In the e-commerce field, there has suddenly been a group of crazy gold diggers under the "acquisition + operation" model.
According to incomplete statistics, companies in this track have raised more than $13 billion so far. Among them, the most representative head enterprise, Thrasio, has raised a total of US$3.4 billion, which is staggeringly fast, and has also made many capital and e-commerce related players rush to chase.
These new players, known as Amazon Aggregator, are committed to acquiring e-commerce brands with potential on Amazon's platform, and then brand empowerment through integrated operations, reducing costs while increasing sales and brand premiums, helping the acquired targets achieve brand growth.
With a 12-month growth of over 200%, what is Thrasio's growth logic?
What is the magic of the phenomenal Thrasio model at a deep level, and why are investors so crazy? In the end, the core lies in the keen sense of capital to find a value increment that can be scaled. That is, the value increase of large-scale small and medium-sized merchants and brands in the e-commerce industry.
Looking at the current e-commerce market, the problem facing the entire industry is essentially a growth problem.
With the disappearance of traffic dividends, refined operation has become a consensus, and extensive growth has become a thing of the past. On the other hand, the global economy is sluggish, consumption is sluggish, and careful calculation has stimulated the growth space of small and medium-sized businesses.
And how to dig out these value increments? Thrasio gave us inspiration to monetize incremental value through an innovative model of capital acquisition + brand operation, thereby gaining new growth in the existing e-commerce market.
In essence, Thrasio's model is not brand logic, but store and product logic. The key is to tap and monetize the hidden growth space through more professional and refined operations.
According to Thrasio's previous record of acquiring brands, most brands can increase revenue by more than 200% in the 12 months after being acquired, of which the profit of brands after acquisition has increased by more than 150% in one year. Multi-brand integration, through finer-grained operational optimization to achieve sales value-added is the core.
Notably, two years after its inception, Thrasio has achieved more than $100 million in profits.
In the post-traffic era, the acceleration of the Chinese version of "Thrasio" broke through
Data show that among Amazon's third-party sellers, the number of Chinese cross-border e-commerce sellers has increased rapidly from 24% in 2016 to 43% in 2020, thanks to the advantages of the local supply chain, the market share of Chinese sellers in North America Amazon has even surpassed the us domestic sellers to the top.
In August this year, Thrasio announced its entry into the Chinese market, and a large number of companies with the same track have emerged in China. At present, most of the fields are start-ups, and they are also more concerned by venture capital, of which Jiqi is more distinctive in the domestic track.
It is reported that Jiqi is a commodity service provider that empowers small and medium-sized businesses to increase revenue and build a micro-brand matrix, using unique intelligent algorithm patent technology and strange success formula to provide closed-loop operation services for micro-brands, helping brand merchants to reconstruct the growth ability of brand operations, so as to achieve increased revenue and efficiency.
As explained earlier, the reason why Thrasio has been able to succeed is that it has found an increase in the post-traffic era, and acquisitions are only the first step to achieve, and more importantly, it focuses on the operational empowerment of the supply chain.
To put it bluntly, the Thrasio model is essentially building a middle office of sellers and brand operation capabilities with data as the underlying layer, and for the platform itself, such a middle office capability is the core competitiveness.
We have noticed that Jiqi in the track is not eager to pursue large-scale mergers and acquisitions, but focuses more on the core growth points of supply chain empowerment and data empowerment.
Focusing on empowerment itself can create its own differentiated competitiveness.
First of all, as a domestic brand, Jiqi has a deep enough understanding of the domestic supply chain. In this regard, thanks to years of experience in the front line of the supply chain, Jiqi is more likely to open up the resource advantages of the industrial chain and empower sellers and brands. For example, Jiqi opens up a series of closed-loop empowerment services [Strange Things Collection] from product selection, content, shelf listing, promotion, to packaging, warehousing, after-sales service, etc., which can help merchants achieve more value-added space.
