Baidu Nuomi

» see nuomi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On its first day of trading, 23 June 2010, Nuomi.com sold 152,165 discounted cinema tickets for a Beijing multiplex chain carrying Jackie Chan's name. That was a world record for a group-buying site at the time and it was not really a startup achievement. Nuomi belonged to Qianxiang Group, the company behind Renren, and Renren was a national social network with a firehose to point at whatever it wanted to launch. The site was famous on day one because it had been given an audience rather than because it had found one.

What followed in China is remembered as the war of a thousand group-buying sites, and Nuomi came out of it as one of the survivors rather than the winner. Baidu bought in during August 2013, $160 million for 59 percent, closing that October. The founding chief executive Shen Boyang resigned in December citing personal reasons and a Baidu vice president took over as acting head. In January 2014 Baidu announced it was buying the remaining shares, the deal closed that March, and the name became Baidu Nuomi.

Baidu's reason for wanting it was not the coupons. Baidu owned Chinese search at a moment when the commerce that mattered was moving into phone applications that publish nothing to any index, so its core asset had no purchase on where the money was going. Buying a place inside that world was cheaper than working out how to rank it. Nuomi was the vehicle, and every number attached to it from then on is a number about how much Baidu was willing to spend to stay relevant to a restaurant.

There is no Turkish version of this story and the reason is that Turkey never had a domestic search engine large enough to have the problem. Google took this market outright and early, so nobody here ever watched a national search company try to buy its way into physical services with a war chest. The discount coupon wave did arrive around 2010 and it burned through in roughly two years, at a scale where the Chinese figures do not translate: a single promotional day at Nuomi in July 2015 moved 350 million yuan, which is more than the entire Turkish sector was worth while it lasted.

~ the dossier ~

~ what twenty billion yuan bought ~

In June 2015 Robin Li committed 20 billion yuan over three years to Nuomi and the other businesses that fulfilled orders with physical labor. In the same period Nuomi was separated out of the location services division under vice president Zeng Liang, and for a while it led the market in sixty cities. It had signed over two million merchants and held better than 30 percent of the local services sector. Those are the good numbers and they all date from that one summer.

The money bought discount and the discount bought share, and neither of them bought the thing that decides this category, which is which application a person opens without thinking when they are hungry. That October, Meituan and Dianping merged into a single company holding both the transaction volume and the reviews, and after that the market had a shape. Baidu could out-spend a competitor. It could not out-spend a habit that two companies had already spent five years each installing.

~ the year baidu left o2o ~

The retreat began in the middle of 2016 when Baidu decided to get out of online-to-offline entirely. Nuomi stopped being a business and became part of the search organization, and the product quietly turned from group buying into advertising for local services, which is the thing Baidu already knew how to sell. From December 2016 staff were converted from direct sales onto agency terms, a sequence everyone inside recognized. A Baidu insider told Caixin in February 2017 that people at Nuomi understood perfectly well and were waiting for the day the ax fell.

Baidu looked for a buyer or an outside investor for the unit and did not find one. On 16 March 2017 it fired Zeng Liang, the head of the division, saying he had violated company ethics rules by profiting from under-the-table arrangements with agencies serving major clients; Baidu said he admitted it and repaid the losses. The food delivery arm, Baidu Waimai, was sold to Ele.me that August. What was left of Nuomi carried on for another five years as a brand attached to a fading advertising product.

~ the wind-down ~

The end was handled quietly and in pieces. A notice went up in August 2022 saying the application had been pulled from the app stores as of the 31st of that month and that the service itself would formally stop in December. A wider announcement followed on 20 September citing business adjustments, with users told to withdraw whatever balance was sitting in their accounts before the deadline. The Chinese Wikipedia entry records the dissolution date as 31 December 2022.

Twelve and a half years, one world record on the opening day, a nine-figure acquisition, a twenty billion yuan pledge and a shutdown notice nobody outside the industry noticed. The bit worth keeping is the sequence: Nuomi's best year and the merger that ended its chances happened four months apart, and every decision Baidu made after that was about how slowly to stop.

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