| Spicy scalding alone cannot be made into Haidilao.
At the beginning of 2022, when chain catering companies are listed together, the first shares of spicy hot are about to be ushered in.
The Hong Kong Stock Exchange disclosed on the evening of February 22 that Shanghai Yang Guofu Enterprise Management (Group) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Yang Guofu") submitted a listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
The self-proclaimed no. 1 fast food brand in China has a total of 5,783 restaurants, but it only has 3 self-operated restaurants at its Shanghai headquarters, and the rest are franchised restaurants.
Relying on the franchise fees, ingredients and raw material sales charged to franchisees, nearly 6,000 franchised restaurants have supported Yang Guofu's average annual revenue of about 1.1 billion yuan and a net profit of nearly 200 million yuan.
Such an asset-light operation model makes Yang Guofu's financial data very eye-catching. At the level of 30% of its gross profit margin, its net profit margin reached 17%, far exceeding that of star catering brands such as Haidilao and Jiumaojiu , whose net profit margin was the highest at 10%.
Yang Guofu, a 51-year-old Harbin native who dropped out of junior high school, is the founder of the spicy hot brand and firmly controls the eponymous company he founded. This is a typical family business, Yang Guofu and his wife Zhu Yongbo and son Yang Xingyu collectively hold 96.97% of the company's shares, and the three are acting in concert. About 3% of the remaining shares are distributed to some partners and core employees before going public.
Mr. Yang's biggest rival is his distant relative, Zhang Liang, who also started in Harbin, which owns about 5,200 restaurants.
Before the IPO, Yang Guofu had never raised any financing. He has always been cautious about capital, and in 2019 he said in an interview with Caijing, "If capital is introduced, what they are asking for is short and fast, what kind of performance they want to achieve every year; we still need to take root at this stage." I'm not planting leeks, I'm planting a tree, I'm planting it to grow. ”
But last year, Yang's attitude changed dramatically, and he publicly said that he could accept outside investment. But even if funds are introduced, it is necessary to "look at the power behind the funds and hope to bring new ideas to the development of enterprises." ”
At the end of 2021, Yang Guofu, who has been established for nearly 20 years, completed the shareholding system reform and submitted an overseas listing application to the CSRC only one month later.
Now, Yang Guofu is finally standing at the moment of listing. He jumped directly around the financing stage to the IPO, perhaps because he wanted to quickly become a spicy and hot Haidilao, or he wanted to open up the gap with competitor Zhang Liang. However, whether the capital market recognizes Yang Guofu after the IPO and whether Zhang Liang will follow up the listing is still unknown.
Yang Guofu is a typical entrepreneur who works hard at the bottom.
He was 34 years old when he opened his first restaurant in 2003 with a sign that read "Yang Ji Spicy Hot." Even from today, 20 years later, in addition to the hot business, this spicy hot really does not see any potential to become a listed company.
Before that, Yang Guofu had been crawling the streets of Harbin for more than a decade. He was born into a rural family in Bin County, Harbin, with many brothers and sisters, and could not make ends meet. He dropped out of school at the age of 15 and wandered around his hometown for a few years before heading to Harbin to earn a living.
Judging from most media reports, Yang Guofu's early life in Harbin was extremely difficult. The most he did was to set up stalls, wandering the streets of Harbin all year round. He later recalled, "The winters in Harbin were cold, and small businesses were not very profitable, except for rent and expenses, and sometimes there was no money to buy coal." ”
The choice of spicy hot is also a complete accident. It was 2000, and he was still in a semi-basement in Harbin doing barbecues with his wife, grilling sausages and grilling squid and the like. Originating in Leshan, Sichuan Province, spicy hot has just spread to the northeast, this simple ingredient, but also a hot pot snack is quite popular with ordinary people in the cold Harbin, and some small shops are often full.
Yang Guofu also tried to eat it a few times, but he was completely unaccustomed to the Sichuan taste that was still heavy and spicy at that time. He said, "I can't eat spicy, and I will pull my stomach for a few days when I eat spicy."
Yang, who has several years of catering experience, realized that this is the drawback of Sichuan spicy hot in the northeast. He saw that spicy scalding had more potential than barbecue, but needed to transform it into something more suitable for northerner tastes.
To this end, he began to think about the development of new substrates. For Yang Guofu, who only has a primary school education, this road is difficult. Burning the base or failing to mix it was commonplace, but he never wanted to give up. He said, "I don't have a high degree and I don't have good family conditions, that's the only way out." ”
Later, he finally figured out the broth made of bones as the base and shouted the slogan "spicy hot soup that can be drunk". He also improved the way spicy hot was purchased, and most of the spicy hot at that time was still sold in the form of finished products, and the dishes were fixed. Yang Guofu pioneered the "self-selection of the pound", consumers can choose their own dishes, but also to avoid waste problems, this model has been widely imitated by peers.
In 2003, Yang Guofu opened his first spicy hot shop in Yonghe Street, Harbin, and the business was booming, and it is said that it sold out in half a day.
The northeast is a very humane society, and the villagers in their hometown see Yang Guofu's spicy and hot spicy hot, and they have come to run and want to open a shop.
Yang Guofu, who came from the bottom, has a bold personality of northeasterners, and many media reports said that Yang was extremely tolerant of franchisees in the early stage of entrepreneurship, and he not only provided stir-fry recipes, but even did not charge franchise fees in the early stage. "Caijing" quoted him in the report, "First send someone a sign, anyway, they are all relatives and friends, let's do it together, everyone is bitter." ”
His hometown of Bin County is probably the city with the highest concentration of spicy scalding in China. Some media reported that there is a spicy hot company in Bin County on average 11 square kilometers.
