Recently, CITIC Publishing Group held the "Shaping and Constructing: CITIC Publishing 2024 Partner Conference" at the CITIC Building, and the conference released the 2023 tribute authors of CITIC Publishing, who are Charlie Munger and Henry Kissinger.
The conference also released CITIC Publishing's 2023 Best Books, Authors of the Year, and Partners of the Year.
At the meeting, Chen Wei, Deputy Secretary of the Party Committee and General Manager of CITIC Publishing Group, introduced that in 2023, under the overall decline of the publishing market, CITIC Publishing will outperform the market and maintain its leading position in the market, and the book publishing business will have a market share of more than 3% in the book market throughout the year, ranking first in the market among independent publishing houses. In the traditional segments, CITIC Publishing continued to lead the market in the categories of economics and management, psychological self-help and biography, with children ranking second in the market and art rising to third in the market throughout the year. In 2023, CITIC Publishing will publish the sci-fi series "Blood and Rust" through the AIGC digital intelligence publishing platform, which will be officially released and receive a lot of attention from the outside world.
Fang Xi, Executive Editor-in-Chief of CITIC Publishing Group, Zhang Zhao, General Manager of CITIC Publishing Group Children's Group, and Shen Jiale, General Manager of Book Distribution Group of CITIC Publishing Group, also shared their industry observations and insights from different perspectives and dimensions.
On the same day, Cai Lei, the representative of the author of 2023, the former vice president of JD.com, and his wife, and Duan Rui, the founder of Icebreaker Station, came to the scene and gave a keynote speech; At the same time, Li Yongle, the author of CITIC Publishing's 2024 new book and a science popularizer and middle school physics teacher, Geng Huajun, the founder of the Planetary Research Institute, the creator of the "This is China Series" and "What is Chongqing", and Wu Xiaobo, a well-known financial author and author of "The Biography of Moutai", were invited to share their observations and thoughts on education, the narrative of the times and the current business.
At the scene, Wu Xiaobo told everyone the creation story of his new work "The Legend of Moutai" at the beginning of 2024. He admitted that Moutai Group is completely different from the companies he paid attention to in the past, and it is a particularly slow enterprise, which makes him very curious and finally decided to write this book.
January 11-13,The 2024 Beijing Book Ordering Fair will be held at the China International Exhibition Center (Chaoyang Pavilion), and CITIC Publishing will have its booth in Hall A of Hall 1, looking forward to exchanging and recommending industry partners and readers.
New books on the shelves].
Title: "The Biography of Moutai".
ISBN: 9787521761917
Author: Wu Xiaobo.
Publisher: CITIC Press.
Editor's Choice
Financial writer Wu Xiaobo has been working on a new corporate biography for six years. The book comes with a manual of Moutai Six Methods and 12 Styles and a pull page of Moutai memorabilia.
It took three years to create, went to Moutai Town for more than 20 investigations, consulted a large number of historical materials, interviewed more than 100 people, and revealed the Chinese secrets of Moutai.
Why should you read "The Legend of Moutai"?
How is the Moutai brand cultivated? What is unique about Moutai's strategy? Moutai has become a well-known brand, is there anything to learn from?
After reading this book, you will have a new understanding of the world's leading wine companies by market capitalization and China's A-share benchmark manufacturing enterprises.
Can Moutai learn?
The specimen value of Moutai lies not only in its endowment characteristics, but also in its universality.
It is a sample of the evolution of China's traditional handicraft industry to modern manufacturing enterprises, a value embodiment of Chinese cultural elements in the consumer goods market, and a classic case of enterprises forming competitive advantages through cultural marketing and anchoring.
What can companies learn from Moutai?
Moutai provides a set of strategic models based on value innovation and brand building models of China's super consumer goods, and its experience is quite enlightening and universal.
Introduction
On the ingredient list of Moutai, only three ingredients are written: sorghum, wheat, and water.
How did the Moutai people use these three simple, common, and worthless local substances to brew the world's most complex, rich, and expensive liquor? As a state-owned enterprise, how does Moutai drive the economic development of the area around Moutai Town? Even China's liquor industry has changed its direction, which has changed the aesthetic taste of contemporary Chinese consumption, and even become a symbol of Chinese culture?
It is a long story, full of mystery and serendipity, which is at once commercial, cultural, historical, and extremely contemporary and representative.
The book takes stock of the major events in the development of Moutai from 1951 to the present, and sorts out the process of enterprise growth. Based on field research and interviews with key figures, combined with the meticulous observation and unique thinking of financial writer Wu Xiaobo from his personal perspective, this paper presents a panoramic view of Moutai's transformation process from cultural accumulation to brand building, and takes Moutai as the axis to look back on the history of China's commercial and economic system reform, explore the secrets of China's leading liquor companies that are famous all over the world, and interpret the growth logic of China's local brand development and innovation.
