Author |Chen Shifeng.
Edit |Lu Xucheng.
15 years ago, Yiwu small commodities were not yet famous all over the world; Fifteen years later, Yiwu ** Gang has become a barometer of China's e-commerce. Nowadays, ** has been intertwined with the development of China's industrial belt, so that many places have their own unique "taste".
Guangzhou Beauty, Foshan Furniture, Dongguan Mobile Phone, Huzhou Children's Clothing, Wenzhou Women's Shoes, Nantong Home Textiles, Nanjing Chemical, Xingtai Leather, Dehong Jewelry, Xuchang Wigs ......Today's **, all kinds of "new specialties" continue to emerge, constantly create "new occupations", and constantly activate "new industries", and traditional industries are living with new brilliance under the blessing of **.
Recently, Taotian Group released the list of the first batch of "Taotian 10 billion industrial belts": in 2023, there will be 50 industrial belts with a transaction volume of more than 10 billion, covering 21 cities such as Jinhua, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Foshan, Jiaxing, Baoding, and 27 categories such as residential furniture, mobile phones, beauty and skin care, and jewelry. In addition, Taotian Group also released the "growth industrial belt" with an annual transaction volume of more than 1 billion yuan and the top 30 year-on-year growth rate, covering 24 cities at the prefecture level and above, such as Zhengzhou, Beihai, Xingtai and Ji'an.
In 2024, as e-commerce enters the stage of stock competition, for major e-commerce platforms, how to tap more potential of the industrial belt has become the focus of the next stage of work. For Taotian Group, what are the characteristics of the development of the industrial belt it is experiencing? How did they develop? What is the future development trend of the industrial belt?
Both broad and deep
China's reform and opening up is regionally different, from south to north, and the industrial belt also follows a general development path. In Guangzhou, beauty is the tip of the iceberg in the development of its industrial belt. There is such a saying: "Global beauty looks at China, and Chinese beauty looks at Guangzhou." "In the 80s of the 20th century, Unilever, Procter & Gamble and other giants entered China, and Procter & Gamble set up its Greater China headquarters in Guangzhou and built its first Chinese factory in Huangpu. With the continuous influx of OEM demand from international beauty brands, foreign cosmetics manufacturers from South Korea's COSMAX and Italy's Intercos have also chosen Guangzhou.
In the following years, the OEM demand of international beauty brands has given birth to beauty foundries in Guangzhou and its surroundings, and at the same time, it has gradually brought together large and small raw material factories and packaging factories, and also gave birth to a number of listed companies with outstanding production capacity, including Bawei Biotechnology and Qingsong Co., Ltd.
Today's Guangzhou is the country's largest cosmetics OEM production base, with a large number of chemical raw materials, mold manufacturing, packaging design, e-commerce platforms, beauty supermarkets and manufacturing and other upstream and downstream supporting chains, industrial clusters are quite large-scale, is one of the most complete areas in the national cosmetics industry chain, and is also the origin of China's local beauty brands.
The times have changed, and now the beauty factories in Guangzhou have accelerated the reshuffle, and the Matthew effect has become more and more prominent, and some manufacturing enterprises with a low-key style behind the stealth brand have also begun to move into the spotlight. With many years of experience in international brand OEM, many beauty foundries are key links in the beauty chain. They are not only responsible for technology research and development, but also cooperate with brands to introduce products and solutions to the market that meet consumer needs. "We are more like a platform that integrates R&D, design, manufacturing and marketing capabilities, and the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain can achieve information exchange on this platform, so that we can jointly develop more products suitable for the market, and ultimately meet the development needs of the brand. An executive of a large beauty OEM company said.
In this case, some beauty OEM companies have started to cooperate with e-commerce platforms and have made great achievements. For example, the Guangzhou beauty company Snow Mary, in 2016, was still worried about the sales of the eyebrow trimming knife it produced, and after trying to open a store on Tmall for the first time, the humanized design and excellent blade quality quickly became a popular hit among young people. The eyebrow trimming knife opened up the market, and Snow Mary became a popular brand in the industry in one fell swoop, and the factory orders including OEM demand came one after another, and the factory production increased several times every year.
Today, whether it is the old beauty company "Kazlan", or the OEM for well-known brands "Suorou", "Ba Wei", as well as the cutting-edge dark horse "Ximuyuan" and other beauty brands, they are building and upgrading their brands through Tmall, so that more national fashion beauty brands are loved by young users, and Guangzhou has become a "beautiful city" among Tmall's new domestic products.
