By JIANG Min
During the pandemic, Alibaba's DingTalk app was transformed into a hugely popular online education tool used daily by hundreds of millions of students. With support from Alipay, DingTalk has launched a management solutions package for private education institutions with the aim of becoming the one-stop education shop for marketing, teaching and, of course, financial management.
Targeting institutional clients has given DingTalk access to an unsaturated sector of a fiercely competitive market. As other tech giants jump on board with their own ideas, DingTalk, and the entire education industry, have discovered unexplored frontiers in the landscape.
Going viral
DingTalk began in 2015 as a workplace collaboration app and began to investigate opportunities in education less than two years ago. In March 2019, a version for public schools, “Future Campus,” was launched. The app now covered online learning, course preparation, “digital campus management” and home-school communication. But the reception Future Campus received was nothing to write home about.
“Schools then didn’t see the point of moving normal campus activities online, not unless their campuses shut down,” said Fang Yongxin, head of DingTalk. And the campuses were indeed shut down.
The app was downloaded a billion times in the month after schools moved online, a five-fold increase in users, the success that can only be described as viral. Since then, the company claims that over 130 million students in 140,000 schools have logged 60 million hours of live-streamed classes through the app.
“We mobilized as much of Alibaba's resources as we could,” Fang told Jiemian News. In response to the explosion in web traffic, Alibaba Cloud deployed more than 100,000 servers to scale up DingTalk’s capacity.
But like all good parents, Alibaba provides more than just the toys its offspring wants. Alipay has allowed DingTalk to spread its wings and glide serenely above the hundred-billion-yuan private education scene.
Welcome to the Internet
DingTalk has its eyes on the B2B [business-to-business] aspects of the market, hoping to sell its technology and services to the 400,000 private education institutions — enrichment camps, cram schools, and college prep classes — across the country. The B2B sector, currently valued at a moderate 27 billion yuan, seems likely to expand fast. A pre-pandemic report by the Ministry of Education expected it to quadruple by 2025.
Suddenly, private educators have flocked online in huge numbers. And DingTalk, hand-in-hand with its cousin Alipay, were there to greet them with friendly support for online teaching, but also offering to guide the newbies through the treacherous quagmire of online business: marketing, accounting and other now-bewildering administrative tasks.
“Private educators already have a presence on Alipay, Koubei (local service recommendations) and Taobao (e-commerce). DingTalk can use this existing network to integrate marketing, teaching and financial management into a single platform,” Fang said. “In this way, we have an obvious head start on our competitors.”
DingTalk expects to be the No.1 marketplace for education products. This year, it has onboarded a number of third-party products, mainly home learning tools, to provide a bigger range of options for institutional clients. This may turn out to be yet another money machine for the parent company. DingTalk receives a commission every time a school signs up for third-party services.
Education lite
Due to the vast potential, the B2B sector is was already a fierce battleground. In the virtual classroom market, multiple deep-pocketed players are already flexing their muscles forbiddingly. They include ClassIn, which in July acquired ten million dollars of series B funding; TAL, a Nasdaq-listed private educator; and Tencent, Alibaba’s arch-nemesis.
There are concerns that DingTalk’s stellar performance will tank when full normality is restored, but Fang is not worried.
“The virtual classroom is only a tiny corner of the market,” he said. A lot of school management will be more effective when conducted online. And later this year, DingTalk will have a new array of goodies to ease the digital transition.
Competition can only intensify. Baidu, Tencent, and Bytedance, all the tech giants, have each developed or invested in portfolios of education products. Alibaba’s range is light on education and heavy on technology infrastructure.
“It’s unlikely that we will ever create our own educational content,” said Fang. “Our focus is, and will likely always be, on digitization and management.”
But just as DingTalk takes to the air, TAL, a potential client, is making its own flight plans. TAL is considering its own smart platform that integrates the company's enviable education resources and teacher pool with technological know-how. However, DingTalk’s focus on B2B may give it access to resources and talent from its client, as a makeweight for the current weakness in on the education side.
“We’ll explore various models, together with the educators,” Fang said. “But of course, our mindset is data-driven and highly commercial.”
With the backing, it has, for now, profit is not DingTalk’s top priority.
“The first step is to build a great ecosystem. We won’t rush to capitalize on the resources we acquire. Our goal is a better experience for our clients by providing whatever services and technology they need,” Fang said.
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