Wen | the author of "Finance and Economics" Weekly, Xue Yongwei and Zhang Jikang
Editor| Chen Fang
The temple is in danger
The 48-year-old Li Rixue ushered in a midlife crisis. The luxury e-commerce temple he founded has recently been concerned by the outside world due to bankruptcy.
The cause of the incident was that the applicant, Chai Chenxu, applied to the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court for bankruptcy liquidation on the grounds that Beijing Siku Trading Co., Ltd. was unable to pay off its debts as they fell due and clearly lacked solvency. The news was interpreted as Secoo being filed for bankruptcy reorganization, which attracted media attention. On January 5, Secoo issued a statement in response, saying, "After verification that the above situation does not exist, the company will reserve the right to pursue responsibility." ”
Did the temple go bankrupt? When the weekly "Finance and Economics World" asked Siku for verification, the other party immediately denied it, and as for the rest, it was reluctant to say more, only emphasizing that the company was still investigating and following up.
From public information, it is impossible to find out what relationship Chai Chenxu, a Beijinger born in 1996, has with Siku, nor can it know the purpose of his application. Curiously, on January 6, Chai Chenxu applied to withdraw his application for bankruptcy liquidation of Secoo.
What is the current situation of the "first share of luxury e-commerce" Sekoo? On January 6, the weekly magazine "Finance and Economics" found that only the fourth and fifth floors of the Sikoo Building, which is located on the five-story floor of Sanlitun, are still in normal operation. The business slump temple library, can not afford the rent of 9.5 yuan a day per square meter here, a long time ago to lease the second and third floors of office space.
(Source: Finance World Weekly)
The Secoo offline experience store, which is located on the first floor of the Secoo Building and has a display area of 1,600 square meters, opened less than a year ago and closed two months ago. According to the agent of Secoo Building, the owner Wangfujing Commercial Group is considering the overall lease, because Secoo is planning to return all the leases.
By renting back this 11,000-square-meter building, siku can save 38 million yuan a year in rent alone. Siku wants to save this expense is really helpless, in 2020 loss of more than 80 million Siku, the current life is not good, deeply trapped in the crisis of layoffs, employees to seek wages, batch rights protection. Informed sources told caijing weekly that as early as mid-2019 to early 2020, Secoo carried out three rounds of layoffs, and the proportion of layoffs in the internal technical team reached 40%.
It can also be seen from the financial report that 2018, the year after the listing, was the year with the largest number of employees in Secoo, when there were a total of 1329 employees, and since then, the number of employees has been declining year by year, and the total number of employees in 2020 is only 848, a decrease of 36% compared with the peak, and a total of 481 employees in two years. Although the 2021 financial report has not yet been announced, it is foreseeable that the number of employees in Secoo is shrinking further.
There are both those who have been laid off and those who have voluntarily left. A departing employee of Siku told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that she chose to leave Secoo in 2021 because the company could not pay wages for a long time, and she did not expect that the three months of wages that had been owed so far from the departure were still not paid, during which she also went through the labor arbitration process and did not work.
Of course, she is not the only one who has been owed wages, on social platforms such as Maimai, a number of Secoo employees have posted that the company has been in arrears for several months, and not a few have not received salaries since August last year.
As early as the beginning of 2021, there were constantly suppliers who broke the news on the Internet that they did not receive the payment from the temple library on time, involving hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there were also hundreds of millions of millions, and these hundreds of suppliers who defended their rights finally chose to build a group to warm up, but very few of them successfully got the money in the past year.
Consumers who trust Secoo are also helpless, from the moment they choose to shop in Secoo, the nightmare begins, the delay in shipping after payment, the application for a refund has not been successful, and now they are also holding groups online to defend their rights.
In 2021, Siku ranked third in the list of complaints about telecommunications and bao, surpassing large e-commerce platforms such as JD.com and Meituan. On the black cat complaint platform, there are thousands of complaints involving the temple library, all of which are complaints about non-shipment and non-refund. Some netizens questioned: "The order in September last year has not been shipped so far, nor has it been refunded. ”
Transformation failed
The embankment of 100 zhang collapsed in the ant nest. Secoo is on the verge of bankruptcy, essentially facing a crisis of trust.
