**: EMBA Center of Xiamen University Text: Jin Nanxiang.
Xiamen University's EMBA, which has ranked first in student satisfaction for 18 consecutive years, has always been carefully organized and strictly required for the visiting and Xi activities of student enterprises.
Led by Professor Li Changqing, Director of the EMBA Center of Xiamen University, and organized by Mr. Jiang Yuchun, the alumni director of the Center, the "Famous Enterprises Fighting Array" visited the Seven Wolves Group, the visiting students were required to conduct research on the visited enterprises and write an investigation report before the visit, such as the visiting students should discuss with a group with a specific research direction and put forward opinions and suggestions to the visited enterprises at the end of the visit.
Although I once complained about this, thinking that this belongs to writing a research report without seeing the research subject, but in practice, I found that conducting research in advance can indeed avoid oversight, and can enter the research state faster. Of course, the harvest of this visit is so great that I feel it is necessary to write a report on it, sort out my own gains, and give a little reference to the students who did not participate.
Reminiscing about the wolf's past
When we talk about the cultural phenomenon of wolves today, what do you think of?may say Jiang Rong's wolf totem, and may also mention Huawei's wolf culture, but if the time goes back to 30 years ago, about wolves, for the Jinjiang clothing brand Seven Wolves, it must be an unavoidable topic.
In 1990, Zhou Yongwei, a bank executive, and his younger brothers Zhou Shaoxiong and Zhou Shaoming founded Seven Wolves**. At the beginning of its establishment, it was aware of the value of the brand, and spent a lot of money to design the company VI and continue to use it today. Since the 90s, the brand image has become popular all over the country and has become a well-known brand. In 2004, Seven Wolves Industrial was successfully listed (002029SZ), becoming the first garment enterprise in Fujian to be listed on the Shenzhen SME Board. Since its establishment, Seven Wolves has won numerous awards, such as "Famous Trademark of Fujian Province", "China Famous Trademark", etc., and the jacket of Seven Wolves' fist products has won the first place in the comprehensive market share for 23 consecutive years. In 2012, the company's revenue exceeded 3.4 billion yuan, 13 times that of the beginning of the listing, and there were more than 4,000 stores across the country.
However, like other business brands, Seven Wolves has faced common challenges in the industry in recent years - the impact of e-commerce and sportswear. With the development of Internet technology, e-commerce has challenged traditional retail channels, and at the same time, the changes of the times and lifestyles, consumers are gradually younger and pursue health, are keen on sports, and pay more and more attention to the functionality and comfort of clothing, so the market share of business clothing is slowly squeezed by sports and leisure clothing, and under the challenges, the sales of seven wolves have been hovering around 30-3.5 billion. How to break through the encirclement and reshape the brand has become the subject of Seven Wolves.
However, in the third quarter of this year, according to the public financial report, Seven Wolves' revenue was **5%, and the net profit rose by 95% year-on-year67%, showing a rebound trend, and at the same time, the company's gross profit margin has also been repaired, exceeding the industry average. Behind this eye-catching achievement is a strategic transformation or the recovery of the industry?With a preliminary understanding of the industry and the Seven Wolves and thinking about the problems, we followed the "Famous Enterprise Fighting Array" visit of the EMBA Center of Xiamen University and walked into the Seven Wolves factory together.
Hunt for wolf tracks
Our first stop at Seven Wolves was to visit the ** museum inside the factory. In the spare time of waiting for other students, I took a look at the brand store in the museum, the store space is not large, the decoration is exquisite and fashionable, and the ** ready-to-wear of various brands under the Seven Wolves is displayed, and I really feel that the brand is changing in the direction of youth.
After walking around for a while, the visiting students were almost there, and we followed the docent in the museum to visit the museum. The museum has more than 10,000 square meters, renovated by the original factory, divided into several exhibition areas with different themes, I am more impressed by the enterprise development, ancient **, wolf culture and ancient houses. For example, the enterprise development exhibition area is to introduce the entrepreneurial process of the Zhou brothers from the cloth industry, including brand concept, products, social responsibility and other aspects. Of course, we have done some homework before the visit and have some understanding of this information, but through the museum's multi-way display, we can better understand the difficulty of starting a business and the enterprising spirit of the Zhou brothers.
The short film just introduced the seven qualities of the wolf: bravery, newness, perseverance, gathering, cherishment, ambition, and inspiration. "The narrator dismantled them one by one in the wolf culture exhibition area. From the character of these wolves, seven wolves have the courage to go to the sea to start a business, self-improvement, cohesion and innovation.
The museum exhibits and display methods are very rich, and the flow of the tour is also very smooth, and the visit does give me a new understanding of the costumes and the culture of the seven wolves, but this does not answer my questions.
The transformation of the wolf
After visiting the museum, Dr. Chen Xinwei, CEO of Seven Wolves Group, gave a speech on the theme of "Seven Wolves Transformation Road". Dr. Chen's sharing was very informative, covering all business segments of the entire Seven Wolves Group. Since its establishment in 1990, Seven Wolves Group has developed into a diversified modern enterprise group with brand clothing industry as its main business, integrating investment, asset management and cultural tourism operation. The group has three major business platforms, the main clothing business - Seven Wolves Industry, the equity investment platform - Seven Wolves Holdings, and the real estate cultural tourism operation platform - Xiamen Henghe Cultural Tourism.
