The author | Gu Twenty
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On December 18, with the fresh landing of Hema in Linlonghui, Jiangning District, Nanjing, before New Year's Day in 2022, the number of Hema stores nationwide exceeded 300.
Previously, Beijing Business Daily said that in December, Hema will usher in a wave of stores, and it is expected to open 14 stores in a month, with an average of about two days to open a new store. It is expected that by the end of 2021, the number of Hema fresh stores will exceed 300.
Today, Hema Xiansheng has reached its goal half a month earlier than expected. Since June this year, Hema Fresh has entered an accelerated period. Restart the expansion of new cities, successively settled in Zhengzhou, Hefei, Jinan and Nanchang and other places, and entered 27 cities across the country.
Among the more than 10 kinds of store types launched by Hema successively, in addition to the main store type Hema fresh, there are also two format stores that have entered the hema X membership store and hema neighborhood.
Hema X Club was first opened in the second half of 2020 and is positioned as a warehouse-type store for large-package sales. The node of the outbreak of the current warehousing club model is a format that Hema is currently prioritizing and focusing on. According to the plan of Hou Yi, president of Hema, 10 more Hema X clubs will be opened in 2021.
Hema Neighborhood is a self-operated self-service point for community services and is the core product of Hema NB Division. Hema NB Business Department was officially established in July this year, NB full name is Community Business, is the third business unit of Hema, responsible for Hema President Hou Yi, directly reporting to Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang.
At the previous media meeting, Hou Yi said that Hema has taken Hema Fresh, X Member Store and Hema Neighborhood as the three growth curves now.
After polishing and iterating more than 10 retail formats, it was finally decided to serve the Chinese retail market through these three store types. Having experienced retail pit filling in 2019 and the decline rate of the epidemic in 2020, today, when the epidemic is gradually stabilizing and normalizing, Hema has handed over its 6-year-old retail answer sheet.
Just from the current point of view, this answer sheet is obviously not as eye-catching as when Hema first entered the physical retail. Whether it is Hema X Club or Hema Neighborhood, it is a commercial service form that has long been formed by the current retail format.
After the launch of hema fresh in 2015 and was regarded as a new species by the industry, today's hema is no longer synonymous with "new". Not only has there been no new retail format, hou Yi believes that hema understands the retail industry as three store types, and it is unknown whether it can afford the three growth curves.
01 box of horses freshly faded
If you look at it from the narrative perspective of a phenomenon-level Internet celebrity, for 6-year-old Hema, there are two stages of growth. The first is the halo phase of self-contained new species in 2016-2018, and the second is the diversified pit filling phase in 2019-2021.
In the first stage, the self-contained aura of the box horse mainly comes from the superposition of the three-layer effect.
The first is Ma Yun's new retail concept and the era environment. In December 2016, before the concept of new retail came out of the circle, the "13th Five-Year Plan for E-commerce" released by the state regarded the "13th Five-Year Plan" period as an important window to release the power of "Internet +".
With the help of the power of the "Internet +" era, the transformation and upgrading of traditional physical retail is promoted through e-commerce mode, and the integration of online and offline has become a new direction for retail development.
Secondly, as the experimental benchmark of Alibaba's new retail, it is different from the traditional retailers such as Yiguo Fresh that Ali has invested in at that time, but it is only undergoing digital transformation. Hema Xiansheng is the result of Hou Yi who left Jingdong and ali Daniel Zhang support, so it is also considered to be the landing of the genetic recombination of China's top 1 + top2 two major e-commerce platforms at that time, which can be described as a new species gene.
Finally, with the birth of Hema Fresh, learning it began to flood the country in the form of fresh + catering as a consumer experience upgrade, which further raised the aura of Hema Fresh.
In 2018, Hema put forward the slogan of "sacrificing his life to run wildly", planning to complete 100 stores in 2018 and open 500 stores in 2019, full of newborn calves image.
However, the essence of commercial business is not the aura of Internet celebrity, after walking through the highlights of 2018, in the second half of 2019, Hema began to fade new clothes.
The final result was that at the end of July 2018, the new species Hema Xiansheng opened 64 stores in 14 cities across the country. However, the target of 500 stores did not go as planned, according to the data of the Daniel Zhang at the Hema Management Conference, 130 stores were opened in March 2019.
