Original: guziming authorized to reprint this article to wechat official account: zhengshitang plus2019
At noon on the 1st, a screenshot of a wechat rumor about Hillhouse capital was widely circulated, saying that Hillhouse was carrying out undifferentiated layoffs, mainly involving the primary market group, and undifferentiated layoffs at different job levels.
Subsequently, sina finance and economics also quoted a VC partner as saying that the layoff was basically true.
With the spread of rumors, not only did A-shares plunge in the afternoon, but many leading technology stocks in Hong Kong stocks also fell by about 4%.
The chat of a few suckling children scared the Chinese capital market into a cold sweat, so that many central media jumped out to help Hillhouse dispel rumors.
Why does the rumor of layoffs in an enterprise with only about 300 employees trigger a soul stirring contest?
Just like the famous saying of ZhangLei, the boss of Hillhouse, “be a friend of time”, Hillhouse’s investment in China represents not capital, but international capital.
In the short term, these international capitals’ ability to obtain information is far stronger than that of ordinary investors. Once they all decide to lay off staff, they must see something wrong.
For example, in the second half of last year, the “double reduction” was introduced, and the education and training investment field represented by New Oriental suffered a disaster. The high position, known as “being a leading friend”, had already sold off its heavy positions in education stocks in advance.
In the long run, the Chinese market is not short of money, but it is extremely short of capital. As an agent in China, the strategic position is a weather vane for international capital to continue to invest in China.
This kind of industrial capital investment is a completely different concept from the water release that benefits the real estate industry.
Hillhouse’s investment has spread all over China’s capital market, from Tencent, jd.com, pinduoduo, meituan, to Ningde times, Longji shares and Wuxi apptec. In the past decade, Hillhouse’s investment has led hundreds of top enterprises and provided hundreds of thousands of highly paid jobs.
Just like Tencent in Shenzhen and Ningde times in Ningde, these enterprises invested from a strategic perspective not only drive the development of industrial chains in a large number of cities, improve the tax revenue of local governments and a large number of high-income jobs, but also provide the most powerful support for high housing prices and high-quality consumption.
In my opinion, most of the chat records leaked on the 1st are fake. The most valuable thing for companies like Hillhouse is talents. If outstanding talents can’t be retained, how can they be laid off indiscriminately.
It is possible that the strategic position from Meidi is following the “Meidi” model of yesterday, laying off some labor-intensive “outsourcing teams” at the bottom, maintaining the backbone team, and only giving up some marginal industries that are not optimistic about.
For example, yesterday’s talk about home appliances going to the countryside and new energy going to the countryside, the consumption and science and technology fields of the “work for relief” model, are likely to be avoided by Hillhouse. Zhang Lei is very clear that these low profit margin areas will face a long-term lack of money for him.
So in my opinion, even if the rumors about layoffs at Hillhouse are true, there is no need to worry too much about the withdrawal of some sectors of Hillhouse international capital, but it also marks that these withdrawal from the huge market will be left to those pure Chinese enterprises.