12 years ago, Lei Jun believed that Chinese consumers needed a smart phone with good quality and low price, so there was Xiaomi, which was squeezed into the world's top 500. Seven years ago, Huang Zheng believed that the e-commerce platform had not yet covered the sinking market, so there was a market value of 62.5 billion US dollars. In fact, whether it is Pinduoduo or Xiaomi, it proves that the "poor" also need to consume. Coincidentally, there is also a company in the convenience store industry that adheres to this philosophy.
Furong, which started in Hunan, flourished by opening stores to remote townships and urban villages in first-tier cities. Today, it has 16,000 branches nationwide. And because of the wide distribution of stores, when cutting into the community group purchase track, it is also favored by capital, raising more than 30 billion yuan in three years, and Tencent has participated in three rounds of investment and become its major shareholder.
Started from scratch, the store exceeded 16,000
Many people say that Liu Qiangdong is already a self-made family, and even to go to college, the village has to collect money, but in contrast, the conditions of Yue Lihua, the founder of Furong's prosperity, are more difficult, and the family commissary is still because the villagers see that he lost his father at a young age and there are seven sisters. The youngest yue Lihua in the family, after a few years of seeing the grocery store, went to the town with his brother to open a wholesale department, and half a year later, the two brothers earned 100,000 yuan by getting up early and greedily, and the per capita salary at that time was less than one hundred yuan.
Judging from the prosperity of Furong, Yue Lihua can be said to be retrograde, after 2000, small shops sprung up like mushrooms, but he decided to open a hypermarket of 200 square meters to 2000 square meters. After 2006, domestic hypermarkets such as RT-Mart, Wal-Mart, and China Resources Vanguard began to lay, and Furong Prosperity began to transform into a convenience store, but it was also such a move that allowed Furong to avoid a lot of competition.
And unlike meiyijia and other chain convenience stores, Furong Xingsheng is not only keen to open convenience stores to the corner of the place, but also let go of the authority of franchise stores, even if it is not at the headquarters to buy is also OK, but also because of this strategy, there are many shop owners willing to join, and at the same time let Furong prosperity of the supply capacity in the competition to be strengthened. It also has the eye-catching results of its current 16,000 stores.
The leader of community group buying, favored by Tencent
As we all know, after the popularity of online shopping, the performance of offline physical stores has been greatly hit, and Furong Prosperity is no exception. However, when many people are attacking online shopping for killing the real economy, Yue Lihua is thinking about how to use the tools of the Internet to continue the development of enterprises, so since 2013, it has been incubating e-commerce projects, in the exploration of e-commerce business, Furong Xingsheng has experienced three models of store distribution, online warehouse distribution and distribution station, and finally chose to give up because of the high operating costs.
Until 2016, Hibiscus Boom launched Boom Preferred. Opened the online pre-sale and self-pickup model, which is also one of the earliest prototypes of community group buying, and thanks to the number of prosperous stores in Furong, the store manager is the head of the group. This move not only allowed Xinxingsheng to develop smoothly, but also brought a good flow of people to Furong Prosperity.
In less than a year after the launch of the group purchase model, the daily order volume of Xingsheng Preferred exceeded 20,000 singles, and by June 2018, the monthly sales of Xingsheng Preferred had exceeded 20 million yuan, at this time, the community group purchase project had not been promoted by the epidemic, and Xingsheng Preferred had already obtained tens of millions of dollars of financing from three heavy investment institutions of Today Capital, Zhen Fund and GSR Venture Capital four months later, and then less than half a year later. Tencent also invested an undisclosed amount of strategic investment.
The money-burning war has come to an end, and the site has been cut to sell women's clothing
Since being affected by the epidemic, the popularity of community group buying has increased significantly, not only various Internet companies are scrambling to enter the market, but investment institutions are also carrying a large amount of funds to enter. As far as Xingsheng Preferred is concerned, there has been a huge increase in financing after 2020, with Tencent participating in the C+ round and C round financing of US$800 million and US$3 billion respectively, and JD.com has invested US$700 million in strategic investment between these two rounds of investment.
With the growth of investment, the performance of Xingsheng Preferred has also risen, in 2020, the average daily single volume has reached 8 million, the annual GMV exceeded 40 billion yuan, and in September last year, the average daily single volume has exceeded 15 million. But even so, as the community group buying track enters the final round, the abandonment of some early users has weakened the heat of community group buying, and Xingsheng Preferred has also ushered in a bottleneck period.
On the track of community group buying, Food Sharing Club and Ctrip's Tongcheng Life have gone bankrupt, Ali's investment of the Ten Hui Group has laid off employees and cut salaries to close the site, and Orange Heart Preferred, which is backed by Didi, has also come to an end. As the industry's forefront, Prosperity Preferred has shrunk its front since the end of last year, in addition to no longer expanding new city sites, the original daily single volume of sites has also been eliminated, and even sold women's clothing on small programs to expand traffic. In this way, although Prosperity Preferred has better financing conditions and timing, it is not an easy task to replicate the success of Furong Prosperity.