Written by AI Finance and Economics Agency Liu Dongxue
Edited / Sun Jing
Qingxue jasmine fruit tea, Golden Lanka (Hong Kong-style) original milk tea, bubble milk tea... If you don't mention the brand, you may think that this is the return of a certain tea classic. In fact, this is the first high-speed rail milk tea launched by China Railway Guangzhou Bureau Group Co., Ltd. a few days ago, called "that girl", it is said that this milk tea is 26 yuan a cup, an average of 3,000 cups sold every day, and often sold out of stock.
Photo/ Official public number of China Railways
This milk tea sounds very good, but it still can't escape the spit of netizens. Some netizens said that in order to help the high-speed rail attendants complete the indicators, ordered a cup, the taste was so bad that it was speechless, and it was not as good as a bag of tea bags. Another netizen living in Shanghai complained that even in Shanghai, 26 cups of milk tea is not cheap, and these flavors are 18 yuan in the general milk tea shop, and most of them cannot sell for 15 yuan.
If this were put in the previous few years, the high-speed rail sold freshly made tea, which was somewhat strange. Just like when KFC started selling snacks, diners fell to its "no business", but now it sells hot dry noodles, and everyone is looking forward to baking cold noodles. Selling milk tea on high-speed rail is not new, after all, China Post has opened milk tea shops across borders.
The circle of new-style tea drinking is like a walled city, under the heavy walls, the brands inside can't get rid of the inner volume, and the outside is looking at the tiger. However, the fragrant flutter that netizens remembered in passing when spitting out the high-speed rail milk tea was still thriving in their own sphere of influence.
In the end, when did the freshly made tea drink start to roll up, maybe there is no exact time, but it can be seen that from the upstream industry chain, product innovation to investment, brands are riveted and want to stand out from this track.
In terms of product innovation, to be precise, in terms of product innovation, brands have squeezed out inspiration and hollowed out ideas. This side of the succulent grapes, Zhizhi berry heat has not passed, there taro mud bobo milk, raw coconut milk jelly has been launched on the small program, the seasonal limited drinks also lie in the most conspicuous position of the menu, waving to consumers.
According to the data of Jiuqian Middle Platform, from 2018 to 2020, Lele Tea launched 600 new products (including peripheral products) in three years, and Heytea and Naixue have launched 300 and 200 new models respectively in the past three years. According to an internal information, Heytea will launch 10 new products a month. Nesher's tea mentioned in the prospectus that on average, a new product will be launched every week.
When fruit ingredients such as grapes, strawberries, mangoes, coconuts and other fruit ingredients have gone through a round on the menus of all new tea brands, niche fruits have been targeted again. In June this year, Heytea took the lead in launching two yellow skin drinks, and other brands that smelled the taste immediately launched their own yellow skin drinks.
Photo/Visual China
Jade oil citrus, a fruit that few people know except Guangdong, Fujian and other places of origin, has also been brought into a hit by Nai Xue's tea "domineering jade oil orange", rising from a few cents per kilogram to dozens of yuan per kilogram.
Uncle Qiu's Duck Fragrant lemon tea was brought to the hot search by Nai Xue's tea, a new product of Nai Xue's tea- Duck Fragrant Treasure Tea, which generated 150 million reads. At the end of October, Nai Xue's tea affiliates preemptively applied for the registration of the "Nai Xue Duck Shi Xiang" trademark, and recently Mi Xue Ice City also began to sell duck shi xiang single bush tea bags.
Pearls, coconut fruits, red beans and other small ingredients can not meet the cup of milk tea hundreds of milliliters, so taro puree, glutinous rice, oats, salted egg yolk, meat floss and so on from the table into the cup. Several small ingredients are added to it, and they are hungrier than the eight treasure porridge. No wonder talk show actor Pang Bo complained that the current milk tea is "rice dumplings mixed with water". If the above is still "innovative", then the milk tea with pepper red soup flavor and tomato clear soup flavor can only be described as hunting curiosity.