"Buying electrical appliances can think of Jingdong, buying women's clothing can think of Taobao, buying luxury goods can think of Siku." This is the founder Li Rixue's original brand vision for Secoo. Therefore, from the establishment of Secoo in 2008 to the listing in 2017, the core of Secoo's business is not to expand the market, but to enhance the brand tone. A former employee of Secoo told Caijing Weekly, "Secoo's early brand marketing was costless, even if it was a set of documentaries, at least tens of millions of expenditures." ”
Regardless of the cost of burning money marketing, the return is not proportional. For foreign investors, Secoo's popularity is far less than that of Alibaba and JD.com. Coupled with the domestic vertical e-commerce Jumei when Secoo was listed, when dang chose to delist, investors were not optimistic about the development of Secoo, and on the day of listing, Secoo fell below the issue price of 13 US dollars per share, facing a crisis of trust from the capital market.
In the nearly five years since its listing, Secoo's stock price has been declining, and the best performer only soared to $15.48 in August 2018, and in 2020, Secoo's stock price fell to single digits, directly falling below $1 at the end of 2021, and also received a delisting warning from NASDAQ. As of the close of trading on January 7, 2022, Secoo closed down 0.32% to just $0.43 per share, with a total market capitalization of $30.43 million, a 97% decline in market capitalization compared to its peak.
Behind the cold-blooded capital is that the performance of Secoo is really too poor, the revenue has not been able to exceed 7 billion yuan, the best 2019 is only 6.869 billion yuan, and the net profit is hovering at more than 100 million yuan all year round. After entering 2020, the situation took a sharp turn, and the financial report was delayed until November 2021, and netizens joked that the performance of the temple library was too poor to issue a financial report.
Secoo's report card is indeed not good, with revenue of 6.02 billion yuan in 2020, down 12% year-on-year; net profit turned from profit to loss, with a net loss of 87.41 million yuan. In the first half of 2021, Secoo's revenue was only 1.526 billion yuan, down 34% year-on-year, with a net loss of 39.82 million yuan.
Mo Daiqing, director of the online retail department and senior analyst of the e-commerce center of the network economic society, said that Secoo's own performance and stock price are both sluggish, and at the same time, they are negatively entangled due to financial problems, and this situation of internal and external difficulties is undoubtedly a serious crisis for any e-commerce platform.
Informed sources told the "Finance and Economics World" weekly that Secoo encountered today's dilemma and founder Li Rixue is not unrelated, he did not have the courage to go all the way to the end, since the beginning of its establishment, Secoo has undergone many transformations, each transformation has hit a wall, and has not yet found the core path to support the company's development.
Secoo originally started from a second-hand luxury consignment platform, under this model, the source of goods can not be guaranteed, and there is an endless problem of fake goods, which greatly reduces the trust of consumers. On community platforms such as Zhihu and Douban, consumers can be seen everywhere discussing the sale of fake goods on the Siku platform. In the Douban group, some netizens found that the dragon bag they bought in the temple library was a fake, so they applied to the customer service for a refund, but the reason for the refund did not have the option of "the product is fake".
Later, Siku transformed into an e-commerce platform for luxury brands to clear inventory, including jewelry, jewelry, watches, clothing, etc., but this model did not go well because it could not get the authorization of the brand side. After Li Rixue thought bitterly, he changed to serving the high-end crowd, they needed to provide what they needed, and the platform launched luxury cars, private jets, artworks, etc., but due to the lack of online service experience, this road did not succeed.
In order to improve the service experience, Secoo has also tried to establish offline stores, but due to the impact of the epidemic and high operating costs, it has failed, and offline experience centers in Qingdao, Tianjin, Beijing and other places have been closed. In 2018, Secoo also tried to learn the social e-commerce model to launch the "Library Store", selling goods that are not limited to luxury goods, but cover beauty and skin care, footwear, jewelry bags and watch accessories, and ultimately failed.
Siku, who repeatedly encountered a wall, finally ushered in a moment of life and death, and Tianyancha listed it as a high-risk enterprise, with a total of 393 risk information, some of which did not fulfill legal obligations on time, and some of which were frozen in equity. It is understood that a total of seven shares in Secoo have been frozen, involving an amount of up to 153 million yuan.
