Text | itlaoyou-com, written by | Zhou Yuhao, and edited by | Han Zhipeng
Hema, who has reached the age of six, finally has to raise funds independently.
The media recently reported that Ali Group is considering seeking independent financing for Hema Fresh, with a valuation of $10 billion; in response, Ali responded that it would not comment.
If the financing "boots land", this is undoubtedly a six-year-old "birthday gift" dedicated to Hema. However, after six years of ups and downs, how is Hema living?
Near the end of 2021, Hema sprinted all the way at the speed of "two days a family", and finally opened the 300th Hema fresh store in the country in the 14 days before New Year's Day in 2022.
Internally, Hema Xiansheng was once the "No. 1 project" of Ali's new retail; externally, compared with Jingdong Qixian and Yonghui Super Species, which started at the same stage, Hema is still the leader among them.
But the white colt has passed the gap, is hema still the new retail flag bearer who used to be the "freshly dressed angry horse"?
Dingdong Buy Vegetables opened 1375 pre-warehouse sites four years after its establishment; Meituan Preferred, Duoduo Buy Vegetables, etc. have entered more than 2,000 counties and cities across the country in less than a year.
In contrast, Hema has a new milestone of "300 stores", but the future is not enough.
At the beginning of this year, Hou Yi, CEO of Hema, said that the past five years have been "scarred"; and in the internal letter of the New Year, Hou Yi also said that in 2022, Hema will temporarily "tighten the belt of pants" and "lean production and lean management".
With the box horse who proposed to "sacrifice his life to run wildly" at that time, he sentenced two people.
The external competitive situation is "turbulent", the internal strategy is changing rapidly, can Hema, led by Hou Yi, successfully cross its own six-year threshold?
stall
In six years, 300 stores, how did Hema go through this road?
In 2016, Hema opened 6 stores;
In 2017, Hema opened 18 stores;
In 2018, Hema opened 88 new stores, bringing the total number of stores nationwide to 112;
In 2019, Hema opened 85 new stores, and the total number of stores nationwide reached 197.
In the four years after the opening of Hema's first store, 2018 is undoubtedly the "peak year of opening a store", and this year is also the first time that Hou Yi proposed to "sacrifice his life and run wildly".
However, looking at the retail industry of supermarkets, the achievements of Hema in 2018 are not "top-notch": Yonghui Supermarket, which is making efforts to "super species", also opened 160 new stores that year.
Of course, starting from 2019, Yonghui Supermarket's new retail "store opening" experiment has basically failed, and the way forward is more difficult.
On the other hand, Hema also suffered a low tide period after 2019.
At the beginning of 2020, Hou Yi also said that in the next year, Hema will implement the double 100 strategy and open more than 100 Hema fresh stores and more than 100 Hema mini in the country.
Reality and ideals, but like sea water and flames.
In 2020, the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, Hema also pressed the pause button, opening only 20 stores in the first 9 months; even after the epidemic gradually improved, from October 2020 to the end of 2021, Hema opened 83 new stores in 15 months, less than the number of stores opened in a year during the peak period.
In fact, from the second half of 2019 to the first half of 2021, Hema has suspended its entry into new cities, shut down some stores and cities that do not meet expectations, and the slogan has changed from the original "life-sacrificing wild run" to "life-saving wild running".
Hema stores opened between 2016 and September 2020, and The Geosong Network has made a map
A word difference, the dilemma of breaking the box horse "stall".
The emergence and spread of the new crown epidemic has indeed affected the pace of expansion of the Hema line, and more community retail players are not "idle".
For example, "do not sell overnight meat" Qian Aunt, in September 2018, the number of stores exceeded 1,000, as of September last year, the number of stores has exceeded 3,400; for example, the hot pot, barbecue ingredients store "Pot Circle Food Hui", opened the first store in 2017, and now the number of stores has exceeded 8,000.
Aunt Qian and Pot Circle have expanded with relatively low-cost franchise models, but even in the front warehouse track that Hou Yi believes that there is no future, the fully self-operated Dingdong grocery shopping is far larger than that of Hema Fresh.
Up to now, Hema has entered a total of 28 cities across the country, and Dingdong has launched 37 cities; last September's QuestMobile data showed that the number of monthly active people in Hema reached 23.42 million, and Dingdong reached 34.71 million.
