Net profit soared nearly 3 times year-on-year. What did Thunderbird Technology do right when it entered unlimited mode?

Good winds often lend me their strength and carry me soaring into the sky.

The advancing Thunderbird has come to its own "warm air" channel. In Q3 2020, Thunderbird Technology's revenue was HK$180 million, a year-on-year increase of 78.7%. Net profit after tax increased by 293.8% year-on-year, and the net profit margin after tax reached 30.9%.

Prior to this, more than one industry analyst believed that with the end of the epidemic, the strong growth of OTT would be terminated. However, OTT industry leaders represented by Thunderbird Technology have strongly countered this view with continued high growth.

In fact, the retreat of the tide has indeed made some OTT platforms look awkward. But for Thunderbird, it is like a migratory wintering bird, with thousands of miles of journey, connected by mountains and rivers, as long as it successfully enters the rising warm air flow channel, it can soar in the wind without flapping its wings too much, and can successfully reach the destination no matter how far the journey is.

Among thousands of paths to choose from, Thunderbird found the road book that best suits him to take off.

Different from the product strategies of traditional OTT enterprises that only focus on content and data, after several years of iteration, LeTV Technology has gradually explored a product route of "coming from the masses and going to the masses".

In essence, OTT is nothing more than presenting content to users as much as possible, but the process of how OTT manufacturers can find the content that users need is full of their own methodologies.

Before facing users, Thunderbird Technology first has a deep insight into user needs.

Since 2018, short videos have been gradually becoming the mainstream of the video industry. In 2019, the total viewing time of short videos even surpassed that of long videos. According to the "2020 Short Video User Value Research Report" released by CSM, 55.8% of users have watched short video content on TV.

The only way to defeat all martial arts is to be fast. Thunderbird Technology has prepared for the needs of users for content in advance, and has joined hands with short video platforms such as ByteDance and Kuaishou to take the lead in adding short video content that users love to watch on its own OTT large screens, thus building a content moat for users to watch short videos on large screens.

Market trends are one aspect, and user preferences are another. In order to more keenly discover user needs, LeTV Technology has also added the powerful tool of "data-driven growth".

For example, although the content library of traditional OTT is broad enough, it may be difficult for everyone to find the products they like. In response to this, Thunderbird Technology has timely added AI recommendation algorithms to push completely customized content to tens of millions of users based on their different viewing preferences.

According to Thunderbird Technology, after the AI ​​recommendation algorithm was covered, the click-through rate of TCL TV's selected channel algorithm increased by 160%, and the click-through rate of VIP channel algorithm increased by 170%.

In addition, based on these two user needs, Thunderbird also tests different product directions through continuous iteration. In this way, one product produces two rhythms of resonance. While ensuring that users get the content they prefer, the platform can also promptly judge and remove the content that the user is not interested in, completing the content push mechanism for each user with double efficiency. It can be said that through the three methodologies of "user insight -> lean entrepreneurship -> data-driven growth", Thunderbird Technology has created a business barrier that is highly consistent with consumer needs.

In the narrative context of LeTV Technology itself, along with the two major stages of data accumulation and data operation, the two corresponding business formats are business intelligence and smart business.

In the business intelligence stage, Thunderbird Technology uses big data to study business logic, and then uses people to make decisions to drive business optimization. When it evolves to the smart business stage, it uses machine learning to seek the optimal solution and uses AI to replace people in making decisions.

In the smart business stage, Thunderbird gradually delegated the business decision-making process to AI algorithms, allowing machines to learn and optimize business logic on their own, like AlphaGo, including the introduction of platform content and the traffic distribution of each part of the content, so as to achieve more efficient and accurate traffic distribution, allowing users to more conveniently access the business services they want.

The product goal of "coming from the masses and going to the masses" is achieved through 24-hour machine learning. Obviously, the unique product design of Thunderbird Technology is that it does not treat market trends or user needs mechanically, but combines insights with data to summarize user needs and elevate them to the level of theory, and then feeds back the products under this theory to users, and corrects the theory through data summary experience. In this way, Thunderbird Technology and users have built an unbreakable intelligent "bridge" for content distribution.