Not only did it reveal the number of stores in the month, but in March 2019, the two speeches that appeared in turn also foreshadowed the stall of Hema in the second half of the year.
One is Hou Yi's speech at the industry forum: the battle to fill the pit, acknowledging that the new retail friends have been brought to the pit. The other is Daniel Zhang speaking internally at the box horse management meeting: the box horse should run wildly and run longer.
As the most important model in the new retail case, the two speeches have also made the new retail followers no longer run wild, and the situation of Hema has begun to become subtle.
Some retail industry insiders said that at this time, there is no new retail aura, no longer use the perspective of looking up at Hema Xiansheng, even in the full speed period of Hema Xiansheng in 2018, the speed of opening nearly 80 stores in 3 years was actually not fast at that time.
According to the statistics of "New Distribution", Yonghui opened 160 stores (excluding Yonghui life stores) throughout 2018; in 2018, it focused on the fresh legend of community fresh supermarkets, opening 100 stores in four years; in terms of store opening speed, the rushing Hema Fresh did not pull away from traditional retail enterprises.
After this, in 2020, Hema Xiansheng withdrew from the Fujian region, the first growth curve encountered obstacles, and at the same time, superimposed on the normalized business environment of the epidemic, Hema began to "force" to intensively launch new models.
02 Hema X club is difficult to support
From 2019 to 2021, in the three years since the aura of new species passed, Hou Yi has tried and launched 10 formats such as Hema Fresh Standard Store, Hema X Member Store, Hema Neighborhood, Hema Small Station in The Front Warehouse Mode, Hema Vegetable Market near the community, Box Pony, and Hema MINI with locations in the suburbs.
After continuous polishing and iteration, the two single-store models that have been explored for less than a year finally, hema X member store and hema neighborhood have become the second and third growth curves after hema fresh, respectively.
Different from the exploratory nature of Hema, the latter two are more about the following of the current retail format, and it is not easy to say whether it can become a real growth curve.
If the site selection is used as the classification criterion for Hemaduo formats, in the view of "new entropy", more than 10 types of Hema formats can be roughly divided into two types:
One is the Hema Fresh + Hema X Club that considers the location of the shopping center. From the perspective of the iteration of the retail business model, the former belongs to the store model, and the latter belongs to the warehousing membership model, so it is also called the first and second growth curves of Hema by the industry.
Another site selection model outside of shopping malls is the community. In addition to Hema Fresh and Hema X Clubs, all other diversified formats of Hema are currently around the community.
However, the location of Hema X clubs is different from that of foreign warehouses and member stores, which are mostly located in the suburbs outside the city, but mainly based on the core commercial body of the business circle. In a recent interview with Hou Yi, he said that the main site selection strategy now is to choose the best Mall and cooperate with the five strategic partners of Vanke and Yintai.
This means that Hema fresh is oriented to large shopping malls in first- and second-tier cities; Hema X clubs are supplemented by small commercial bodies in high-school cities and large commercial bodies in lower-tier cities.
Both store expansion speed and ceiling depend on the number of urban shopping malls in the country, so in the context of the economic environment, there is no fundamental commercial growth jump.
For the physical retail format, the growth curve is established on the condition that the store can reach more untouched people, rather than multi-dimensional reach of the same group. The former considers the market coverage ratio, and the latter considers the repurchase rate.
The competition for market coverage occurs in the growth period of siege and land grabbing, and the repurchase rate occurs in the mature period of refined operation. For the first curve hema fresh has just reached 300 stores of hema, it is obviously still in the growth stage.
Therefore, for the determination of the second growth curve, it should be decisive whether the new single-store model can cover the blank market that has not been covered before, and the blank is hidden in the community.
Whether it is the Hema Vegetable Market, which previously focused on the wet market, or the Hema Small Station that mainly focused on the front warehouse, or the Hema Neighborhood that has now upgraded and iterated, the essence is the commercial service ecology around the community.
The adjustment and polishing of all business formats also revolves around the changes in the community business environment, which is a really different position transition from the commercial real estate as the site selection format.
The location transition brought about by different location considerations is also changing the ceiling of hema. The number of commercial entities mentioned above is the ceiling of the first curve of Hema, so for the Hema community format, the number of Communities in China is the theoretical growth limit of its community format.
There is no doubt that compared with the Hema X club, which still takes the business district as the core element of the site selection, it is obvious that the diversified formats with the community as the site are the real second growth curve of Hema.
