Article/Yang Wang, columnist of Sina Financial Opinion Leader (WeChat official account kopleader)
The sharing economy is still an immature concept. The side effects of excess resources, the huge hidden dangers of weak supervision, and the deviation of the sharing concept are all huge constraints to the development of the industry.
Yang Wang, Special Writer of Sina Finance From a succession of thunderstorms on the P2P platform, frequent accidents on Didi downwind, to the preparation of bankruptcy reorganization plan for the bike sharing ofo, it indicates that the sharing economy has come to a cold winter.
The once popular resource sharing model has been questioned by all parties in the face of frequent problems Pathfinder How can we not forget the original intention of "sharing", clarify the supervision responsibility, and create a new spring of sharing economy?
Based on "solving the last kilometer travel", bike sharing is experiencing a large-scale recession after the fierce competition of capital seizing the market. The mismanagement caused by the existing vehicle surplus is even more shocking (as shown in Figure 1).
As of June 2017, the daily order volume of Mobil and ofo both exceeded 20 million, and the damage rate was no less than 20%. However, the trend of the collapse of the second echelon showed that users could not return their deposits everywhere. In July 2017, Xiaoming Bike, the first bankruptcy case of bike sharing, reported in Guangdong that the company's account was only 350000 yuan, and it was unable to repay the debt of more than 55.4 million yuan.
Not only sharing bicycles, but also sharing economy has been in turmoil in other fields. Once the leader of the Internet finance industry, the online loan platform aimed at linking financial needs experienced frequent thunderstorms during the year, and many platforms with 10 billion level transaction funds ran away.
According to the statistics of online loan home, there were as many as 296 P2P problem platforms in the first half of 2018, and the industry was in a standstill. In July, there was no new platform for the first time in nearly three years. As the world's largest travel sharing service company, Didi Travel has had two hitchhiking incidents in the past six months, and its shortcomings have begun to attract attention.
Under the continuous waves, we may ask, what has changed the sharing economy?
Good vision and multi support
In 1978, American sociologist Wilson put forward the term of sharing economy. However, it was not until recent years that sharing economy really became popular due to the development of mobile Internet technology and the transformation of economic structure.
In the first half of 2017, the sharing economy became a popular outlet, and capital entered the market one after another, attracting a total of 10.433 billion yuan (as shown in Figure 2). On the one hand, influenced by the long tail theory, a large number of fragmented and heterogeneous customer needs in the market are valued, and the Internet gives consumers more and more choice space.
On the other hand, the material is increasingly abundant, and the large resources are not fully utilized. According to the statistics of the China Used Goods Association, at present, the total amount of personal idle goods in China is more than 5 trillion every year, and is growing at a rate of 5%. In addition, with the improvement of market openness, the semantic category of idle resources is also expanding: in addition to idle goods and space, idle funds, information, and even skills are regarded as idle resources.
Driven by various favorable factors, various Internet platforms with the sharing economy as the main concept have flooded into the market, matching the supply and demand sides through model algorithms, realizing the rapid docking of demand and resources, and using economies of scale to significantly reduce marginal costs (see Figure 3).
In business practice, the sharing economy is mainly divided into two categories: one is the C2C model suitable for heavy assets, such as Didi Chuxing and Airbnb, and the other is the B2C model that prefers light assets, such as Mobike and Shared Power Bank.
Breaking risks together and creating a new spring
Sharing economy was born to improve resource efficiency. However, in the process of various enterprises trying to solve this pain point, the shared mode of operation exposes deeper problems.
First, the problem of resource efficiency has not been effectively solved, but has been magnified because of resource surplus. B2C enterprises are the most intuitive, and there are endless sharing projects in the market: from bicycles and power packs to umbrellas and washing machines... enterprises seize the market opportunity by widely laying products. Resource surplus is a prerequisite for the emergence of the sharing economy. However, at present, there is not only surplus in the sharing resources themselves, but also more serious waste due to the massive occupation of social public space. C2C enterprises have created a prominent "Airbnb effect" on the operational efficiency of the entire social resources. According to the research of the US Economic Research Bureau, every 10% increase in the number of short-term rental houses in Airbnb will drive the rent up by 0.39% and the house price up by 0.64%. That is to say, in terms of the allocation of resource efficiency, the sharing economy is gradually away from the original intention.
Second, the sharing model connecting supply and demand has inherent systemic risks. Strange resource providers have brought the most fundamental risks to the sharing economy. Many sharing economy platforms have been committed to creating social situational marketing in order to eliminate the distrust brought by strangeness, Airbnb used story by story scenes in the "OneLessStranger" activity to weaken the concept of "strangers", eliminate users' psychological barriers and build trust. Didi Hitchhiker also made friends in the same way. It seems that it wants to make people subconsciously ignore the inevitable risks in this resource sharing situation through social attributes.
Third, there is a high requirement for diversified and coordinated operation. At this stage, the platform side overemphasizes its technical attributes, and under the drive of interests, it often evades its regulatory responsibilities as an intermediary. However, it is difficult for the supervisor to exert its efforts because of the failure to achieve data exchange. In addition, the public on the demand side lacks basic understanding of the purpose of capital operation behind the platform economy, and is too inclusive. It is not difficult to find out from the operation mode that the cross industry, cross region and networking characteristics of the sharing economy have put forward new requirements for the current supervision mode, and its benign operation needs multi-party coordinated governance.
Sharing economy thrives on technology, but it must not stay on technology. On the one hand, all kinds of chaos can be attributed to the fact that the current society has not established an order suitable for the sharing economy, restricted by social factors such as interpersonal relationships, and the sharing ecology is not yet mature; On the other hand, many sharing platforms fail to assume the responsibility of the leader. Avoiding their responsibilities for economic benefits and standing idly by will not only leave huge hidden dangers, but also ultimately put enormous development pressure on the nascent sharing economy.
From the current situation, the sharing economy is still an immature concept. The side effects of excess resources, the huge hidden dangers of weak supervision, and the deviation of the sharing concept are all huge constraints to the development of the industry. The formation of sharing ecology requires multi cooperation to jointly promote the prosperity and development of sharing economy.
(The author of this article introduces: Vice President of Hande Institute of Financial Science and Technology, and researcher of International Monetary Research Institute of Renmin University of China.)