About the Author
Financial writer, founder of "Wu Xiaobo Channel" and "Blue Lion Publishing", perennial engaged in company research. His works such as "The Great Defeat" (I and II), "Thirty Years of Turbulence", "Ten Years of Turbulence, Big Fish in Water", "Gains and Losses of Economic Reform in Past Dynasties", and "The Biography of Tencent" have all become bestsellers. His works have twice been selected as one of the top 10 books of the year by Asia Weekly.
Wonderful book excerpts
Foreword "Six Methods of Moutai": What to Learn from Moutai?
There are only five words in the ingredient list of Moutai: sorghum, wheat, and water.
I wrote "The Biography of Moutai" just to answer one question-
Why are these three most ordinary and humble substances on earth able to make the most complex and rich liquor, and become the world's most valuable liquor company and China's highest A** manufacturing company?
From "Tencent Biography" to "Moutai Biography".
I'm a very planned person, but I can't stand up for some jobs that will pop up out of nowhere, like a "curious cat" hitting me on the waist.
Writing about Tencent and Moutai is a similar experience.
In the spring of 2011, two founders of Tencent, Zhang Zhidong and Xu Chenye, came to Hangzhou to find me, and I asked them to drink new tea in Longjing Village. As soon as they sat down, they said, "Can you write a Tencent book?" At that time, the sensational business world "3Q war" had just been fought, Tencent won the market but lost **, from Ma Huateng to all the Tencent people were very depressed and depressed, they finally thought of writing a book to explain their growth history and business logic clearly.
I thought about it for two months, and finally agreed to take the job, and I made two conditions: I wanted to be able to interview the people I wanted to interview and access all the original materials, and the company would not interfere with my creative freedom. Tencent readily agreed.
Tencent Biography was originally planned to be published in 2013 to coincide with the company's 15th anniversary. Unexpectedly, it took six full years to write, and it was not officially published until the end of 2016. During this period, Tencent launched WeChat, grabbed an important ticket to China's mobile Internet, and then adjusted the organizational structure twice, and tried the layout of venture capital, and the market value soared from more than 300 billion yuan to 2 trillion yuan, becoming the first stock of China's listed companies. And I myself launched the "Wu Xiaobo Channel" in 2014, and I couldn't help but get involved in the wave of entrepreneurship.
In fact, the in-depth research and creation of an enterprise is like an intellectual adventure, which is not only a process of summarizing and combing, but also a process of learning a lot of new knowledge. In the creation of "Tencent Biography", I re-understood the meaning of "product", thought about the cultivation model of ecological organization for the first time, and summed up Tencent's experience of "running in small steps, trial and error iteration" in continuous communication with decision-makers. These findings are not in the initial writing outline or planning, but the result of a marathon of research. In this sense, the author and the object of creation achieve each other in the game.
After completing Tencent Biography, I decided not to write a biography of a single company, which was too time-consuming and painful for me. But I didn't expect that this time I actually broke the ring for Moutai - I hope this is the last time I break the ring.
Moutai Distillery found me in 2020. The company was founded in 1951 and I was asked to write a book to coincide with the celebration of its 70th anniversary. I'm not good at drinking, and I'm not very familiar with the liquor industry, so after the first meeting, I politely shirked it. The comrades of Moutai said, whether you write it or not, come to the distillery for a walk. So in the next six months, I went to Moutai Town twice, and finally decided to take the job.
made up his mind to write Moutai, but he was "killed" by curiosity.
Compared with the young and vigorous Shenzhen Tencent, Moutai Distillery is located in a river valley in the Yunnan-Guizhou Mountains, and is a typical traditional craft-based manufacturing enterprise. Its speed of evolution is like that of a wine, which seems to be still, but in fact it is strong, slow and time-convincing. Its understanding of craftsmanship and technology is completely different from that of Internet people. If Tencent's corporate history is a history of explosion from zero to one, then Moutai is a brewing history that has evolved from tradition to modernity, from "metaphysics" to science.
These seem to be the two poles of the growth of Chinese-style enterprises: one starts from innovation, the other starts from tradition, and eventually becomes a giant company with a market value of trillions of dollars. Their history is textbook-level.
Can Moutai learn?
I heard that you are writing "The Biography of Moutai"? Most of the people who came to ask looked a little surprised, and the next words were basically running in two directions: "Can you get a few bottles of Moutai to drink?" "What is there to learn about Moutai? ”
There are very few of my friends and students who don't like to drink Moutai, and most of them think the company is too mysterious to know what to learn from it.
I told them that Moutai Distillery was not a century-old company, and that it had only been 70 years since the merger of the three dilapidated burndowns and the time I wrote the book. Hearing this, everyone felt a little surprised.