With the advancement of China's reform and opening up, the Yangtze River basin has also ushered in the spring of the industrial belt. As an important starting point of the "Maritime Silk Road", textile and apparel has always been an important pillar industry in Zhejiang. Spread out the industrial map of Zhejiang, you can see Haining fur, Pinghu down, Puyuan cashmere, Jinhua ** and other well-known textile and apparel industry belts, which are an indispensable part of Zhejiang's textile and apparel industry. Among them, Jinhua ** industrial belt is the most well-known in the country.
Since the beginning of the last century, the textile and garment industry in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province has shown a booming trend, and then gradually formed a whole industrial system from raw material procurement, fabric processing, garment manufacturing to market sales, providing sufficient resources and market support for the production of clothing such as base wear. Backed by Yiwu International Trade City, Jinhua ** has also repeatedly obtained international orders.
Around 2012, garment exports encountered a cold wave, coupled with factors such as rising raw material prices and rising labor costs, and the pressure on garment companies was increasing. However, relying on the advantages of Yiwu International Trade City, Jinhua has sprouted a huge group of first-class sellers, and with the help of the "first-class industrial chain" export to domestic sales, Jinhua's first-class industrial belt has ushered in a second development. Today, Jinhua has become "China's famous weaving city" and "China's textile industry base", and has developed into one of the most influential cotton textile fabric production bases in the country, with the output of pure cotton and white grey fabrics ranking first in the country, supporting many clothing brands and businesses in Hangzhou.
In recent years, the Baoding luggage industry has developed rapidly, "Yiwu in the south, Baigou in the north." From the pocket shops and cabinet shops in the late Qing Dynasty to the "luggage capital of China" with an annual output of 800 million bags, the luggage dream of Baigou people has never stopped for a hundred years. From handicraft workshops, roadside stalls, to wholesale markets in front of shops and back warehouses, to the spacious and bright international luggage trading center ......Baigou luggage industry has climbed all the way through the hurdles, transformation and upgrading.
After more than 40 years of development, Baigou has formed a complete industrial chain of raw and auxiliary materials, design and development, e-commerce and warehousing and logistics, and currently has more than 4,000 luggage production enterprises, with an annual output of 800 million bags, accounting for 40% of the total production of bags in the country.
Around 2020, the old road of "OEM processing" and "high quantity and low price" encountered obstacles, and affected by the "black swan" event, orders decreased, exports were sluggish, and physical stores were ...... depressedUnder a series of crises, the current Baigou luggage trading center is no longer as bustling as before. The new model of "live broadcast + short ** + e-commerce" has become the first choice for enterprises to "save themselves".
Taking Baigou's local Pengjie leather goods company as an example, Wang Peng, the "second generation", joined his own company after graduation, and at first relied on the advantage of English to take care of foreign trade orders, and since May 2020, he has tried to bring goods live broadcast, with careful polishing of language and action, and timely improvement according to audience feedback, the number of fans and sales have been rising. In September 2020, just in time for the beginning of the school season, the sales of the live broadcast room soared. Since then, Wang Peng has taken live streaming as a new track, and the company's live broadcast room has maintained a live broadcast frequency of one per day for a long time. At present, live streaming sales account for 1 3 of the company's annual sales. Nowadays, in the first live broadcast, live broadcast with goods is becoming the "standard" for a new generation of Baigou luggage people like Wang Peng.
From Guangzhou to Baoding, from beauty to bags, the epitome of the iteration of industrial belts across China has unfolded on the **Tmall platform. With the development of e-commerce, the production and processing links have further sunk to the third and fourth-tier cities and counties, and the inland cities with a relatively weak foundation have seized the e-commerce outlet to develop rapidly. At the same time, with the development of e-commerce information technology and the reduction of transaction costs, all links of the industrial belt can form a division of labor and cooperation in a larger region, and the map of China's industrial belt is also constantly "renewing and developing".
Accelerate upgrades
As we all know, the industrial belt refers to the upstream and downstream enterprises that focus on production equipment, raw materials, fabrics and accessories, design, freight and other production-centered upstream and downstream enterprises in a specific region, establish a close economic and technological cooperation circle, reduce production costs, improve production efficiency, and ultimately significantly improve the regional economic competitive advantage of industrial clusters.
An important factor in the formation of an industrial belt is the local policy, first concentrate resources on cultivating several large-scale, strong industrial driving force of local head enterprises, and then through the policy tilt to attract the same industry clusters, as well as supporting technology, equipment, product investors, service providers to enter, and then promote market information, sales channels, R & D and design, finance, logistics and other service industries organically combined, step by step to improve.
