Yonghui Supermarket swallowed the largest annual loss

Reporter | Zhao Xiaojuan

Edit | Ya Han Xiang

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On the evening of January 28, Yonghui Supermarket (601933. SH) announced its 2021 annual results forecast. The forecast shows that in 2021, Yonghui's net profit attributable to the mother was -3.93 billion yuan, and the net profit attributable to the mother after deducting non-deduction was -3.89 billion yuan, compared with the net profit of 1.79 billion yuan in 2020, which is the largest net profit decline since Yonghui was listed.

Yonghui disclosed four reasons in the announcement, including the company's overall operating income fell by 3.8% year-on-year, gross profit margin decreased by 2.4% year-on-year, online business losses of 840 million yuan, in addition, the impact of the implementation of leasing standards and investment losses totaled 1 billion yuan.

Yonghui's loss has begun since the second quarter of 2021. According to the announcement of past quarterly reports, from the first to third quarters of 2021, Yonghui's net profit level was 0.23 billion yuan, -1.08 billion yuan and -1.09 billion yuan, respectively; from this calculation, Yonghui lost nearly 1.8 billion yuan in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Retailers generally experience pre-loss performance. Source: Company announcement

In addition, on the evening of January 28, Zhongbai Group (SZ.000759), Jiajiayue (SH.603708), Hualian Zongchao (SH.600361), Aeon (0984.HK) announced pre-losses. HK), all of which have experienced different degrees of performance pre-losses. Jiajiayue, which also has an advantage in the fresh category with Yonghui, is expected to lose 260-300 million yuan in 2021.

The reason for the general loss of retailer companies comes from the differentiation of offline customer flow. Between 2020 and 2021, because of the impact of the epidemic, consumer groups that originally shopped offline began to shop from social platforms. One of the reasons for the loss given by Yonghui Supermarket in the annual report of the first half of 2021 is that the whole industry has been affected by online business, especially emerging businesses such as community group buying, and the company's revenue and gross profit margin have declined significantly.

A supermarket supervisor told Interface News that although community group buying will end in the second half of 2021, the consumption habits cultivated by these platforms are still retained, and supermarkets have to reduce gross profits in many categories to increase competition with e-commerce and social platforms, while improving their ability to reach their own home business.

In 2021, Yonghui's online turnover has reached 10 billion yuan, accounting for more than 10% of total revenue. The retail giant with a revenue scale of 100 billion yuan began to explore omni-channels including home business around 2015.

In August last year, Yonghui appointed the first CEO with a technical background, Li Songfeng, hoping to turn around by betting on digital retail. On January 29, Yonghui disclosed information to the outside world that in 2021, Yonghui released a new ten-year plan, clarified the strategy of Yonghui technology, and accelerated its progress towards a fresh-based, customer-centric omni-channel technology retail enterprise. Under this strategy, Yonghui Technology invested 670 million yuan in 2021 and set up a yonghui technology center with a team of 1,000 people, and the full-link retail digital system "YHDOS" independently developed by Yonghui has also been put into use on a large scale in Fuzhou and other places.

At the same time, Yonghui has adopted the strategy of adjusting the structure, reducing inventory and ensuring the market in the operation of physical stores, and under the tide of industry withdrawal, Yonghui has completed the opening of more than 70 stores and the upgrading of more than 50 warehouses in 2021. The digital strategy has also significantly improved the operational efficiency of Yonghui, and the inventory time of Yonghui digital benchmark stores has been reduced to about 16 days, while other similar supermarkets in the industry are generally 20 to 24 days.

However, whether the above exploration can curb Yonghui's loss after experiencing the pain of loss has not yet seen results in a short period of time.