For expansion, Liang Changlin, CEO of Dingdong Grocery, once said: "Leaving the scale to talk about various profits, I think it is not the business logic of people in the Internet era. ”
The division of store size reflects the multi-faceted gap after the stall of the box horse.
For Internet companies, the scale effect means that the marginal cost is reduced and the profitability is optimized, but it is not easy for Hema to achieve this step.
Since the second half of 2019, hema's GMV growth rate has gradually slowed down, and it was not until 2020 that Hema achieved full profitability in Beijing and Shanghai.
"I came from a traditional retail background, and it is always a shame to do business without making money." Hou Yi said.
Behind the stall, Hema began to expose many problems, and the focus of the contradiction was ultimately in the supply chain and internal strategy.
Influencers "faded"
Inside Ali, Hema was born "with a golden spoon".
At the beginning of its establishment, Hema can accurately match and select the location of the human freight yard through the underlying support of Alibaba cloud computing and big data; Alipay, Ele.me, etc. also open the traffic entrance for Hema; Ma Yun also personally "stands" for Hema.
Not only the internal resource support, Hema has its own "net red" attribute at the beginning of its opening, the store decoration and the automatic transmission equipment at the top are full of fashion and technology, the trading method is "only accepting the Hema App", and the aquatic products such as fresh Boston lobster and king crab are in the aquatic tank...
There are many novel elements, a large number of young consumers have come to punch the clock, and traditional supermarkets are visiting and learning "must visit" Hema fresh.
In the wave of new retail transformation in full swing, Hema is constantly consolidating its supply chain capabilities. Since 2018, Hema has strategically cooperated with more than 500 direct-harvesting agricultural product bases across the country; by 2019, the proportion of hema fresh direct procurement has reached one-third, and the number of private brands has accounted for more than 20% so far.
The fashion and technology elements of the store, coupled with the cost-effective advantage formed by the direct procurement of the place of origin, Hema is undoubtedly the leader in the transformation of new retail.
At that time, a 99 yuan live Boston lobster and a live abalone of 1.99 yuan were the strongest explosive models of Hema Fresh, "Bolong, which is often hundreds of yuan in the hotel, can be bought at only 99 yuan in Hema." ”
Focusing on fresh aquatic products and "cost-effective", Hema not only earns enough eyeballs, but also consolidates the cost-effective advantage.
But times have changed, where is the $99 Boston Lobster now?
At present, in Hema's base camp in Shanghai, the smallest Boston lobster also needs 158 yuan to buy; the smallest abalone, one sold for 3.3 yuan; the original daily first order exemption from delivery fees, has also become "consumption less than 49 yuan, charged 6 yuan delivery fee."
As for the exquisite decoration style and "only accept the Hema App" trading method, in the wave of innovation in new retail round after round, hema's "net red" attribute is gradually being diluted.
Especially in the current fierce competition of community e-commerce, the progress of design and technical tools is even more "not worth mentioning".
Including at the supply chain end, the proportion of fresh direct procurement of fresh food in Dingdong, which is in the front warehouse system, has reached 79.1%, and in mature areas such as Shanghai, this figure is more than 85%.
The rise of community group buying in 2020 is to strengthen the social cooperation force while deeply cultivating the source of direct procurement, the central warehouse from the professional logistics park leasing, the grid warehouse to adopt the franchise system, the head of the group to adopt the commission system, greatly reducing the cost of performance, each single performance cost of about 1 yuan, far more than the front warehouse to home, the traditional express delivery model.
Supply chain transformation capabilities may have their own advantages, but the most critical issue is that the front warehouse and community group buying have continuously created an "extreme cost performance" model by upgrading circulation links and strengthening cooperation between production areas, so as to benefit consumers and increase income for source farmers and manufacturers.
On the other hand, Hema, the cost-effective advantage laid by the "99 yuan Boston Lobster" is being surpassed by new players in community e-commerce, and no matter how novel the technical tools and decoration styles are, it is difficult to hide the gap between the supply chain and commodity attributes.
Nowadays, consumers walk into Hema, there are aquatic product areas, there are refrigerated food areas, there are tobacco and alcohol areas, there are imported brands at the commodity end, and there are self-operated brands, and stores can shop, eat and rest.
The floating clouds of the "net red" attribute have dissipated, but Hema has turned itself into a "hypermarket".
Hou Yi also said in 2019 that hema became a hypermarket that year, and internally believed that the vegetable farm model may be closer to the people, "Later, it was found that the complete competition was not enough for the local hypermarket." ”
Problems are seen, but not much change.
