Hunan bravely out of Hunan Province, regardless of the north and south of the Tianshan Mountains or the southeast of the land can be triumphant. ButIn the new century, all the consumer Hunan troops fought in other provinces: Needless to say, the well-known Wen Heyou, tea and pleasant face, finally cowered and stretched out one foot, and soon came back with his tail between his legsNew Chinese bakeries such as Momo Dim Sum Bureau, which once went to Beijing and Shanghai, have also withdrawn all stores outside the province and returned to Hunan to survive.
Now, the same doom looms over Prosperity Preferred: a unicorn that straddles consumer and internet.
A thousand miles of rout
Venture capital used to chase and run, and there were waves of listing rumorsThe liveliness of the year particularly reflects today's loneliness
When retreating from Guangdong at the end of 2023, Xingsheng preferred to reduce losses and focus resources on use. It is hard to imagine that only two years ago, Xingsheng Preferred once accounted for the first market share of the community in Guangdong.
At that time, due to its new model of "pre-sale + self-pickup", coupled with the birth of the stay-at-home policy of the epidemic, this kind of Internet grocery shopping business was favored by many capitals, especially in 2022, but this year has also become the final peak period.
At its peak, Xingsheng's preferred business had reached 18 provinces and cities. As a player who started as a traditional community supermarket and does not have the genes of a large Internet factory, it cannot but be said to be a miracle.
The defeat from Guangdong was only another in a series of routs in which Xingsheng preached. In 2020, it had reached the target of 40 billion yuan in GMV. But after three years of fighting, in 2023, only half of the scale will be left.
The Internet giants are running to enter the market, squeezing the living space of the original small players such as Xingsheng Preferred and Shihuituan, and the Internet giants generally burn money and subsidies in order to quickly "stake their land", which also leads to the accelerated exhaustion of the entire community industry.
At the end of 2020, the State Administration for Market Supervision issued new regulations on "nine prohibitions" in the community, restricting low-price dumping and disorderly competition in the community.
In November 2022, when Xingsheng preferred to shut down the business in 4 provinces and cities of Henan, Shandong, Sichuan, and ChongqingThe market is already debating whether it can survive 2023. This is the same tone as in 2021, when the market talked about whether the Hunan supermarket boss BBK could survive 2022.
In April 2023, Xingsheng Preferred will withdraw from Fujian, and only 6 provinces will be left in the national territory: Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Shaanxi, Guangxi, and Guangdong.
It turns out that backgammon did pass out, but Xingsheng Preferred is still able to take care of himself. It's just that he is emaciating very quickly. Xingsheng's preferred business sphere of influence has shrunk from the whole country, leaving only the three neighboring provinces of Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi.
Earn money from the "poor".
As the actual controller of Xingsheng Preferred, Yue Lihua's starting road is full of reckless legends.
If the Chinese pay attention to inheritance, then,The commissary opened by his parents in a small county town in Hunan is the starting point of Yue Lihua's dream of a community supermarket chain "Furong Prosperity".
At the beginning of the business, he proposed that with a small franchise fee can open a Furong prosperous, franchisees do not have to worry about the purchase of goods, this game touched the hearts of many people, scrambling to join the chain. The rapid growth of the scale allowed Yue Lihua not only to drink the first soup, but also to get a large piece of meat, and made a name for himself in the industry.
Yue Lihua started from a remote small county, and the thriving enclosure of Furong has also gone through the road of "rural areas surrounding cities", so the industry ridiculed that his net worth of tens of billions came from making money from the "poor". But it is undeniable that providing cost-effective products in a more convenient way is the most important reason why community supermarket chains can grow.
Xingsheng is also Yue Lihua's second entrepreneurship based on this idea. Moreover, it was once more successful than Fleur Prosperity, which he regarded as the foundation of his life.
According to incomplete statistics from public information, from 2018 to 2021, Xingsheng Preferred completed a total of 8 rounds of financing, with a financing amount of at least more than 5 billion US dollars (about 35 billion yuan), and the investors included Tencent, Today Capital, KKR, JD.com, Sequoia China and many other well-known venture capitals.