People inside and outside the industry are criticizing the serious homogenization of new tea drinks, and the positioning of individual brands is not clear, is it that everyone is not working hard enough? On the contrary, everyone is working too hard, but the industry threshold is low, there are too many competitors, and the efforts are insignificant.
In the fiercely competitive situation, brands have to improve the repurchase rate through product innovation. Cui Biao, founder of Yamasumi Tea in Jinan, Shandong Province, told AI Finance and Economics, "We have done data research, and the loyalty of users who drink milk tea is very low, and if he (she) feels that your product is not worth it, he will immediately change to a new brand." Most of the new products in milk tea shops in the country are made with the trend, and everyone does not know why they are made, but they have to do it. ”
What bothers him even more is the fluctuations at the end of the supply chain. "After a certain raw material is on fire, the purchase price doubles. Small and medium-sized brands do not have strong bargaining power like big brands such as Xicha and Naixue, and everyone can only buy goods at high prices. But the high cost cannot be passed on to the terminal, because consumers are very sensitive to price. The result is that some merchants either compress profits or choose 'low-grade' raw materials in order to ensure profits, so that product quality will be greatly reduced. ”
The head brand is another set of games - directly shifting the competition upstream. For example, Xicha built a 500-acre self-owned tea garden in Fanjingshan in 2017; in 2020, it began to develop strawberry varieties and find suitable areas to build a strawberry base. Naixue's tea once contracted 165 acres of strawberry orchards in Yunnan, and the strawberries produced have long been used in stores; the raw materials and production processes of tea products such as Alishan Chulu are also bought out. Mi Xue Ice City and Cha Yan Yue Xie have set up related companies to explore upstream businesses such as agricultural product acquisition and fresh fruit wholesale.
Efforts are not only reflected in raw materials, but also in the name of new products, while maintaining brand recognition. Xicha loves to use overlapping words, Zhizhi, Bobo, Berry, Peach... Nai Xue's tea likes domineering, treasure and other words; the name of the tea color drink is the same as the packaging, the Chinese style is carried out to the end, the black tea series is called red face, the green tea series is called Huansha green, and the name of the drink such as fireworks is easy to cold, floating clouds and agarwood are more artistic than realistic. In contrast, The Ice City is really much, brown sugar bubble tea, cheese milk cover green tea... Names don't leave room for your imagination.
The superficially lively milk tea business is not short of calm onlookers. "The secondary market has not reacted very well, and we have given up the track of [milk tea]." An investor who focuses on the consumer sector told AI Finance.
Who is the listed milk tea brand? It was sent to Nai Xue's tea "ID number". It is no wonder that the above investors are not optimistic, naixue's tea has been falling and falling since its listing this year, closing at HK$17.12 per share on the first day of listing, down 13.54% from the issue price of HK$19.8; as of press time, the stock price of HK$9.50/share is less than half of the issue price.
Naixue's tea recently released three quarterly reports show that the third quarter of the net addition of 90 tea stores, 2021 is expected to open about 350 new tea shops, contrary to the expansion trend, the third quarter performance from profit to loss, but also affected by the second half of the epidemic, domestic consumption weakened and other factors, it is expected that the year-on-year growth rate of revenue in 2021 will be lower than expected.
In fact, before the listing, Naixue's tea was in a state of loss, public data show that from 2018 to 2020, Naixue's tea loss amount was 69.73 million yuan, 39.68 million yuan and 203 million yuan, respectively, and the adjusted performance in 2020 finally achieved profitability, but it was only 16.64 million yuan.
It is not only the Naixue family that is caught in the predicament, but also the recent confirmation of the temporary closure of 87 stores by Cha Yan Yue, which is also the third time that the brand has concentrated on temporary closures this year, the first time at the beginning of the year, and the second time at the end of July. The official explanation of Cha Yan Yue Color said that because of the repeated epidemics, everyone in high-density distribution points cannot eat enough, and the temporary closure of some high-density areas will also become the norm.
