liga, for 45 million euros; In February, Wanda announced that it would join hands with three investment institutions to defeat 11 competitors and acquire 100% of the shares of Swiss Infront Sports Media Group for 1.05 billion euros, of which Wanda Group holds 68.2%. According to public information, Infront is the world's second largest sports marketing company and one of the world's largest sports media production and broadcasting companies. The company's copyrighted media broadcasts cover 25 sports events.

Ranked first in the world in the field of football and winter sports, its rights include FIFA, exclusive sales rights to broadcast football matches in 26 countries and regions in Asia, including the World Cup. The most important ones are the sales rights of two World Cups in 2018 and 2022. In the second half of the year, Infront's football and ice and snow projects will be launched in the Chinese market; in May, Wanda led the investment in Series A financing for LeSports; In July, Wanda issued a statement announcing that it will In the second half of this year, it will increase the pace of mergers and acquisitions, complete the mergers and acquisitions of three foreign and three large domestic companies, and promote the implementation of overseas corporate business in China; In August, Infront Sports, which is controlled by Wanda, invested 260 million euros in Bundesliga team Mainz over 10 years;

In the same month, Wanda acquired a 100% stake in World Triathlon Corp in the United States for US$650 million. The company owns the copyright of triathlon events and accounts for 91% of the global long-distance triathlon sports. During the acquisition, Wang Jianlin left a bold statement: "In the future, one or two sports companies will be merged together to IPO"; this month, Wanda Holdings's Infront acquired Italian football marketing company Gsport and sports media company Sport 09. The customers of the two companies include many well-known clubs in Serie A and Serie B.

Why choose the M & A method? Wang Jianlin said the following words in his summary of Wanda's work in the first half of this year: "Industrial resources such as culture, sports, and finance, especially upstream industrial resources, have basically been divided up by European and American companies. It is basically impossible to develop yourself. Only through mergers and acquisitions can you get it."

After all, he is a senior sports owner who worked hard to run a local club 20 years ago. Wang Jianlin knows very well how difficult it is to cultivate a brand. Merging and acquiring mature overseas companies with scarce event resources is indeed the fastest and most effective way to layout these events. Resources have long-term value compared with broadcast copyright, and Wanda also hopes to adjust the industrial structure of the entire group through mergers and acquisitions.

However, Wang Jianlin also said that Wanda is not a local tycoon and buys everything. It has its own logic in sports industry mergers and acquisitions: the acquired sports company business must be able to be implemented in China. Only in this way can these companies with only single-digit growth abroad achieve annual growth of 20%-30%.

Compared with the other three companies, Wanda has the strongest ability to manage sports in terms of financial strength, investment vision and experience.

LeSports: "Find concepts" and tell ecological stories In December last year, LeSports spun off its parent company LeTV and began to operate independently, describing the company's business form as "event operations + content platform + intelligence + value-added services". Compared with the other three, LeSports's business covers almost the upper, middle and lower reaches of the industry, and is currently the longest sports industry chain.

LeSports's strategy is to "find concepts" and focus on the accumulation of rights to broadcast events. Compared with Alibaba and Wanda, LeSports's capital volume is relatively weak and it has short-term funds, which determines that they must work on resources that can be realized. In other words, LeSports is seeking to spend one yuan to generate two cash flows: LeSports's "madness" in event copyright is unknown to everyone, and the number of copyrights they own is updated almost every month. As of August this year, this number has reached more than 200.

In addition to mass events with a large audience base such as Europe's five major leagues, CBA, Champions League basketball, AFC Champions League, Super League, WTA and ATP Tour, they also bought copyrights for relatively niche events such as cycling and golf. "Buying a massive amount of event rights" is a breakthrough path planned by Jia Yueting, who bid US$600 million at the beginning of the year but saw the exclusive online live broadcast rights of NBA fall into Tencent's hands. Their goal is to "own more than 90% of domestic and foreign sports. Event copyright, covering mass sports, high-end sports and elite sports without blind spots." Just today, there was news that LeTV won the copyright of the Hong Kong Premier League for the next three years for a beautiful price of 400 million yuan.

In terms of event operations, in February this year, LeSports signed a four-year contract with the International Champions Cup (ICC). LeSports is responsible for all work such as signal production, content broadcasting, copyright distribution, and ticketing sponsorship for ICC China events as of 2019. On July 25, the International Champions Cup held the match between AC Milan and Inter Milan Stadium in Shenzhen. This was LeSports 'first show in event operations.

In terms of smart hardware, on August 11, LeSports released three super bicycles more than four months after the PPT launch conference. Previously, LeSports also established its headquarters in the United States. LeSports CEO Lei Zhenjian was interviewed by Hu Xian. It was revealed that the early business focus will be on product technology, and research and development will be carried out in two directions: the content communication value chain based on sports content and the field of sports health, such as wearable products such as bracelets. In order to make breakthroughs in smart hardware, they also tried to recruit engineers from Google and Apple from Silicon Valley.

Value-added services. According to LeSports 'definition, projects based on providing services other than content to a large number of users, such as sports lottery, sports training, sports e-commerce, sports ticketing and sports games, are all value-added services.

At this stage, the Internet level of sports lottery and sports games is relatively high, but policy supervision is very strict; sports e-commerce has not yet reached a certain scale due to its low integration with traditional industries; and sports training and sports ticketing The degree of Internet is low and the business model is not yet mature.

Tencent: Focus on key IPs and rely on social genes for brand operations Tencent's idea of deploying sports is very simple. It relies on its strong social genes to win top-level event copyrights and operate brands and communities.

Through sports + social + payment + games, we try to effectively connect users into Tencent's ecosystem and realize monetization.

Tencent's biggest trump card this year is that it won exclusive online live broadcast rights for the NBA for the next five seasons in January for US$500 million (about 3.1 billion yuan), which is also a live broadcast of 1500 + games per season. In addition to exclusive online live broadcasting rights, Tencent also has the rights to broadcast all games of 30 NBA teams and the "remaining rights" to broadcast NBA licenses on other online platforms. This means that Tencent can package each team's games for fans to watch the games for the whole year. Paid content is generated, but the paid market still needs to be cultivated. This is also a common problem faced by all sports video websites.

At the same time, Tencent is authorized to operate the NBA official website + the official website of 30 teams, the NBA's only official Chinese community, and the exclusive community of the top 100 stars. It relies on platform resources of WeChat and QQ to form strong interaction with users and increase user stickiness. A large number of highly sticky users can bring huge possibilities to the online sales of NBA peripheral products.

More importantly, the NBA also authorized Tencent to develop interactive basketball games. You know the monetization power of games. According to Lanxiong Sports, games are what the NBA values Tencent most.

Compared with the other three companies, it seems that the Penguins are the most "focused" at present. They have seized the copyright of a top event like the NBA and worked intensively from upstream to downstream, as if they are trying to utilize the NBA's commercial value to the extreme in five years. The # 500 million dollar is not wasted!

It is not difficult to find that the starting point of Alibaba and Wanda's involvement in sports is based on the layout needs of the entire group's entire industry chain. The sports industry is its ecological business creation around its core strategy, and the original media genes of LeSports and Tencent determine their layout. The accumulation of content begins.

Editor: yvonne