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After resigning as chairman of Suning Tesco for two and a half years, Zhang Jindong recently returned to the public eye as the chairman of Suning Holding Group.
Suning, who is fighting, does not allow anyone to lie down, and wants to fight a turnaround battle against the industry and society in 2024. On January 2-3, Suning Tesco held the 2024 annual work deployment meeting, at which Zhang Jindong shouted to all employees and established Suning's goal in 2024 - to achieve comprehensive profitability.
In recent years, although Suning Tesco has experienced several power changes internally, and even Zhang Jindong is only left as honorary chairman, but in 2024, Zhang Jindong will return to the front-line deployment of business, and the "founder of Suning" seems to be returning to the stage**.
Since the beginning of the year, Suning Tesco has also held 2024 strategic cooperation meetings with Beko, Panasonic Ice Wash, and Midea one after another, announcing a number of cooperation plans to accelerate the race to the home appliance track.
Suning wants to fight a "turnaround battle".
In order to achieve the goal of full profitability in 2024, Suning Tesco said that it will build three capability middle platforms and two operation platforms to deeply reform the organizational management and operation mechanism.
Specific measures include the establishment of a user service platform, a commodity management platform, a store empowerment platform, as well as a first-chain operation platform and a retail operation platform.
At the business level, Zhang Jindong also put forward clear requirements, mainly focusing on three major businesses:
The first is the offline market, after Suning Tesco closed a lot of loss-making bad stores in the liquidity crisis, and now the goal is to "open big stores and good stores".
The second is to continue to expand the sinking markets such as urban and rural areas, counties and towns, and will open more than 3,000 new stores throughout the year.
The third is to change the previous e-commerce business development model and become more open, including cooperating with major traffic platforms, giving full play to the advantages of retail capabilities such as first-class chain and logistics after-sales to achieve rapid expansion.
For the current Suning.com, the challenges in 2024 are no easier than in 2023.
From an internal point of view,Its previous capital debt problem has not been completely solved,From an external point of view,Suning Tesco is located in the home appliance digital 3C retail industry,It is a "surplus competition" field,The company needs to face Ali、Jingdong、Pinduoduo and other e-commerce giants are suppressed,It is even more difficult to achieve a breakthrough。
According to the financial report data, in the first three quarters of 2023, Suning Tesco achieved an operating income of 4865.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 1239%；Net loss attributable to shareholders of the listed company was 260.7 billion yuan, the loss narrowed.
Although Suning's losses are gradually narrowing, the external situation is still grim, and for Zhang Jindong and Suning, Suning Tesco will face a long-lasting torment and struggle in the future.
Zhang Jindong never left
As a giant in China's home appliance retail industry, Suning has staged several top-level power changes in recent years.
In 2021, after Suning fell into a liquidity crisis, it experienced a series of negative news such as equity pledge and emergency suspension, at that time, the founder Zhang Jindong resigned from the position of chairman and transferred to the "honorary chairman", and the core personnel of the Ali system represented by Huang Mingduan entered the Suning system.
Since then, Mr. Zhang has rarely appeared in public, and it was once thought that the retail giant would fade out of business.
However, this is not the case, in June 2022, Jiangsu Suning Cinema Development was established with a registered capital of 10 million yuan. Suning Cultural Investment Management, Suning Cinema Line Investment (Beijing), the legal person of the enterprise, is actually controlled by Zhang Jindong.
In April 2023, Zhang Jindong's "descendant" Ren Jun became the chairman of Suning Tesco, which was interpreted by the outside world as the abdication of the Ali department and Zhang Jindong's return to power.
As the founder of the company, Zhang Jindong's appeal and control of the company are irreplaceable, but in the face of the current situation and changes in the e-commerce industry, it is still unknown whether the former home appliance retail giant can break through again.