The biggest advantage of the industrial belt is the production potential energy, in the past, the first and production capacity advantages can play a great value, but the business radius of the industrial belt business is often only to dealers, distributors, can not reach consumers and then truly understand consumers. At the same time, the "white label" problem seems to be a difficult pain point for businesses in the industrial belt.
How to activate the industrial belt from the three elements of people, goods and yards? **Tmall and other e-commerce platforms continue to make efforts, especially for county-level industrial belts with relatively insufficient economic development, **live broadcast actively exerts its own resource advantages, takes advantage of the opportunities of the digital economy era, strengthens industrial development, explores the deep integration of e-commerce and industrial belts, and realizes the possibility of overtaking in corners. In this process, the first live broadcast launched a series of measures to support the development of the industrial belt.
For example, in view of the need to improve the competitiveness of "people" and "fields" under the premise of having the advantages of "goods" in the industrial belt, an important part of the "Source Power Plan" launched by the live broadcast is to help the regional industrial belt improve the local live broadcast operation capacity, incubate new industrial belt live broadcast teams, and take advantage of the live broadcast to further enhance the scale effect of the industrial belt, so that the practitioners of the industrial belt can make profits. "Compared with other platforms, ** attaches more importance to historical weight, has strong support for new accounts, and has a stable growth and upward channel, which may be more suitable for us," said a manufacturer in the home textile industry belt in Nantong.
In September 2023, ** also launched the first small and medium-sized business marketing product "**Star Origin" for small and medium-sized businesses in the national trend industrial belt. Through this new IP, we will take out tens of billions of traffic, deeply integrate platform-level resource tools such as good price festivals, live broadcasts, search recommendations, and buy a piece, and excavate, support and surface high-quality pallets of China's new and dynamic industrial belt in the past three years, helping it to complete multi-dimensional outbreaks from single-point outbreaks, long-term support, new product co-construction, and communication breakthroughs.
Not only that, Tmall Group is also willing to do the business of "bending down to pick up steel hammers", through the establishment of localized merchant operation centers, to serve and support local businesses more closely, and to promote the development of the industrial belt from the aspects of logistics and other infrastructure. For example, the Ganzhou furniture and home improvement industry belt, which is second only to Foshan, has a pain point that cannot be ignored: "The logistics cost of furniture and home improvement is very high, sometimes a solid wood bathroom cabinet is flawed, and consumers want to change the goods, we would rather directly resend a new past, without returning the original." "Feedback from many local businesses.
Businesses in the industrial belt have to cooperate with different service providers in each link of pickup, distribution, delivery and installation, but under such a traditional operation, it is almost impossible to unify the service standards at the end, and the service quality is uneven. "The furniture logistics service chain is long, the shape of the accessories are not standard, if there is a bump, it is difficult to define which link the problem is, in the process of pushing back and forth, the user in the after-sales service has no one to care, the experience is very bad. A local high-end furniture merchant said.
In order to solve the delivery pain points of home improvement consumption, the rookie home improvement self-operated business entered Ganzhou, and the entire chain from pickup to delivery and installation was completely self-operated, with the aim of allowing all small and medium-sized businesses to enjoy the industry's benchmark services.
From front-end marketing, to back-end factories, to the construction of infrastructure, Taotian Group is driving the development and upgrading of China's first-class chain with a complete value system.
Future: e-commerce, branding, digitalization
At present, the new model of e-commerce has become an important driving force to promote the transformation and upgrading of the domestic industrial belt. E-commerce channels break the traditional marketing chain, shorten the cycle of consumer market feedback and product iteration, and promote product innovation. In addition, the e-commerce platform has broken the original consumption radius of the industrial belt, which has greatly promoted the circulation of local products to consumers across the country.
In recent years, the penetration rate of e-commerce in the industrial belt has continued to increase, and there has also been a prominent phenomenon - the convergence of "entering the Taotao tide" and "returning to the Taobao tide". For example, Guangzhou's ** industrial belt is experiencing a new round of "return to Taotao".
Yaduoer fashion ** is an industrial belt business that has been relocated from Haizhu District, Guangzhou to "10 billion ** village". It returned to Taobao in May and officially operated in July, and the business maintained steady growth after returning to Taobao. Its founder, Chen Huanxin, expressed great confidence in this.