Then, I told them that the distillery was not born glamorous, it had a 16-year loss period, ** in 1958 proposed to "make it 10,000 tons of Moutai", and this goal was achieved in 2003. Everyone was even more surprised.
Moutai is very familiar, and Moutai is also unfamiliar.
"The Biography of Moutai" is indeed not easy to write, it is too traditional, too single, too famous, and there seems to be too little "innovation".
There are only three ingredients in Moutai: sorghum, wheat, and water. So, why did the wine made from them become a legend in the history of contemporary commodities?
There are three key words in this question:
Complex and rich: Without Moutai, the world would lack a fragrance called "sauce aroma", which has gone through 129 years from the birth of the first bottle of wine to the completion of the finalization, and is the result of several generations of continuous relay. It's not an inevitable process, filled with all the twists and turns and drama of product creation.
Super single product: It is the first echelon of liquor in China, and the annual revenue of a single product - 53 degrees Feitian Moutai - exceeds 100 billion yuan. There are three similar "super items" in the world, namely Coca-Cola, Pepsi and iPhone, but Moutai is very different from them in terms of product characteristics.
Highest market capitalization: This is a company with a gross profit margin of 93%, and its market value exceeds that of all factories, banks and energy companies in China, making it an outlier in the capital market. To this day, some people see it as a "shame", and some see it as an honor.
The specimen value of Moutai lies not entirely in its uniqueness, but more in its universality. It is a sample of the evolution of China's traditional handicraft industry to modern manufacturing enterprises, a value embodiment of Chinese cultural elements in the consumer goods market, and a classic case of enterprises forming competitive advantages through cultural marketing and anchoring.
One of the "Six Laws of Moutai": Today's people may not lose to the ancients.
Studying the case of Moutai, one of the most common views is that Moutai people are "ancestors appreciate wine", and the ancestors have passed down a secret recipe for winemaking, as long as you honestly catch it and pass it on, you will definitely be able to "eat and drink for a hundred years".
This is the biggest misreading of Moutai and even China's traditional craft industry.
In the book "A Short History of Chinese Porcelain", the children's book industry said: "From the perspective of development, any object is always ancient. I think so.
The ancient law may not be the best law, and the present people may not lose to the ancients.
In addition to handmade works, such as carving a piece of jade, playing a chair, embroidering a phoenix crown, the ancients consumed fine labor, and it may be difficult for future generations to surpass, but where there is a little technical content, future generations must have the ability to catch up with and surpass the ancients.
Baijiu is a brewing process, involving raw materials, cellars, water, blending and storage. A bottle of Moutai must go through 30 processes and 165 processes, and the entire brewing process takes at least five years, and there are opportunities for improvement in each of them. It may be the optimization of the process, the substitution of new materials, and the improvement of efficiency and quality of technical means.
It is especially important that today's understanding of the elements and principles of production is far beyond the reach of the ancients. The ancients often knew what it was, but they didn't necessarily know why.
For example, it is easy to get drunk and get started, what is the reason for it, the ancients must not know. We now know – it's because of the phenolic impurities in the wine. Therefore, as long as you can reduce its proportion, it is possible to make a wine that is not good. In an experiment in 1965, Ji Keliang found that after two years of storage in Moutai, the hydrogen sulfide content in the liquor would be reduced by a large proportion, while other liquors did not have this change.
For another example, Moutai in the era of the burning house used "clear spring water" in the packaging. In general perception, spring water is definitely better than river water. However, later Moutai distillers found that the spring water is "heavy water", and the water of the Chishui River is "light water", and light water is better than heavy water to make Moutai, so the current Moutai liquor is brewed with river water.
For example, the cellar of Moutai is different from the mud cellar of the strong aroma type, and the cellar walls are made of local stones. Judging from the old cellars excavated later, most of the cellars in the era of the burning house were gravel cellars, which were easily breathable, had high moisture content, and were easy to burn dry sake lees. Today's cellars are all neatly made of stone cellars.
There are many other details such as the amount and variety of koji used, the temperature at which the sake is poured, the ratio of blending, the area where the mash is stacked, and so on.
In the process of Moutai, there are also cases of returning to the ancient method after improvement, such as stepping on the song. In the era of burning houses, it was manual to step on the koji, and in 1967, the koji-making machine was invented and changed to machine-made koji; However, in 1986, the distillery switched back to manual tamping. The reason for this repetition is that comparative studies have found that the manual stepping method is indeed helpful to the quality of koji, and this is based on physical and chemical analysis.
Therefore, if you ask a winemaker in the 20s of the 20th century and a winemaker in the 20s of the 21st century to make wine, it is difficult to compare the level of a glass of wine, but if you make a ton of wine, the probability of the latter winning is almost 100.
What happened to Moutai will also be seen in other traditional Chinese craft industries – traditional Chinese medicine, ceramics, silk and tea, among others.
Editor-in-charge: tx