03 Hema neighborhood turns into a street fight
In the offline physical store industry, there is a saying: commercial real estate is similar, and the location of the street is very different. It means that the commercial body is used as the factor for site selection, which is conducive to improving the standardization of site selection and the ability to expand stores in the national region.
For example, in the early days of Haidilao, street stores were the mainstay, but after the listing, the shopping mall stores relying on large commercial bodies in the expanded single-store model became the main store type.
However, with the disappearance of the traffic dividend in high-tier cities, the single-store site selection model of commercial entities has begun to become a constraint on the ability of sinking penetration. This is also the main reason why new consumer brands that developed as shopping malls in the early days, such as Xicha and Naixue, are still difficult to penetrate even after launching low-priced products for the sinking market.
For physical store brands in high-tier cities, the ability to expand stores is mainly based on the past single-store model with shopping malls as the main one,000 points, and in the sinking market, it will be found that there are not so many shopping malls that can be standardized and copied. On the other hand, the non-standardization of street store location will further slow down the speed of store expansion.
Until 2019, the community group buying model that Flourish Preferred ran out attracted the attention of the mainstream market.
Even if the People's Daily published an article in the second half of 2020 saying "Don't grab turnip cabbage", meituan, Pinduoduo and other capitals still rushed in one after another, mainly because once the single-store model of community group buying runs through, it means that with the community as the basic unit, it can be quickly standardized to copy and expand the store, covering the entire Chinese market with the community as the basic unit.
From the perspective of site selection, combined with the retail behavior under the abnormal situation of the epidemic, the community is obviously the most basic retail unit in China. Assuming that a person's total shopping volume is a certain situation, the sales of each community retail unit are a robbery of the sales of other retail formats.
However, in the attempt of community formats, Hema Neighborhood may not be the end of Hema. In terms of community format store type polishing, Hema has successively launched a variety of iterative store types such as Hema Small Station, Hema Mini, and Hema Neighborhood in one year.
Hema Small Station is the front-loading warehouse mode launched in 2019, Hema mini is the store warehouse integration mode, and Hema Neighborhood is the self-pickup point mode.
Compared with community group buying, according to the three-element dimension of people, goods and fields: Hema Small Station emphasizes goods, there is no field that can be experienced, and there is not enough traffic, also known as the front warehouse mode. The reason why Hema closed the small station is that the low cost can be quickly copied, but there is no field, and the pure online traffic subsidy cannot burn the head.
Hema mini is people, goods, fields, but there is no point particularly prominent, belongs to the model of community convenience stores, compared to the community group purchase cost is high, slow expansion; Hema neighborhood is more than the community group buying more emphasis on the field experience, but in the people, goods is not prominent, the cost is higher than the community group purchase, but the expansion can take self-operation and franchise, the speed is slightly faster.
As the 3.0 version of the Hema community format, Hema Neighborhood is also known as the "new store merchant", which is considered by the industry to be the retail interactive format of the chain supermarket reverse harvesting community group purchase.
However, this format has just been born for less than half a year, and it is not easy to say whether it can really run through. At the beginning of December, Hema neighborhood began to encounter obstacles, and the market contraction in the Pearl River Delta region such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen was interpreted as a local strategy adjustment.
In addition to whether its own model can run through, in the field of community formats, the opponents facing it have begun to play differently. Different from the new retail period, combined with Ali's data advantages, the success of Hema Fresh was once considered to be an air-to-ground dimensionality reduction blow.
Now turning into the street battle of community retail, Hema is no longer facing the same amount of capital and data competition, but flexible, mobile, and endless new players emerging. For example, community group buying + retail stores = community e-commerce; community warehouses + same city riders = front warehouses; community group buying + real estate properties = property group purchases.
Here, community retail is a business, and the core assets are not GMVs and star enterprises, but community group buying thinking and community group buying infrastructure. No matter how the middle and back office are positioned and structured, the front end is still an individual unit, and who can attract individuals, liberate individuals, and empower individuals needs time to test.
Resources:
New Distribution "What Happened to Hema"
Cayman 4000 "Hema Neighborhood NB, why not NB? 》
36Kr Pro "Dialogue with Hou Yi, President of Hema: Hema Neighborhood is not a community group purchase, and there is no future for burning money subsidies"