In fact, ** clothing has also made efforts to do this. In September 2023, ** Apparel set up an operation center in Guangdong, which is its first exclusive operation center outside Hangzhou. At the same time, 1688, the source factory direct sales platform under Taotian Group, also upgraded the origin map before Double 11, which is convenient for ** sellers to immerse themselves in the purchase through the map, and the refinement of the map can even reach the production workshop of a certain source factory.
In addition to "returning to Tao", there are many industrial belts that have ushered in new "Tao" groups. For example, under the guidance of Zhushan District, Jingdezhen City, Jingdezhen New Youth Hutian Porcelain Society, together with ** and ** live broadcast, relying on the Jingdezhen City "Jingpiao" mobile party member Party Committee, launched the "Yangjing Drifting into Tao" project, organizing local young Jingpiao and Yangjing Drifting to enter Tao to open stores and open live broadcast rooms.
At the same time, e-commerce has also driven the demand for "branding" of businesses in the industrial belt. Some analysts recognize that the agglomeration effect of the industrial belt faces two problems: one is the integrity of industrial factors, and the other is from production to brand. "When an enterprise moves towards a brand, it has to go through different stages of quantitative and quantitative changes to qualitative changes. Many platforms have e-commerce genes, but the support provided by Tmall in the growth path of merchant brands is relatively complete. For example, he said that if a ** merchant wants to brand, he can choose to endorse the brand with "Ji Youjia", or he can choose to settle in Tmall, 1688, etc., which can also provide more opportunities for merchants to link upstream and downstream, "In **Tmall, a merchant has countless ways to become a brand." ”
Luo Zhendong, a professor at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning of Nanjing University and an expert in village research, found that the industrial chain and chain model that had long relied on wholesale markets such as Shahe were being replaced by new models. He**, in the *** industrial belt, there may be a Chinese fashion brand similar to Uniqlo. In fact, now the industrial belt has become the largest brand of Tmall's new brand, accounting for more than 4% of the new business.
In addition, e-commerce platforms such as Tmall continue to promote the digital transformation of the industrial belt, support regional characteristic industries to become stronger and bigger, not only to create stronger pillar industries for the local area, but also to drive small and medium-sized enterprises in the industrial belt to extend to product development and brand building with the help of digital tools, and better start a business. At the same time, e-commerce platforms such as Tmall also continue to help improve the response ability of small and medium-sized enterprises in the industrial belt, and integrate the chain while driving the development of the industrial belt.
For example, the small household appliance industrial belt in Shunde, Guangdong, with the help of the digitalization of the ** Tmall platform, grasps the industry consumption trend, and constantly develops and iterates new products, a local industrial belt business revealed, "The reason why we are good at grasping new consumption trends, in addition to based on past experience, will also be mined from Tmall sales data." "After discovering new trends, the R&D team will quickly implement the function, and if it can't be realized, it can be solved through the ** chain and technology of dozens of cooperative factories.
In 2021, when economist Zhou Qiren conducted research in Shunde, he summarized that China's manufacturing has gone through three stages, one is "me too", the second is "me better" is a little better than you, and the third is "me only" emphasizing uniqueness. With the help of the Tmall Merchant Operation Center, more and more businesses in the Shunde small household appliance industry have steadily entered the third stage, giving full play to the hard power accumulated over the years.
As the earliest e-commerce platform in China, Tmall is the most deeply rooted and earliest layout of the entire domestic e-commerce platform in the industrial belt, and has built nearly 20 merchant operation centers across the country. In this process, the platform has also increased its efforts to support the development of small and medium-sized enterprises in the industrial belt. For example, in 2023, Taotian Group will successively release the "Star Generation Plan" to support the incubation of new businesses, the "Thousand Stars Plan" and the "Blue Star Plan" to support new brands and trend tracks, etc., to help start-up brands find the right track and make word of mouth; At the same time, the platform also continues to upgrade the capabilities of the first chain: in December 2023, the first apparel development division was officially established; Tmall and Cainiao continue to promote the construction of the country's largest home decoration "delivery and installation" network; As well as accelerating the investment and research and development of AI and large models, it has injected new imagination into the development of the domestic industrial belt.
Today, each industrial belt has found a corresponding new mark on Tmall, which has become a new driving force for local economic growth. Through platforms such as **, Tmall, 1688, etc., the products of merchants in the industrial belt have broken the geographical boundaries and entered thousands of households, and the brands of merchants in the industrial belt have gradually been well-known and remembered by the public with the blessing of e-commerce and digitalization, and have become the basic plate for the rise of China's domestic products.