As early as September 2020, Xu Xin of Today's Capital disclosed that he had raised 5 times in two years and invested in Xingsheng Preferred 11500 million yuan. It is also rumored that Meituan offered $10 billion to acquire Xingsheng Preferred, but Yue Lihua refused.
Although Yue Lihua's reason for refusing was full of emotion, it was obvious that the premium offered by Meituan at that time was not high——In July 2021, Xingsheng Preferred received a strategic investment of 300 million US dollars, and the investors are Ontarioteachers, a retired teacher in Ontario, and the post-investment valuation was exposed to reach 12 billion US dollars (about 85 billion yuan).
However,After several rounds of financing, although he stepped on the wind, he failed to earn the money of the "poor" as he wished. On the one hand, it is difficult to make a profit just by selling vegetables, and the unit price is too low;But when they turn around and sell high-priced goods such as clothes, consumers don't buy it. It has not established its own "moat" and the prosperity of the profit model, and has deeply experienced the "volume" of China's Internet enterprises.
"Volume" is just one word
Xingsheng Preferred used to be the winner of the "Community **" war. Orange Heart Preferred retreated, Shihui Group and Tongcheng Life went bankrupt, and Xingsheng Preferred survived tenaciously.
But,The survival logic of Xingsheng is "rolled" by the Internet giants: First, it is highly subsidized to absorb traffic, and burn money for growth. Consumers who are attracted by low prices are far from being able to form a stable consumer system.
It's not just consumers who need to "burn money" for bad things. Xingsheng Preferred was the first to create the "10% commission" rule to attract the head of the group, but with the continuous tightening of funds, the promised high commission made it difficult for Xingsheng Preferential to ride the tiger.
Hibiscus Prosperity was born from "Hibiscus Prosperity", and there is a natural advantage, that is, in the community distribution, you can get the first hand;However, compared with the sons of Internet giants such as "Duoduo Buy", its disadvantages are more conspicuous. Xingsheng Preferred's main business relies too much on offline chain convenience stores, resulting in no other way for its online users to monetize, and the advantages of the local ** chain rooted in Hunan for many years do not mean that they can eat all the country. In fact, it can be seen from the rhythm of Xingsheng Preferred's retreat that the overly strong "Hunan" atmosphere has limited the pace of its national development.
The prosperity of "rushing to the doctor in a hurry" is preferredIn addition to constantly retreating from other provinces, he has also tried to open up a separate clothing e-commerce entrance, from a community e-commerce platform focusing on fresh food to a clothing business. From the perspective of sales logic, it is not a high-frequency rigid demand;As far as the product itself is concerned, it can't win Pinduoduo. The result, of course, is a wordless ending.
Dare to ask where the road is
If the rise of Furong is said to be prosperous, it comes from the dividends of the new era of consumption expansion;The ups and downs of prosperity and optimization are undoubtedly teased by the times.
Looking at the entire industry, whether it is Xingsheng Preferred, Shihuituan and Tongcheng Life as the "Old Three Regiments", or the menacing "New Three Regiments" Meituan Preferred, Duoduo Grocery Shopping, and Taocai Caicai, there is actually no winner.
The profit model of the community has not yet been fully run, and this competition has become a pure money-burning competition. Even "People**" once publicly criticized the capital fever of the community**: "Don't just worry about the flow of a few bundles of cabbage and a few catties of fruit. ”
However, for Xingsheng Preferred, shutting down a large area of sites to "survive with broken arms" is not a bad thing at the moment. Xingsheng Preferred, after entering other cities, it cannot reproduce its success in its base camp Hunan, and the most important thing is that the profit model cannot be replicated in a large area. Therefore,Putting aside the scale theory of blindly staring at market share, returning attention to profitability itself is the long-term survival strategy of enterprises. On this track, find a way to cooperate with the entire ** chain for a win-win situation, rather than really grabbing business with "small businessmen and vegetable farmers", in order to find opportunities for commercial innovation and development.
But before re-entering the wind, prosperity is preferredAs an Internet company, this road must be impassable；And the venture capital that was generous in the early stage is the urine that has always been the icing on the cake and never sends charcoal in the snow. If you can't get the money, you can save some money first。How to survive safely is the top priority of Xingsheng this winter.
*: Foothills Kancai.