Annihilated
"If the temple collapses this time, it means that the luxury e-commerce industry is completely destroyed." Zhou Ting, president of the VIP Research Institute and an expert in the luxury industry, told Caijing Tianxia Weekly.
Founded in 2008, Secoo can be said to be the elder of luxury e-commerce. In that era when material life was greatly enriched and e-commerce was higher than a wave, "luxury freedom" was once a hot outlet for vertical e-commerce. Before the temple, catwalk nets, Meixi fashion, etc. have long been aimed at this piece of fat meat.
(Source: Screenshot of the official website)
After 2010, luxury e-commerce has blossomed everywhere, and the scale of financing has exploded, with 12 financing cases disclosed throughout the year, raising $108 million, far more than the sum of previous years. According to incomplete statistics, from 2009 to January 2012, the number of domestic luxury websites reached 40 to 50.
However, the good times are not long, and while the growth rate of luxury e-commerce is slowing down, some companies have lost in the competition. From the end of 2011 to the winter of early 2012, there were 3 luxury e-commerce companies that were closed and closed down, more than 4 were exposed to layoffs and salary cuts, and the profitability of the catwalk network that was still sticking to was worrying.
The first problem to arise was huha.com. In December 2011, the five-year-old Huha website was hacked, the website came to a standstill, the business was terminated, and a large number of employees left. "NetEase Shangpin" also issued an announcement that it stopped service from 00:00 on January 1, 2012, which was less than a year after its official opening. On January 9, 2012, Pinju.com, which had only been online for 3 months, entered liquidation, suspended the relevant business, and officially announced that the company could not continue to operate due to the break of the capital chain.
At the same time, on January 12, 2012, the catwalk network carried out layoffs and integration, transferring some departments in Beijing to the Shenzhen headquarters; Shangpin.com carried out large-scale layoffs of middle- and low-level employees, reducing the size of employees from 400 to 100 people; a month later, Zunku Network also laid off employees and reduced salaries, including Hou Yujiang, then chairman and CEO.
Half a year later, the news of large-scale layoffs was also reported on Jiapin.com, when a laid-off employee said that the scale of employees who were "optimized" in this round was nearly 200 people, accounting for about 1/2 of the total number of original employees of Jiapin.com. In 2013, Jiapin.com gave up luxury sales and completely transformed into Macy's regular-price online mall in China, and founder Yang Peifeng also left the market. Once hailed as the fastest company in history to get SAIF's investment, the exclusive network collapsed in 2014, and the website page could no longer be opened.
And those survivors, who are not happy, are deeply involved in the capital chain crisis and the haze of price wars. In August 2011, Chen Yijia, vice president of Catwalk.com, told the media that the entire website was not profitable and was basically in the stage of "pure burning money". Due to the poor financing restructuring and obstruction of operation, Shangpin.com, which has been struggling for nine years and "selling itself" to Hemei Group, also ushered in the end of bankruptcy in 2019.
One of the most sensational price wars in those years was a big promotion in July 2015. At that time, the Chanel chain bag, which was originally priced at 48,000 yuan, was sold by the temple library for 4.7% discount, as low as 25,000 yuan, and directly called the Chanel counter. The treasure network also could not sit still, sacrificing 5999 yuan of Chanel, calling the duel "a certain warehouse price". As the two fights escalated, Chanel issued a "warning" that third-party platforms had never been authorized and supplied.
This gave luxury e-commerce a blow, and the fig leaf of the supply was torn off.
"Luxury e-commerce, in the early years, from various wholesale channels, even parallel markets (foundries straight out) to transfer goods, and then get online sales, can be said to be wandering in the gray area." Zhou Ting analyzed that luxury e-commerce such as catwalk network and siku plays the role of channel providers and middlemen, and the goods are not strictly speaking directly issued to consumers by the brand side, "which buries huge hidden dangers for the authenticity, quality and after-sales of the product."
According to the "2019 China Luxury E-commerce Report", the supply rate of unofficial merchants in china's online channels is 73%, the shipment rate of unofficial products is 81%, and the probability of customers buying fake goods is more than 48%.
What is even more fatal is that luxury e-commerce companies are all losing money and making money. Sun Yafei, CEO of Fifth Avenue Global Preferred, told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that at the beginning of its establishment in 2009, the cost of fifth avenue customer acquisition was 50-60 yuan / person, and by 2016 it had soared 10 times, and by 2017, it became 2000-3000 yuan / person, and it was difficult to pull a consumer with 10,000 yuan of precision advertising, "In 2017, our luxury business sales fell by more than 50%."
