Over the past two decades, Youngor's troika has been clothing, real estate and investment. From 2002 to 2022, YOUNGOR's revenue increased sixfold, of which the real estate business increased by 16 times, and the clothing business only increased by more than 3 times.
Statistics show that from 2007 to mid-2003, the cumulative net investment income of YOUNGOR reached 47.6 billion yuan. Taking 2020 as an example, the Youngor fashion, real estate and investment sectors achieved a net profit of 9600 million, 165.7 billion, 465.5 billion yuan.
With the performance gap between the three business segments so obvious, I still put forward a hypothesis: if Youngor did not do real estate, what kind of existence would it be today?
As early as 2006, I wrote an article "Why Coca-Cola Doesn't Engage in Real Estate", in which I proposed that Coca-Cola can't do real estate in China without money, and it is impossible to recruit good talents, let alone not get the support of the best people.
However, Coca-Cola has a strong social influence and can solve the three core elements of real estate: capital, talent and political and business relations, so why does it remain calm in the face of China's booming real estate market and only concentrate on making a bottle of drink?
At that time, my answer was focus and focus, with clear business boundaries, and it was vigilant about cross-border things.
The market always rewards brands that are focused.
Brand Finance, a British brand evaluation agency, has released the "2023 Global Food and Beverage Brands" value report. In the list of "Top 25 Global Soft Drink Brands in Value", Coca-Cola topped the list.
Youngor's real estate business started in 1992, and in the past 30 years, the real estate sector has indeed contributed a lot of profits to the company, but if it has been deeply involved in the clothing field for the past 30 years, it is very likely that its output value, market value and profits will be better.
It seems that the real estate business will not affect the clothing sector, but in fact the impact is profound. First, a project in the real estate sector can earn 500 million or 1 billion, which will make the company's top decision-makers tilt their energy on real estate, and pay insufficient attention to the clothing business that needs to be sold one by one. Making quick money brings a completely different kind of pleasure.
Compared with Vanke, Longfor and other real estate professionals, it is actually difficult for Youngor Real Estate to achieve real development, and can only use the 20-year best schedule of China's real estate market to make money, but once this period passes, it is difficult to sustain the performance.
Clothing is different. Clothing is an industry with a high brand premium, but clothing brands need time to accumulate, and if they are focused and focused all the time, their brand equity will become more and more tired, and its brand will become more and more valuable.
Youngor intends to change the company's Chinese name from "Youngor Group Shares*** to "Youngor Fashion Shares***", it can be seen that its strategic focus has begun to return to its original main business.
The market for clothing is always there. In addition to increasing the eponymous brand, YOUNGOR has also established a brand matrix through investment and other means, such as accelerating the expansion of physical stores in China such as American designer brand Alexander Wang, American fashion product Undefeated, and Norwegian outdoor sports brand Helly Hansen.
Of course, the competition faced by YOUNGOR will not be small, and the main brand of the same name, YOUNGOR will compete with overseas brands, emerging domestic brands and Tao brands; The international brands invested are also under pressure from other international brands in the domestic market.
If Youngor hadn't been engaged in real estate, the work he is doing today may have started twenty years ago. If it had focused on its main business for 20 years, completed the planning and design of the brand matrix 20 years ago, and spent 20 years to continuously iterate on lean and lean iterations, it may have become a world-class fashion group today.
Zhao Chongfu, a brand strategy expert, is one of the practitioners who best understand positioning theory and super symbols in China, and uses positioning ideas and super symbol methods to empower brands to grow healthily.