Most of China's spicy hot brands are out of here, and many of them are related to Yang Guofu, such as Yang Guoku, the founder of Yang Guoku, is Yang Guofu's brother, and Zhang Liang, the founder of Zhang Liang Spicy Hot, is a distant relative of Yang. There are also sources that Zhang Liang once worked at Yang Guofu's restaurant, which was denied by Zhang Liang.
But in any case, Yang Guofu can be called the "godfather" of China's spicy hot world.
Yang Guofu's first pot of gold came from the villagers to join the business. With more and more people coming to join, Yang Guofu spicy hot began to officially join the outside world, opening more than 70 stores in only 2 years, occupying the streets and alleys of Harbin.
By 2008, Yang Guofu's spicy and hot stores had spread throughout Heilongjiang, with more than 300 franchise stores. In the early days, Yang Guofu's spicy hot franchise fee was about 1,000 yuan to 3,000 yuan. Just by collecting franchise fees from franchisees, Yang Guofu is said to earn two or three million a year.
However, after the surge in franchise stores, Yang Guofu also once went into a difficult situation. The uneven quality of franchisees and the dirty and chaotic environment in the store have brought more and more complaints from consumers, making the already unstable brand foundation more and more fragile.
In 2010, Yang Guofu began to rectify the franchise business. However, he had no management experience, so he decided to appoint a third-party management team to manage the franchised stores. So far, the restaurants under the direct jurisdiction of Yang Guofu's spicy hot headquarters have only been limited to a few provinces such as Shanghai, Sichuan, Hainan, Tibet and Xinjiang, and most restaurants are still managed by third parties.
The prospectus also explains that some of the restaurants directly managed by the headquarters are the headquarters and factories of Yang Guofu, such as Shanghai and Sichuan, and the other part is the limited number of restaurants, and the direct management is more economical.
It was also during this rectification period that Yang Guofu established a series of standardized processes for chain brands, such as unifying store styles and logos, and standardizing catering production processes.
Yang Guofu was also quoted many times in media reports, saying that when he selected franchisees, he must also review the character of franchisees, and he believes that morality is an important indicator of judging whether a franchisee is reliable. It is said that when the early franchisees joined, Yang Guofu had to talk to each other personally to determine whether the other party was in line with his values.
Similar to most catering leaders, Yang Guofu also began to establish his own supply chain system after he began to enter the national market. Although he originated in the northeast, when he established the factory, he chose Sichuan, the origin of spicy hot. The factory he has established in Chengdu has an annual output value of about 200 million yuan, which can meet the seasoning needs of 12,000 franchised stores.
This is probably the biggest difference between him and his rival Zhang Liang. Zhang Liang spicy hot still uses the external mining method, and the revenue mainly comes from the franchise fee. In contrast, Yang Guofu's franchise fee accounts for only about 3% of its revenue, and more than half of its revenue comes from products such as ingredients and seasonings sold to franchisees.
In 2015, Yang Guofu moved the company's headquarters from Harbin to Shanghai, and the number of franchise stores nationwide exceeded 3,500. By 2017, Yang Guofu spicy hot began to expand overseas, and also took the same way of joining. However, after 5 years, Yang Guofu still has only 21 overseas stores.
Yang Guofu has great ambitions, although he makes spicy and hot, he has always taken Haidilao as a benchmark. He has repeatedly mentioned to the media his idea of building a food and catering empire, hoping to make "Yang Guofu" a brand with the same name as giants such as Haidilao, Starbucks and McDonald's.
In a 2019 interview, he said, "In the future, we will target Haidilao. Although we are not as big as its stock market value, it is not small. ”
However, compared with Daniel Zhang, who has already become the richest man in Singapore, Yang Guofu's spicy hot is still facing a big gap. One of the proofs is the popular franchise strategy in the spicy hot industry, almost all spicy hot brands are franchised as the main expansion method, not to mention that most of Yang Guofu's restaurants rely on third-party management.
In contrast to Haidilao, Daniel Zhang has relied on his management strategy to create a corporate culture that belongs exclusively to Haidilao, and even made Haidilao synonymous with food service - but Yang Guofu still has no clear brand image.
In July last year, when some bloggers secretly visited Yang Guofu's spicy hot stores, they found that there were a lot of food safety problems, such as the ingredients were bitten by rats and then ignored and continued to be used, the kitchen rags washed while washing shoes, and the boiled lungs were cooked directly without washing. Yang Guofu apologized to the outside world at that time, saying that the store involved had been closed for rectification, and the company also set up a project team to investigate.
However, related food safety problems still occur many times. In the food safety inspection of the Beijing Market Supervision Bureau last year, Yang Guofu had problems in 14 stores, second only to wallace, which was plagued by negativity.
In Yang Guofu's vision, he tried to high-end the spicy hot category, one of the manifestations of which was its price that increased year by year. On social media, a large number of consumers can also find complaints about Yang Guofu's spicy hot price increase.
Some catering people expressed their concerns about the high-end of the spicy hot category in interviews with the media, and the ceiling of the industry is also limited.
"We benchmark starbucks ... I hope that consumers can also have a sense of glory when they eat spicy and hot," Yang Guofu said in an interview with the media.
The only question is, do consumers really like to eat spicy hot with a "sense of glory"?
Resources:
"Yang Guofu will be listed: How was a bowl of spicy hot sauce invented by Sichuanese promoted to the whole country by a northeasterner |? Tencent News Cai See", Cai See - Tencent News;
"Yang Guofu spicy hot competition for the "first share of spicy hot", can relative Zhang Liang let it go? Parity;
"He, the King of Spicy Hot!" 》Chinese Business Tao Strategy;
"The Legend of Yang Guofu's "Spicy"", Red Food Network;
"Bin County Double XiongJi: Yang Guofu and Zhang Liang's Spicy Jianghu", Finance eleven