Luxury e-commerce is caught in a vicious circle, not spending money on marketing is dead, spending money on marketing is also dead. In 2020, catwalk network, which has been established for more than 10 years, officially announced the suspension of business.
Looking at the rise of luxury e-commerce from the rise, to the barbaric development, to the industry reshuffle and the beginning of the crisis, the doubts about its false proposition have never stopped, and some companies have closed down, shut down, transformed, laid off and other news has made this judgment. The rumors of Secoo's bankruptcy seem to announce that the industry has officially reached the end of the story.
There is no future
Putting aside the clichéd supply problem, the collapse of luxury e-commerce is the most critical issue of business model.
As a practitioner, Sun Yafei has a deep understanding of this. She told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that after realizing the poor performance of the company's luxury e-commerce business, Fifth Avenue also tried to radiate downwards and add some new 200-300 yuan of goods, but this does not have a traffic advantage compared to those platform e-commerce companies with many mass categories. But if you want to continue to radiate upwards, increase the high-end luxury category, and introduce more attractive prices, the company will be overwhelmed in the inventory and capital chain.
Sun Yafei said that under several trial and error, in 2017, Fifth Avenue began to seek transformation, launched a new business sector "Fifth Wealth", and provided customers with non-standardized consulting services with higher unit prices in the fields of career investment and real estate allocation, "finally out of traffic anxiety and price comparison dilemma".
Zhou Ting also analyzed the weekly "Finance and Economics" weekly that the B2C business model relied on by luxury e-commerce is equivalent to luxury e-commerce buying goods from brands and then selling them to consumers in their own name. The platform e-commerce of Tmall and Jingdong is to survive through the mode of brand settlement, so that the brand itself provides logistics, services, and products, which will be more direct.
"One of the characteristics of luxury consumers is that they believe more in brands, and they need product services and after-sales experiences from the brand side. Therefore, as a form of middleman vertical e-commerce, it is difficult to have a living space. Zhou Ting analyzed.
Indeed, Chanel, which has been developed for hundreds of years, in order to ensure its market position and brand tradition, will not easily authorize e-commerce sales, and rarely reduce price promotions. This leads to luxury e-commerce if they want to obtain brand authorization can not achieve low prices, want to low prices can not achieve brand authorization, seriously restrict their development.
Chanel once said that the elegance of luxury is "the privilege of those who have mastered their future", and the realization of this "privilege" relies more on offline consumer experience - magnificent decoration, thoughtful service, tall activities, which is the high value-added source of luxury.
(Source: Visual China)
This makes even the self-built e-commerce of luxury brands doomed. A luxury industry source who has been engaged in the industry for more than ten years told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that all this cannot be brought about by online consumption, "The online sales of luxury brands will not account for more than 10% of global sales, and the brand's self-built e-commerce is more like a commodity display." The reliance of luxury goods on online channels is a false proposition. ”
If you want to sell luxury goods online, the final way out seems to be to rely on the platform model. Tmall's Luxury Pavilion (Tmall luxury channel), which was launched in 2017, soon had brands such as Cartier, Gucci, Prada, Balenciaga and Armani, which allowed the brand to operate itself, which greatly reduced the operating costs of the platform.
In 2017, JD.com invested $397 million in the overseas version of "Serato" Farfetch, becoming one of its largest shareholders, and relying on strong capital strength, it obtained the exclusive entry of Saint Laurent and cooperated with Burberry and Prada.
"Luxury goods are not just needed, the repurchase rate is extremely low, the consumer group is very small, and as a vertical e-commerce luxury e-commerce, but also to continuously introduce traffic, so the best destination is to be acquired by giants similar to Tmall, Jingdong and introduce traffic." Otherwise, it is a dead end. Sun Yafei admitted, "Even offline, luxury brands can only open in shopping malls to share the flow of people in shopping malls." In the simplest example, LV can only be sold in SKP, but you've never seen an LV tower. ”
"Luxury e-commerce has no future", Sun Yafei believes, "this is almost the end of every vertical e-commerce." ”
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