Text: Xiangshan Finance.
Towards the end of the year, Shede Liquor has recently (600702SH) suddenly announced a new round of management adjustments: Ni Qiang stepped down as chairman of the board of directors and chairman of the strategy committee of the board of directors and continued to serve as a director;Pu Jizhou will serve as the chairman of the board of directors and the chairman of the strategy committee of the board of directors, responsible for the overall governance of the companyWu Yifei is the co-chairman, and Tang Hui is the president.
Shede Liquor said that the personnel change is a normal management adjustment, and the production and operation of the listed company is stable and will not be affected.
In the eyes of some sensitive investors, the change of leadership at the end of the year may not be so simple.
After all, judging from the resume, Pu Jizhou is a veteran of Shede Liquor, while Ni Qiang was once a core executive of the major shareholder Fosun. In other words, the resignation of Ni Qiang and the succession of Pu Jizhou can actually be understood as a change in the management of Shede Liquor by the new and old factions of Shede and Fosun.
Therefore, behind this, there is either a potential evaluation of Fosun's past annual performance, or an advance layout of next year's liquor consumption market, or both.
However, just when all kinds of speculation arose, another news of Shede Liquor Industry's "From January 1, 2024, the ex-factory price of 500ml taste Shede (including the fifth generation and celebration packs) distributors will be increased by 20 yuan bottles", which directly led to the stock price, but also vaguely explained the reason for the change of leadership at the end of the year......
Using price increases to combat the slowdown in growth, Pu Jizhou's "three fires".
In fact, if you just look at the year-end change of the head of Shede Liquor, there may be a variety of interpretations, but if you link it to the current "taste Shede" price increase after Pu Jizhou took office, it is not difficult to seeThe end of both storylines seems to point to Shede's fundamental performance and stock price performance.
Tianyancha APP data shows that in 2023, during Ni Qiang's tenure, Shede Liquor achieved revenue of 52 in the first three quarters4.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 1362%；Attributable net profit of 129.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 793%。At first glance, it seems to be good, but in fact, compared to the same period in 2022, the revenue was 28% and the profit was 23With a growth rate of 76%, Shede Liquor has shown a significant slowdown trend.
Then, in the first three quarters of the poor performance, and this year's liquor market is upside down, which makes the brand's pressure space for dealers further shrink, Shede Liquor wants to lead the annual revenue to 21 in the fourth quarter of the same period last yearThe growth rate of 86% is also quite difficult.
Even Shede Liquor is still growing throughout this year, but the growth rate may be slightly conservative compared to last year.
At the same time, the decline in Shede Liquor also represents the gross profit margin indicator of the brand's market competitiveness, from 78 in the first three quarters of last year34%, all the way down to 75 in the same period this year28%。This is definitely not good news for Shede Liquor, which has already secured the mid-to-high-end market, but wants to go further.
Therefore, when various weak signals of fundamentals are transmitted to the capital market, as of December 25**, Shede Liquor is 887 yuan shares, compared with 154 at the beginning of the year65 yuan shares (January 3**) shrank by more than 40%, and the market value evaporated by 229 during the year3.1 billion yuan, the shrinkage scale is second only to the head Wuliangye, Yanghe shares, Luzhou Laojiao and Shanxi Fenjiu.
So in this situation of internal and external troubles, it seems reasonable to let the more professional "veteran" Pu Jizhou replace Ni Qiang, who was "airborne" from the major shareholder Fosun.
In this regard,Pu Jizhou has indeed lived up to expectations, judging from the recent "taste willing" price increase, it seems that it has found a breakthrough point to quickly improve performance in the short term.
For this price increase, some investors interpret it as: the price increase means that the "destocking" of the channel is basically over, and now dealers need to replenish inventory. However, as of December 28, Xiangshan Finance has observed from multiple e-commerce platforms that the terminal price of Taste Shede seems to be still in the inverted stage, so whether the channel inventory of Shede has been completed may be further confirmed by comparing the inventory in the 2023 annual report and the first quarter report of next year.
However, judging from the logic and results of the price increase,Regardless of Shede Liquor's channel inventory, its gross profit performance in the first quarter of next year seems to improve.
This profit is related to the market, but some of it may also be squeezed out of dealers.
You must know that the price increase of high-end liquor such as Moutai and Guojiao 1573 is different from the tonality of consolidating the brandThe price increase of mid-range or sub-high-end liquor such as Shede Liquor and Jiannanchun, without greatly crossing the ** belt, is essentially testing the bottom line to the market or distributorsto quickly improve revenue performance.
Especially in the current embarrassing and fragile mid-to-high-end liquor consumption market, even if Shede Liquor takes the lead in completing the channel inventory, dealers may still not be able to sell at a good price, but they will also be unwilling to make up too much inventory in the window period at this time because of the backlog and inversion of omni-channel liquor inventory.
After all, for dealers, at this time, a large amount of purchase at the original price is willing to taste, not only may sell one at a loss, but also occupy a lot of capital cash flow and warehousing costs. In this case, the sales enthusiasm of distributors will decline sharply, and the performance growth of Shede Liquor may become more slow and ......
In addition, if the liquor industry is willing to take the time-limited price reduction of Guojiao 1573 and let the dealers play the game of exchanging price for volume, although it is logically feasible, the premise is that the brand's market positioning and channel management must be tenacious and powerful enough, so as not to self-defeatingly disrupt the brand's entire dealer price system. This is an almost impossible "risky" choice for Shede Liquor, which has just ended the period of rapid channel expansion and stabilized the mid-to-high-end brand market.
