Image source @ Visual China
In the battle of fresh e-commerce, the big guys have personally gone down again.
On March 14, Hou Yi, CEO of Hema Fresh, posted in the circle of friends, saying that Dingdong buys vegetables "is estimated to burst the warehouse soon... Relying on the disorderly expansion of investors' capital, price subsidies, and winning the market is not long-term," is a response to the remarks made by its CEOs and investors about the competition between the two.
A few days ago, Liang Changlin said when participating in the Panchao video connection activity, "Now there is a traffic war between enterprises, especially between startups, and they think that they must monopolize the market to make money, and I think it will not happen." Dingdong buys vegetables does not take the competition very seriously, but believes that "harmony and difference", the biggest competition is whether it can meet the needs of users and serve consumers.
Han Rui, a partner at Gaorong Capital, and others also stated in the connection, "It is good to be stared at by an opponent who seems to be unable to spend all the money, because this is the time when Dingdong grows the fastest, and the most feared thing is that Dingdong has no opponents, and after a year or two of its own development, it has embarked on a strange path." ”
It is worth noting that this is not the first time that Hou Yi and Liang Changlin have met.
As early as December 6, 2021, Hou Yi forwarded the relevant article "Hema Fresh Launches 'Chopping Price' intended to 'Chop Ding'", saying that "in the face of fierce competition in multiple formats in the fresh industry, Hema also has the ability to wage a price war; since it is fought, it is a long-term war..."
In January 2022, Hou Yi posted a screenshot of Dingdong's stock price in the circle of friends, with the text "So tragic, tens of billions of funds trapped in it, almost no leeks." It's like a Titanic crashing into a glacier, and everyone knows that the ship is about to sink, but there is nothing that can be done. The era of winning competition with price subsidies is over. ”
According to the data, as of December 2021, Dingdong has more than 100 front-end warehouses in Shanghai, looking at a total of about 1,400 in the country, with an area of about 500,000 square meters; in the same period, Hema also has 53 stores of various types in Shanghai, and only Hema has exceeded 300 stores nationwide. In addition, the two sides have also launched fierce competition in the new field of fresh e-commerce, such as flowers, hot pot ingredients, prepared dishes and other categories of fires in the past two years.
But in terms of profitability, neither has achieved a breakthrough.
As for when to achieve full profitability, Liang Changlin previously said that the profit model similar to Shanghai will be extended to the entire Yangtze River Delta in the future, and strive to achieve full profitability in the Yangtze River Delta region by the end of the second quarter of this year, and also strive to be close to profitability in the fourth quarter of the country. Prior to this, the company had a cash reserve of 5.2 billion yuan, which was enough to maintain operations.
In terms of Hema, according to public reports, Hema has only announced that mature stores in some regions can achieve profitability, but it has not yet achieved regional profitability. At the beginning of this year, Hou Yi said in an internal letter that Hema has clarified the "road of multi-format online and offline coordinated development", with the goal of increasing the profitability of a single store from the current one to a full profit.
In addition, the two also face varying degrees of internal turmoil.
In January this year, Dingdong grocery shopping was exposed to a large layoff, including procurement, algorithms, technology and other core departments will be optimized by 20%-50%. At that time, Dingdong responded that the news was not true, and the individual changes were normal organizational resource adjustments of small-scale companies. Liang Changlin also debunked the rumors, saying that the Shanghai Municipal Labor Inspection Department's field investigation showed that the company's employee turnover did not change much from previous years.
(Edited by Liu Mengmeng, editor of Titanium Media App)