Secondly, with the support of its own intelligent algorithm technology, Jiqi can accurately match new and exotic products with online merchants. This means that Jiqi has a data-driven supply chain distribution capability, and the result of this ability is higher supply chain competitiveness, thereby further empowering merchants and achieving sales value-added.
Of course, with the future strength of the growth, in addition to focusing on the core growth points of supply chain empowerment, the possibility of Jiqi acquiring brands is not ruled out.
At the marketing level, Jiqi can also use data capabilities and algorithm capabilities to further help merchants expand marketing channels through brand empowerment, realize the aggregation and value-added of micro-brands, and thus achieve more premium space.
Landing to the implementation level, the above three points actually need the support of the team, and the organizational ability of the team often determines whether the strategy of the enterprise can be sustained and effectively landed.
On the one hand, the heat of the track and the rapid growth require a founding team with enough experience to stabilize the fast-growing enterprise organization, on the other hand, the group core is also the first executor of the strategy, and it must have enough judgment on the rapidly developing industry.
In fact, the Jiqi team has a wealth of experience as a serial entrepreneur, taking founder and CEO Zhao Hong as an example, who has more than 15 years of experience in data product development, as the former head of Alibaba's big data center, he was responsible for the group's data strategy, data products and commercialization, and he is also a serial entrepreneur.
In addition, the core team members of Jiqi are senior practitioners in various fields such as consumer retail, supply chain, brand marketing, and the Internet, all of whom have more than 20 years of industry experience and a deep understanding of entrepreneurship. In the field of venture capital, the weight of the early project team is very high, because the high-allocation team, once the financing is in place, can quickly and steadily land the project on a large scale.
This means that Jiqi not only has deep experience accumulation in technology, effective technical support for merchants, based on years of experience in the retail industry, Jiqi's accurate attention to potential merchants and market trends can also have accurate judgments, which may become The differentiated competitiveness of Jiqi.
Jiqi's Chinese-style road
From the perspective of capital markets, Thrasio's success in overseas markets has been verified, and its valuation has reached nearly $10 billion, and there is a lot of room for growth in the future.
For China, the Chinese version of "Thrasio" like Jiqi is also growing rapidly and continues to attract the attention of the market.
In the long run, as China's version of "Thrasio", the future growth of Jiqi lies not only in the above-mentioned differentiated competitiveness, but also in the long-term growth of the current policy environment.
Judging from the trend of the Internet industry in recent times, the policy environment under the micro is changing, and the growth of Internet business also needs more long-term. From this perspective, Jiqi's model may be more in line with the long-term growth of the current domestic situation.
In fact, for small and medium-sized businesses and micro-brands, Jiqi attaches more importance to cooperation empowerment, and constantly incubates merchants and brands with growth potential, essentially creating a shared community of interests with brands, merchants and suppliers, rather than simply acquiring and being acquired.
The Chinese market is different from overseas markets, the number of small and medium-sized sellers and brands is large, and the growth problem itself is not only an economic problem, but also a social problem, behind which is employment and resident income. After interconnection has become the background sound of the Internet, in the long run, the open empowerment of Jiqi is more in line with the national conditions and the overall trend of the development of the Internet industry.
In the current capital market, the entire large e-commerce track, the target with long-term growth potential is relatively scarce, which may also mean that in the future primary and secondary financing market, companies like Jiqi may have more growth value.
Compared with the performance of "Thrasio", this domestic track has just emerged, and there is a lot of room for growth in the future. In the past two years, the supply chain track has been being paid attention to by the market, and a number of start-up companies have emerged in China.
From the action of the capital market, for high-quality targets, the competition between industry capital is also accelerating. For Chinese companies such as Jiqi, this is both an opportunity and a challenge.
As one of the representatives of the hottest e-commerce model in the United States, Thrasio in overseas markets has become a value sample. In China, as a representative of this field, the future development of Jiqi deserves continuous attention.