The Transformation Report is divided into three parts:
First, the transformation of the main clothing industry. Mainly in two aspects, category focus and extension mergers and acquisitions. In the face of the adverse effects of the industry and the epidemic, the company's management thought about the strategy, and finally decided to focus on the strategy and determine the jacket as the core of the rebirth of the Seven Wolves brand. Because Seven Wolves has a good foundation in this category, it has been the No. 1 market share for 23 consecutive years. In September this year, the company did two major things to build momentum for the brand, one is to bring a new product supercar reversible jacket to Milan Fashion Week, and opened the first jacket in Changsha *** As of October 2023, the sales of the Seven Wolves jacket expert store increased by 106% year-on-year, the sales of jackets increased by 203% year-on-year, and the proportion of young users was 70%, and the transformation has achieved initial results.
In terms of mergers and acquisitions, Seven Wolves acquired the rights to operate in Greater China for Karl Lagerfeld, the brand of the fashion godfather Galeries Lafayette, who still left a legacy after his death. Through the promotion of the past few years, the brand has set up more than 60 physical stores across the country. Karl Lagerfeld's advantage in fashion is just enough to complement the gap in the seven wolves. Last year, the epidemic affected the performance, but this year it is basically a breakeven, and the company is confident that the brand's revenue will increase by 100% next year. In the future, Seven Wolves will also rely on the needs of the main business to carry out other mergers and acquisitions.
Clothing has always been the main business of Seven Wolves, this core business idea has not changed, and the original intention of building the company into a century-old clothing enterprise has not changed. Since the listing of Seven Wolves in 04, the actual controller has not only never been **, but even increased his holdings, and few listed companies can do this.
Second, on the transformation of the equity investment sector. Since 2000, Seven Wolves Group has been involved in financial equity investment, and has expanded from bank equity to first-class insurance. The main investment projects include Industrial Bank, Bank of Xiamen, Chongqing Rural Commercial Bank, Zhongshan**, Sunshine Insurance, UnionPay Commerce, etc., to share the fruits of China's rapid economic development. In 2009, on the one hand, it strategically invested in Shenzhen Capital (China's largest local venture capital institution), and at the same time established its own venture capital platform, Seven Wolves Venture Capital, and gradually laid out the field of venture capital. After years of accumulation and precipitation, deep cultivation of different tracks, Seven Wolves Venture Capital has been divided into three teams: Qisheng Capital, Acorn Capital and Qicheng Capital, focusing on laser, semiconductor, chip design, new materials, new energy, advanced manufacturing and other subdivisions, and temporarily emerging in CVC investment, forming a small ecosystem of optoelectronic industry, chip industry and new energy industry.
Dr. Chen shared with us some successful cases in the venture capital sector, such as the investment in CATL: "CATL is the only company that started from a pre-Series A valuation of 18 billion yuan to go public. For example, Montage Technology invested: "Montage is the leader of memory interface chips, which was privatized and returned to China to be listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board in 19 years. For example, the investment in Keyi Hongyuan: "The valuation of our A round of investment with Huawei was very low, but it is the only one in China that can make a light source for lithography machines, and it is the national "stuck neck" technology. ”
Third, the transformation of Seven Wolves Group's real estate development to cultural tourism operation. "We are not developing real estate as a fast-moving consumer goods, but as a means of asset allocation to resist inflation. Therefore, the progress of our projects is not fast, but the quality is very good, such as the Henghe Qishang project we developed, which has won many honors. Many developers buy their own properties, and they say that their own projects cannot reach this level of quality. "At present, the projects operated by Seven Wolves Cultural Tourism mainly include Seven Shang Hotel (the hotel has been selected as the world's top luxury hotel alliance, with a Ctrip score of 4.).9), Qixu Reef and Qixu Bell Tower Hotel (both are one of the world's luxury boutique hotels), Xiheshan Tieguanyin Cultural Park (national AAAA tourist attraction).
At the end of his speech, Dr. Chen introduced the transformation of Seven Wolves Group's quasi-financial platform to industrial operation, and participated in the consumer goods fields such as Yongchun Old Vinegar, Qingxiangyuan (Zhongba Soy Sauce), prefabricated dishes, and airline food through mergers and acquisitions. Dr. Chen said that these are basic consumer goods like the main clothing business, in fact, there are some commonalities, and investing in these products can avoid stepping into the unknown field, and you can avoid the loss of cognition.
Wolves' dreams and persistence
After Dr. Chen's speech, the visiting groups of students also had a heated discussion with Dr. Chen on the research direction of their own group.
After listening to Dr. Chen's speech and interactive discussions, my doubts were solved. The man is not ambitious, he is born with an eight-foot body, and the seven wolves are still the enterprising wolves we used to know, but it is now more mature and wiser. The persistence of the seven wolves in the main business is in line with the description of the ability to resist risks in economics, that is, they don't care how many wells there are, and whether they can resist risks ultimately depends on the deepest well;Seven wolves' insistence on listed companies reflects a sense of responsibility and ethics of an enterpriseThe separation of the main business and the investment project of the seven wolves reflects the pragmatic change of the Minnan people and the unity of "separating the industry without separating the family".
It is not easy to do a century-old brand, a hundred years, people's aesthetics will change, people's needs will change, especially the economy will exist in several cycles, to keep up with the changes, through the cycle, and the times at the same frequency in order to build a long-lasting business, to achieve the dream of a century-old brand.
Director Li Changqing thanked Seven Wolves Group for its warm reception and careful organization of the visit to the "Famous Enterprises Fighting Array", analyzed and summarized some of the measures of Seven Wolves in the process of enterprise operation, and put forward his own suggestions, hoping that the students could apply the knowledge learned from the visit to the famous enterprises to their own business activities.
I wish the 33-year-old seven wolves a steady march towards a hundred years.
Thanks to Dr. Xinwei Chen for his wonderful sharing and guidance and correction of this article).