Cha Yan Yue xie confirmed to AI Finance and Economics that there are currently more than 400 stores in Changsha.
However, the above-mentioned investors believe that the epidemic is not the whole reason for the centralized closure of chayan Yueshi, its single dependence on Changsha, cross-regional operation is not successful, resulting in a dilemma. As Cha Yan Yue said himself, the previous dense distribution has indeed earned dividends in Changsha's urban development, but there are always times when specific areas are saturated, and outside Changsha, new tea drinks have formed a certain pattern.
It is understood that the number of the latest stores of Xicha has exceeded 800, as of the third quarter of this year, the number of tea stores in Naixue has also reached 668, the same mid-range positioning of tea hundreds, there are about 4800 stores in the country, and the tea beauty positioning is very similar to the overlord Chaji currently has more than 400 national stores, tea yan currently does not have enough strength to participate in the expansion of regional competition and operation.
In the end, behind the dilemma of new tea drinking is a profit problem.
According to Ai Media Consulting data, from January to August 2021, the number of investments in the new tea industry reached 87, with a total investment amount of more than 17.9 billion yuan. According to the "Analysis Report on the Supply and Demand Model and Development Trend of China's Milk Tea Industry market in 2021-2027" released by Zhiyan Consulting, the market growth rate of China's fresh milk tea industry has been stable at more than 20% from 2016 to 2020.
The track still looks hot, but in front of the problem of how to make a profit for the new tea drink is how to survive. According to industry statistics, the survival rate of milk tea shops is only about 20%, and ai media consulting data also shows that milk tea shops that have been operating sustainably for more than a year are only 18.8%.
In order to consolidate the sense of security, the head brand also expands its territory through financial strength and does not put eggs in one basket. Since the beginning of this year, Cha Yan Yue has invested in Changsha's local tea brand Guo Ya, Mi Xue Bingcheng has invested in the Guangdong tea brand "Hui Cha", and Xi Cha has become an investor in new brands such as the tea brand "He Yi Peach Peach", the chain coffee brand Seesaw, the plant-based brand Wild Plant YePlant, and the pre-mixed wine brand WAT cocktail.
The anxiety of new tea drinking may not seem worth mentioning in the world of brewing milk tea. Netizens in the spit high-speed rail milk tea incidentally remembered the fragrant flutter, but also in their own sphere of influence seems to live well.
A provincial-level agent in Xiangpiaopiao's East China told AI Finance and Economics that he has been the brand agent for 3 years, and the sales volume is not as good as the year, and the new products are not easy to promote. "But fortunately, the pressure is not serious, the subordinate dealers are relatively stable, and the profit margins are not affected."
From the perspective of revenue plate, Xiangpiaopiao's revenue in the first three quarters of this year was 1.974 billion yuan, an increase of 4.29% year-on-year; the net profit was about 39.3955 million yuan, down 11.45% year-on-year, and the net profit loss after deducting non-profit was 22.6641 million yuan. But the loss in the third quarter has improved from the first half of the year.
Compared with the profitability of new tea drinks, it is slightly better than the unpromising Xiangpiaopiao. According to the 2020 financial report data, the gross profit margin of Xiangpiaopiao's milk tea business is 36.67%, and the net profit margin is 9.5%. Freshly made tea seems to have a lot of room for the market imagination, but money may not be easy to earn. In 2020, the only profitable year for Naixue's tea, its profit margin was only 0.5%, and according to the previous calculation of YiMagazine of "First Finance", the net profit margin after the D round of financing of Heytea was about 6.56%.