With cutting-edge product strategies, Thunderbird can naturally achieve impressive user data based on meeting consumer needs. According to the financial report, in September 2020, the number of Thunderbird Technology's existing members increased by 42.2% year-on-year. In the third quarter, Thunderbird Technology's membership business revenue increased by 82.3% year-on-year; value-added business revenue increased by 300% year-on-year.

In addition, on November 11, 2020, TCL TV ranked first in sales across all channels, with online sales of all categories exceeding 1.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 44%. Although these data are related to factors such as hardware and marketing, they also indirectly demonstrate the appeal of Thunderbird Technology, the soul of TCL's TV system, to consumers.

If it were a traditional OTT manufacturer, after the "main business" had achieved such impressive results, it would have been possible to put the horse and the sword in the warehouse and refine the operation of the business at hand. After all, it would not be wrong not to do it, and taking small steps forward on the existing performance is the most stable business path. However, the aggressive Thunderbird Technology did not do so. Instead, it took this as a new starting point and once again burst out with a stronger desire for innovation.

According to LeTV, in addition to efficiency-driven and strategy-driven, it also focuses on innovation-driven: "It has begun to try businesses with a success rate of less than 30%. In terms of investment in the three businesses of platform business, strategic preparation, and innovative business, the investment ratio of 80:15:5 in 2019 was adjusted to 60:20:20."

Since 2019, Thunderbird has gradually launched innovative businesses with distinctive features, such as education, children, and Thunderbird Alliance. By Q3 2020, these new businesses have yielded fruitful results, with revenue increasing by a record 300% year-on-year. During the Double Eleven shopping festival, Thunderbird Technology's sales of children's members and music members increased by 259% and 49% year-on-year.

From this, if we look at the overall strategy of Thunderbird Technology again, we will find that on the basis of stabilizing the basic situation, it is undoubtedly various innovative businesses that drive the overall advancement. When these two wings act alternately, the rising channel of "warm air" that soars thousands of miles will naturally be opened, which will not only enable Thunderbird Technology to achieve strong business growth during the OTT dividend period, but also ensure that it continues to seize the initiative in cutting-edge businesses.

In his book "Finite and Infinite Games", American philosopher James Carse expressed the following view: There are two types of competition in this world: finite games and infinite games. Finite games are meant to have a clear ending, while infinite games are meant to keep the game going.

From the current development trend of mobile Internet, we can find that most of the leading related companies have transitioned from the finite game stage to the infinite game stage.

For example, Tencent started to choose to co-build an ecosystem as early as 2011 and became a major player in the global market; although Meituan was born out of group buying, it now encompasses dozens of completely different businesses such as taxi-hailing, grocery shopping, and business travel; Alibaba has spared no effort to invest in dozens of unicorn companies in various business directions.

Perhaps because of the different industries, the development of products is not balanced. At present, the main theme of the OTT industry is still limited games. On the other hand, Thunderbird Technology has found two horizontal growth points, namely, Smart Screen Ecology 1.0 and AIxIoT, outside of the OTT ecosystem. Among them, Smart Screen Ecology 1.0 means that users can get a full range of digital life experiences such as "entertainment from long videos to long videos", health, and medical care, while AIxIoT can bring "the experience of the Internet of Everything from large screens to home terminals". From this perspective, Thunderbird Technology's dual-wheel drive can build an infinitely broadened business model.

To be honest, in the current OTT industry, there are not many manufacturers that can break out of their own ruts and look to the future. Thunderbird Technology is one of them. In the future, those who challenge the OTT industry must not be peers. It is a very necessary forward-looking decision to jump from narrow limited games to vast unlimited games as soon as possible.

From this perspective, when we look at the surging innovation and excellent performance of Thunderbird Technology, perhaps, for Thunderbird, the future is really not just about big screens.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.