Hema "cost-effective" advantage is no longer, self-positioning and gradually lost, and the community e-commerce of Agni Cooking Oil is becoming one of the power points of the Internet giant, and the community group purchase is covering the whole country in a short period of time, and the daily single volume has exceeded 10 million pieces.
In addition to the supply chain competition, what is the weakness of Hema?
It's me
The birth of Hema stems from the "love and agreement" of Daniel Zhang and Hou Yi.
In 2015, the new Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang wanted to explore a new retail model that integrates online and offline, while Hou Yi wanted to do a fresh supermarket with a heavy model, starting from offline, and then connecting offline and online through data.
Hou Zhang and Zhang hit it off immediately, and after a period of preparation, hema opened. For a long time, Hou Yi reported directly to Daniel Zhang.
However, Hou Yi's subsequent professional experience was extremely tortuous.
At the end of 2019, Hema was selected as the "Rotten Strawberry Award" (Alibaba's internal team that performed poorly in serving customers), and its internal status was also reduced from an independent business unit to a sub-business segment of the business group.
After 2021, Ali set up the MMC business group, focusing on the community e-commerce business, and Hou Yi, the head of the former Hema Market (now renamed Taocai Cai), reported to Dai Shan, the head of the business group.
Dark tides are surging.
During this period, the community group purchase project led by Hou Yi in September 2020 only launched four cities in four months, and in the same period, Meituan Preferred has completed the "Thousand Cities Plan" and purchased more vegetables in more than 300 prefecture-level cities.
The field is obvious at first sight.
After the establishment of the MMC business group and The leadership of Dai Shan's community group buying, Hou Yi was once "unwilling": "I think the Hema Market has done a good job, but the group has not given us enough resources and time. ”
In fact, as early as November 2020, Hou Yi believed: "Many people occupy some form of transaction of community group buying, but in fact, these are not worth mentioning." ”
However, Hou Yi's unwillingness and "ambition are not rewarded" became more and more significant when Hema Neighborhood was established: "Hema Neighborhood is not a community group purchase, and there is no future for burning money subsidies, and it is a regression in innovation ability." ”
Dai on the leader of the tao vegetables, Hou in the lower fierce attack on the community group buying, the smell of gun smoke filled.
In August 2021, Daniel Zhang officially released an internal letter that Dai Shan would no longer represent the Group in charge of the Hema Business Group, and Hou Yi would report directly to the Daniel Zhang instead.
Between the ups and downs, Hou Yi seems to have an obsession with the physical store model, more precisely, insisting on "me-based" and full-link self-operation.
The "me-based" model can indeed effectively control store operations and supply chain links, but when community group buying attacks with a more efficient social cooperation model, Hema's "me-based" will drag its feet.
In the future of high manpower and fixed costs, social collaboration can fully mobilize idle and effective social resources, while the "me-based" model will be difficult to move forward.
This was a strategic mistake made by Hou Yi.
It is worth noting that as early as the beginning of 2020 in Wuhan, Hema's distribution team tried to deliver goods to the door of the community and developed a leader in the community, but this test did not get Hou Yi's attention.
Including Hema has also tested the water of the pre-warehouse business "Hema Small Station", but in less than a year it was completely shut down, Hou Yi also commented that "the pre-warehouse is a false proposition"; and Dingdong buy vegetables, daily excellent fresh two major pre-warehouse new stars, in the past year have been successfully listed.
It's a shame.
As the "flag bearer" of the new retail, Hou Yi's hema is still a top student, but whether it is a company or an individual, it cannot only indulge in the success of the past strategy, but ignore the drastic changes in the industry and the obvious gap between itself and the new format.
According to a number of sources close to Hema revealed to Dige Network, Hema's current focus on the formats are "X member stores" and "Hema neighborhoods", and strengthen the ability of "refined operation".
Hema Neighborhood is a new area that Hou Yi led last year to open up, but recent news shows that Hema Neighborhood has withdrawn from Guangzhou, Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta region, and the road ahead has added another layer of haze.
Expansion stall, positioning loss, strategic misjudgment, these are all thorns hindering the progress of the box horse. More importantly, the resistance and non-acceptance of the external innovation model, and the insistence on the "me-based" model, how far can Hema go in the future?
The box horse led by Hou Yi seems to have been in the trek.