However, individual efforts are always difficult to resist the change of the situation, which is not something that any brand can reverse on its own. According to the data of Zhiyan Consulting, the size of China's brewed milk tea market has shown negative growth in 2015, and it has begun to recover in 2016, but the growth rate has always maintained single digits from 2019 to 2020. In 2020, the market size of China's solid milk tea industry was 4.89 billion yuan, far lower than the market size of 113.6 billion yuan in the ready-made milk tea industry.
Therefore, there is a view that China's brewed milk tea market has a ceiling, and the teas are hunting for incense. But in fact, XiangPiaopiao's opponents are never Xicha.
Kaopiaopiao's real rival, Kinoro's Yoramei, has long been beaten down by himself. For this typical case, the industry has long analyzed. Xiangpiaopiao conveys the message of being a leading brand to consumers through "annual sales of N00 million cups", which triggers the herd effect of consumers. And Yolomy took the sensational route, when it cost a huge amount of money to invite the superstar Jay Chou as a spokesperson, the amount of advertising was more than three times that of Xiangpiaopiao, but because the advertising content was too literary, the product positioning was vague, and the effect was greatly reduced. Simply put, it is to spend a lot of money to do invalid positioning.
From 2012 to 2020, Xiangpiaopiao maintained the first market share in cup brewed milk tea for 9 consecutive years with a market share of more than 63%. However, although it is a monopoly in the brewed milk tea market, from 2018 to 2020, the growth rate of Xiangpiaopiao's revenue and net profit has slowed down year by year, which shows that the biggest challenge of Xiangpiaopiao is time and market.
I think Xiang Piaopiao is also aware of the crisis, and the lack of growth is always not a good sign. The high-end market is likely to be unable to get cheap, it is better to choose to avoid its sharp edge and go deep into the sinking market. According to media reports, Xiangpiaopiao brewing plate now has about 75% of the income from the third line and the third line below the market, but it is far from saturation, this year, Xiangpiaopiao put forward the "preservation, digging increment" strategy, the purpose is to tap the sinking market potential.
In addition, the aging of the product structure is a very dangerous thing for enterprises, and brewing milk tea is not so fragrant. Everyone's voice can be heard, you say that my taste is monotonous, I will launch a new taste, while cold brewed milk tea also keeps up; you say that my ingredients are cheap, not friendly to health, I will plant fat powder for milk powder; you laugh at my "N circles around the earth" advertising words old soil, I invited traffic students to be spokespersons...
Demand determines the market, the main consumer population of the entire market is young people, especially the Z generation crowd, tea is not only tea, but also with social attributes, the effect of the film is not good, young people can not buy it. Recall, did some young people post photos of fragrant milk tea in the circle of friends?
Therefore, Xiangpiaopiao changed some of the product packaging, "pretended" that he was still young, and successively launched liquid milk tea Lanfangyuan and juice tea brand "MECO Honey Valley", deliberately getting rid of the label of "Xiangpiaopiao", which has a sense of age. The above idea is no problem, in the first half of this year, Xiangpiaopiao solid products achieved operating income of 660 million yuan, accounting for 60.69% of the total revenue, this data was 82.34% last year, it can be seen that the transformation of Xiangpiaopiao, which tried to diversify its operation, has begun to bear fruit.
However, Xiangpiaopiao's above efforts have not been recognized by executives, nor have they been able to reverse the impression of the capital market on themselves. Since the beginning of last year, Feng Yongye, the employee representative supervisor of Xiangpiaopiao Company, Yu Qi, the supervisor of shareholders' representative, Gou Zhenhai, the director of the board of directors and deputy general manager of the company, and Cai Jianfeng, the director and deputy general manager of the company, have successively left their posts.
In the past two years, new tea drinks have been sought after in the capital market, and there are fewer and fewer institutional investors holding fragrant and fluttering stocks. Flush iFinD shows that at the end of 2017, 78 institutions held shares of Xiangpiaopiao, and only one remained by the end of 2020. At the same time, as of press time, Xiangpiaopiao's stock price is 37.43 yuan / share from the highest value, which has shrunk by 57%.
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