In this way, the Shede liquor industry can only "taste the ex-factory price of the dealers", and force the dealers to release greater sales enthusiasm in the Spring Festival consumption season by moderately squeezing channel profits, so as to quickly reverse the fundamental performance of the Shede liquor industry.
The more differentiated the liquor, the more reluctant it is to be inseparable from the old liquor strategy
In fact, from the perspective of the long-term development of Shede Liquor, Pu Jizhou's appointment is an inevitable result.
Because in addition to his qualifications and experience, Pu Jizhou is also the main designer and leader of the "old wine strategy" of Shede Liquor. WhileBehind the old liquor strategy, in essence, it is the key to the current Shede liquor industry's impact on the high-end brand, and it is also the core to resist the differentiation of liquor and the sinking and squeeze of high-end famous liquor".
You must know that a major trend in the current liquor market is the polarization of the low-end and high-end of "drinking less and drinking better". The market of low-end liquor differentiation often means integration and substitution for mid-to-high-end liquor, so only when the brand now stabilizes the image of mid-to-high-end liquor can it better achieve large-scale growth in the future market.
Among them, the breakdown,The sinking of high-end famous liquors, such as Moutai series liquor, will squeeze all grade brands except high-end, and then extend downward, that is, to form a hierarchical effect of big fish eating small fish and small fish eating shrimp. In this way, if Shede Liquor can stand more firmly in the mid-to-high-end field, then it can eat more in the downward market at the same time, and be eaten less by Wuliangye......
However, the embarrassing thing is that although the old wine strategy has been implemented for many years, "how to transform the advantages of old wine into brand upgrade advantages" has always been troubled by Shede. So much so that although Shede Liquor has more than 100,000 tons of aged high-quality base wine, and can also wrestle with high-end famous wines in terms of products, it is a big gap in terms of high-end branding.
Leaving aside Moutai Wuliangye for the time being, let's just say that the gap between Shede and Luzhou Laojiao is very obvious. In terms of gross profit margin, the gross profit margin of Luzhou Laojiao from 2020 to 2022 is as follows. 70% and 8659%, Shede Liquor respectively. 81% and 7772%。Especially in the past two years, the gross profit margin performance of Shede Liquor has declined slightly.
This shows that Shede's old wine strategy may not have brought more value to Shede. The gap in this is not to say that Luzhou Laojiao is better than Shede Laojiu, but more of the reason may be in marketing.
In the current liquor industry, when the differentiation of the liquor industry intensifies, the brand concentration continues to increase, and the overall inventory pressure of the industry, there are actually two things that liquor companies can do: improve quality and brand.
In terms of improving quality, Shede has made a lot of preparations. For example, it is the first to use the real vintage logo of the double year, and summarizes the "six old" brewing techniques of old cellar pool, old quyi, old brewing art, old sake lees, old craftsman, and old base wine, all of which are improving quality.
But in the matter of improving the brand, it is not good enough.
For example, high-end wine is "reluctant", which seems to be a masterpiece to enter the ultra-high-end market, but it is not pleasing in marketing.
It can even be said, "A good hand, a bad hand." ”
On the one hand, brands such as the way of giving, taste, wisdom, and reluctance seem to have rolled out the exhibition line, covering the high-end, mid-to-high-end market, but it seems to be a little messy on the consumer side. BecauseIn the field of liquor, there is a theory of "brand boundary", that is, the number of sub-brands that can be driven by a main brand is limited, and once there are too many sub-brands, it will reduce the recognition of consumers and even dilute the value of the main brand.
In contrast, Wuliangye Puwu and Wuliangchun, Luzhou Laojiao's Guojiao 1573 and Tequ, the brand differentiation is clearer, and the force point of high-tech is also clearer.
On the other hand, compared with the rich philosophical and cultural connotation of the brand itself, it is reluctant to lack a core "overall situation" view in the internal brand tonality, which is an important core of the high-end marketing of liquor brands.
When everyone is discussing that young people don't drink liquor, why can Jiang Xiaobai take down young people?The core lies in value recognition.
The consumer group of high-end liquor is still dominated by high-end business people, and this part of the people buy liquor, mainly to buy a brand identity. For example, the Dream Blue and Sea Blue series that have risen in the past two years. In fact, it also depends on the recognition of the brand core.
Only this kind of consumer recognition can finally be transformed into brand value and real gross profit margin. Everyone likes to drink old wine, and how to make more people like old wine is the core.
However, it is obvious that Ni Qiang, an executive of Fosun, who came from the airborne system, did not answer this question well, so now Shede and Fosun can only hope that Pu Jizhou, the original designer of the "old wine strategy", can re-find the high-end interpretation of the Shede brand, so as to truly give full play to the core advantages of the old wine strategy.
So when the new management represented by the "new handsome" Pu Jizhou debuts, where will Shede Liquor go in the future, and whether it can realize the "tens of billions of lofty words" at that time, all this may be witnessed by time ......
Disclaimer of WarrantiesThis article is based on the company's statutory disclosures and public information, but the author does not guarantee the completeness and timeliness of the information. Another: **There are risks, and you need to be cautious when entering the market. The article does not constitute investment advice, and whether to invest or not should be determined by yourself.