event:
On December 20, 2021, the Inspection Bureau of Hangzhou Taxation Bureau of Zhejiang Province found out that, Network anchor Huang Wei (net name: Weiya) from 2019 to 2020, Huang Wei evaded taxes of 643 million yuan by hiding personal income, fictitious business transformation, false declaration of income nature, and other underpaid taxes of 60 million yuan. According to the law, Huang Wei made a decision on tax administrative punishment, recovered taxes, collected overdue fines and fined a total of 1.341 billion yuan. Previously, Zhu Chenhui, a well-known online celebrity anchor (net name: Sydney) and Lin Shanshan have been recovered by the relevant departments, collected late fees, and planned to impose a double fine, totaling 65.5531 million yuan and 27.6725 million yuan.
Our view:
1. Platform side: the proportion of brand self broadcast continues to increase, and the storm of head anchor may cause a certain impact in the short term, with limited long-term impact; It is expected to bring opportunities to the rise of waist and tail talents and further optimize the structure. Based on the calculation that the Gmv of Taobao live broadcast in 2020 is RMB 400 billion, the cumulative turnover of Weiya and Sydney accounts for about 8.8% of the overall Gmv of Taobao live broadcast in 2020. If Weiya and Sydney are banned from live broadcasting and carrying goods for a long time, it may have a certain impact on the Gmv and market share of Taobao live broadcast in the short term. According to Alibaba’s investor day in 2021, in the year ending September 30, 2021, merchants’ self broadcast Gmv accounted for about 60% of the overall Gmv of Taobao live broadcast. Brand merchants will reallocate the budget of Taobao advertising in time, allocate the budget of Weiya and Sydney live broadcasting room to other anchors or other marketing methods, and vigorously develop brand self broadcasting. The impact of the head anchor storm on Taobao live broadcasting is limited. From the revenue side, based on the sharing structure of Taobao live broadcasting, if the advertising streaming in the live broadcasting room is not considered, the takerate supplied by Taobao live broadcasting to Taobao platform is 6% of the Gmv of live broadcasting with goods. Based on the cumulative Gmv of Weiya and Sydney live broadcasting with goods in 2020, the platform brought to Alibaba is about 2.1 billion yuan. However, due to the transfer of part of the budget by merchants, We expect the actual impact on the revenue side of Alibaba platform to be less than RMB 2.1 billion.
2. Brand side: it has little impact on the head brand, and the medium and long tail brand tests the three-dimensional marketing ability. For the head brand, the cooperation with the head anchor focuses more on the brand publicity effect. However, the head brand has accumulated a wide range of brand awareness. If the head anchor with goods effect is lost, the actual impact on product publicity is also relatively limited. At the same time, the head brand advertising resources and budget are relatively sufficient, and it is able to build a team for brand self broadcasting, which is more conducive to the long-term marketing transformation of the brand. Therefore, the head anchor storm has a limited impact on the brands that already have a certain popularity. Medium and long tail brands, especially emerging domestic brands, are relatively dependent on the head anchor. They need to use the high traffic of the head anchor to promote brand construction and publicity. Therefore, under the storm, the probability of medium and long tail brands “becoming popular” through cooperation with the head anchor. However, at present, the Internet advertising media are constantly enriched and diversified, which will test the brand building and three-dimensional marketing ability of businesses in the future.
3. The brutal growth period of the live broadcast e-commerce industry is over and will move towards standardized and compliant management in the future. From 2017 to 2020, the transaction scale of China’s live e-commerce market increased rapidly. It is expected that the transaction scale will reach RMB 235 billion in 2021, a year-on-year increase of 79%. After several years of brutal growth, the live broadcast e-commerce industry also frequently has problems such as excessive false publicity, difficult return and exchange, selling inferior goods, and the anchor’s false sales, which is relatively lack of supervision and policy constraints. The centralized network anchor tax regulation has sounded an alarm to practitioners, further standardized the tax order of the webcast industry, and also indicates that the webcast e-commerce industry will move towards standardized and compliant normal management in the future. For live broadcast e-commerce platforms and MCN institutions, they should actively guide popular people to conduct self-examination and self correction, timely prevent the risk of tax evasion, promote the online live broadcast industry to strengthen industry self-discipline, and gradually form industry disciplinary measures and mechanisms, so as to make the live broadcast industry develop healthily and stably on the basis of legal compliance.
Risk tips: policy supervision risk, anchor illegal risk, macroeconomic instability risk, increased industry competition risk, user loss risk, Internet valuation adjustment risk, etc
