Return to the first market! Can Wish get out of the predicament after the change of leadership?

It seems that I haven’t heard any sellers mention Wish for a long time. I have a vague illusion that this once top seller has disappeared in the cross-border circle.

Not so. Recently, Wish announced its return to the French market. Not long ago, it also officially announced the appointment of a new CEO, showing its determination to regain the market. But is it just a struggle in the end or is everything far from the end?

Wish pays 3 million euros fine and returns to French market

Recently, Wish's parent company Context Logic Inc. announced that the French regulator DGCCRF (Directorate-General for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control) has canceled the delisting measures against Wish , allowing it to re-enter France's app stores and search engine systems .

This means that French users can once again download and update the Wish app from Google Play, as well as navigate to the website directly from Google Search and the French search engine Qwant. In addition, the Wish app will also be available again on the Apple App Store in the coming days .

From the issuance of the ban to its cancellation, Wish has gone through a long and arduous 15 months in France .

In November 2021, the French government ordered major search engines and app stores to remove Wish because the platform ignored consumer protection regulations and illegally sold unsafe and counterfeit products . After receiving the warning from the DGCCRF, it did not recall the illegal products, but instead put them back on the shelves for sale under a different name .

At that time , French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire forced various platforms to remove Wish, including Google and Apple, and said that if Wish was not deleted , legal action would be taken against these companies .

After its IPO in 2020, Wish's development began to decline, and the ban was undoubtedly a further blow to Wish. After that, Wish lost a European market, and its search traffic and platform sales plummeted.

For 15 months, Wish 's parent company ContextLogic has been trying to overturn the DGCCRF's decision to remove products from the shelves, but has not been successful . It was not until March this year that Wish paid a fine of 3 million euros to the DGCCRF ( Wish's founder and CEO was fined 250,000 euros) and established a recall procedure for banned products , and reached a settlement with the DGCCRF.

A French government official said the DGCCRF 's decision to allow Wish to return to the French market came " after more than a year of discussions with Wish regarding the commitments it had made ."

Europe has always been one of Wish's top markets, and its return to the French market has made its business territory complete again. This should be good news for Wish today, after all, last year's performance was terrible.

Wish's revenue in multiple business segments plummeted in 2022

Like other e-commerce giants, Wish was hit by the cooling market last year.

In February, Wish's parent company ContextLogic announced its fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial results.

In 2022, Wish platform revenue was US$571 million, a year-on-year decrease of 73% , a huge drop; and in the past year, Wish's net loss continued to increase, reaching US$384 million, and US $361 million in 2021.

Among Wish 's major business modules , core markets , product   The revenue of Boost , third-party markets , logistics , etc. all performed poorly compared with 2021. Among them, the core market revenue fell by 81%, ProductBoost fell by 72%, the third-party market revenue fell by 80%, and the logistics revenue fell by 59% .

At its peak, Wish's monthly active users could reach more than 100 million, but in recent years, the platform's user loss has continued to intensify. In 2022, the number of monthly active users was only 24 million , and the number of active buyers plummeted from 64 million in 2020 to 13 million in 2022. Both fell by more than 60% year-on-year in 2021, and by nearly 80% year-on-year in 2020 .

In the fourth quarter of 2022 alone , the revenue of Wish 's core market , Product Boost , and logistics business segments fell by 74%, 64%, and 37% year-on-year, respectively ; the net loss for a single quarter reached US $110 million .

However, it is worth noting that Wish's historically criticized logistics and return issues seem to have improved.

Taking Wish ’s fourth quarter data for 2022 as an example, the on-time arrival rate ( OTD) of products on Wish reached 89%; the product refund rate decreased by 36% year-on-year, and the order cancellation rate decreased by 58% year-on-year .

In the past , the quality of Wish products was mixed and the delivery time was slow , which led to a poor user experience and a sharp decline in the number of users and active buyers. Although the user churn rate was still very high last year, Wish is making more changes to retain users.

Wish CEO Joe Yan said: "Despite the uncertain and challenging macroeconomic environment, 2022 has been a productive year for Wish . Although the transformation is still in its early stages, each of the foundational pillars has made tremendous progress. There is still a lot of work to do to get back on the path of profitability and sustainable growth in 2023. "

From 2017 to 2022, Wish has not been profitable, and the head coach has been changed again and again, but there has been no improvement. The previous interim CEO Joe Yan has now become the official CEO of Wish and a member of the company's board of directors. The task he shoulders is obviously very arduous .

With the third CEO in charge, can Wish break the dilemma?

Last November , Wish 's second CEO Vijay Talwar announced his resignation less than a year after taking office. At that time, Joe Yan became the temporary successor and became Wish's third CEO in 2022 .

Joe Yan, the new head coach of Wish, has a very rich resume. When he took over Wish, he was the operating partner of venture capital firm GGV Capital , but he had previously worked for many internationally renowned technology giants, including Alibaba Group Holding, Alphabet Inc. and Amazon .

At that time , Wish announced that Joe Yan was the interim successor and that the ContextLogic board of directors had hired a headhunting company to find a permanent CEO . However, many industry insiders believed that he would eventually become the official CEO and the so-called "temporary" was only a probation period given by the board of directors.

Last February, Wish announced that Vijay Talwar would succeed founder and former CEO Piotr Szulczewski as its second CEO, responsible for leading the strategic execution of Wish's transformation plan, improving the experience of users and merchants through interesting features, technological innovation and operational excellence, and enabling Wish to regain the market.

At that time , the share price of Wish's parent company Contextlogic rose by 10% due to this appointment , which once restored consumers and sellers' confidence in Wish . During Vijay Talwa 's tenure, Wish's NPS (word of mouth) doubled. But in the end, for unknown reasons, Vijay Talwa left after only 7 months in office.

Although Vijay Talwa failed to save the company from losses, he did achieve a lot during his tenure. As the new head coach, Joe Yan still has many urgent tasks to do in charge of Wish.

Joe Yan said that ensuring the stability of the team and business is the first priority . In addition, team members should be made aware of the company's long-term development direction and short-term business focus, and resources should be reasonably allocated and utilized to achieve short-term breakthroughs in business while taking into account long-term development.

There are internal troubles and externally, there is fierce competition for the market.

In the early days , Wish was very successful with its low-price strategy , but logistics and quality problems arose frequently, and both sellers and buyers were lost. Now it is difficult for it to regain the market .

Last year, Temu, which also focused on low prices and was nicknamed "Wish 2.0", made a strong debut in the United States, repeatedly topping the download charts and gaining a lot of attention. In just half a year, it has expanded its market to Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom, and will expand to more markets in the future.

As far as platform-based e-commerce is concerned, the competition among e-commerce giants such as Amazon, eBay, and AliExpress is becoming increasingly fierce. Nowadays, social e-commerce is also developing day by day, and social media giants such as TikTok have also gained considerable attention in the e-commerce field.

As the competition becomes increasingly fierce, can Joe Yan lead Wish to break through the siege and return to the top?

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