Economic Observer Network reporter Fu Xiaoyin, a tenant of a long-term rental apartment in Guangsheng Village, Shenzhen, found that in August last year, the outer wall of the apartment "grew" a row of crisscrossing brackets, which surrounded the façade of the entire building and connected to the balcony of each home.
The notice at the entrance of the apartment building posted the answer, a device that transports express delivery and takeaway, "I don't need to go downstairs to get takeaway in the future." The tenant Yangyang immediately understood.
Half a year after the installation of this device, there have been concentrated outbreaks of new crown pneumonia in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Jilin and other places, home isolation has become a high-frequency word in people's lives, and this express delivery system in Guangsheng Village has also gone out of the circle.
A long-term rental apartment equipped with a "courier takeaway into the household system"
In fact, as early as the installation period of the equipment, this system has attracted countless lights. Chengguan first came to ask, did you declare it? This was followed by the "onlookers" of nearby villagers, who also questioned "what is this thing".
Yuan Dong, a staff member who was supervising the work at the scene, explained to the villagers countless times: "After you order takeaway or express delivery at home, you don't have to go downstairs to pick it up, and this device can be directly delivered to your balcony." ”
By the end of October last year, the equipment was completed and began trial operation, and the villagers who saw the physical object finally understood how the system worked, but the question asked xiaohuang became, "When can I use it?"
Every three forks and five also tenants came to ask the housekeeper Xiaolin, when will the takeaway system be used?
Kobayashi, a housekeeper who works on the first floor all year round, has become the spokesperson for this "grassroots new infrastructure", after introducing the bedroom and living room to the tenant who came to see the house, Kobayashi usually walks to the window sill and puts his hand on a small black box shaped like an oven, "The position of the balcony We have added an extra horizontal track, takeaway, express delivery can be sent directly to this small box along the track", probably feel that the description is not appropriate enough, she added, "Equal to them taking the 'elevator' upstairs."
The "courier trolley" runs on the track
The "courier trolley" delivers the courier to the "receiving box" next to the window sill of the resident
On March 10, a passing netizen took a picture of this rather unusual youth apartment and posted it on Weibo. In the video, the apartment building seems to be wearing a piece of "armor": surrounded by a circle of tracks. The netizen sighed in Weibo, "Niu, Niu, at first I thought that (the track) was a natural gas pipeline, and it was originally express delivery and takeaway."
The video was then carried by many bloggers and media, and this "grassroots new infrastructure" became popular on the Internet platform, some people even drove more than 20 kilometers to visit, and other apartment owners called to consult, "Can you install it here?" ”
Therefore, in addition to the apartment housekeeper, Xiaolin has an additional identity, that is, to receive these "netizens" who come to punch in.
However, not all households are buying the new equipment. One day after returning from work, a tenant found that the "metal locket" in his room was installed, and the box occupied nearly 1/4 of the position of the window sill, which made him a little unhappy, "If you rent a house, the window itself is more tense, and then install a box, block the lighting, and block the escape passage of the anti-theft net next to it."
After the video was released online, some netizens raised security concerns, believing that the track would bring convenience to thieves entering the home. In this regard, Chen Tianxiao, head of the system research and development team and founder of Shenzhen New Box Technology Company, said that the entire apartment has anti-theft net protection, theoretically there will be no thieves entering the house, but there is indeed a possibility of climbing, so they decided to improve the program to avoid future troubles.
The Economic Observer Network learned that the apartment's express delivery system is the first home intelligent logistics distribution terminal piloted by the new box technology company in the outdoors, which mainly undertakes the task of debugging at this stage, and will not really be put into operation, and will be demolished when the recent debugging task is completed, at the same time, they will reinstall the upgraded version of the system for the apartment, and according to the new system for the window to support the appropriate anti-theft net.
Express takeaway into the household system 3.0
In the New Box Technology Company of Tianming Science and Technology Building in Nanshan District, the Economic Observation Network met Chen Tianxiao, an investor and developer of the express delivery delivery system.
Chen Tianxiao came to Shenzhen from Hong Kong in 2019 and settled here, although he has been engaged in Internet finance in Hong Kong before, he himself has a strong interest in computer technology, and he also worked as a programmer in his early years, and after returning to the mainland, he plans to switch to physical research and development. The reason for choosing to develop a home intelligent logistics distribution terminal was to hope that the delivery of the last three kilometers could be accelerated.
The core members of the start-up team are his former colleagues in the company, a considerable part of them have overseas work backgrounds, and later have successively absorbed other members responsible for electronic research and development, electronic board design, hardware structure design, and the current number of R & D team is about 20 people.
After the video became popular on the online platform, Chen Tianxiao fell into a contradiction, "I want fire and I don't want fire." On the one hand, he also wants to do more research and development, and premature exposure may attract other companies to join the competition in advance; and the good side is that the product may carry out the first round of financing in June, and greater exposure and popularity means the convenience of financing. However, the question in front of him was no longer an optional question.
Before adopting rail transportation systems, Chen Tianxiao also considered drone and unmanned vehicle distribution. However, after repeated consideration, several unsolvable pain points dissuaded him. The problem with drone delivery is that air transport has greater security risks, involves invading the privacy of residents and excessive noise; the problem of unmanned vehicle distribution is that the footprint is large, the delivery speed is slow, and the pedestrian passage is crowded. To this end, Chen Tianxiao decided to use the traditional rail transportation mode.
The express delivery system in Guangsheng Village is only the first generation of products developed by Chen Tianxiao and his team. At the Tianming Science and Technology Building in Nanshan District, the Economic Observer Network saw an upgraded version of the third generation of the product, which will also be used in another youth apartment in April.
The third generation of the system simulates the operation scene of the community, the logistics track is composed of two sections, one is from the intelligent express cabinet at the entrance of the community to the residential building in the community, the second is from the starting point of the residential building to the household, the first part of the journey is transported by the "transit car", the reason why it is named "transit car", because after reaching the residential building, the "transit car" will deliver the objects carried to the designated "transfer box" and then return, and the latter section of the journey will be relayed by the "express car" and finally delivered to the "receiving box" of the household. Chen Tianxiao's initial idea is that the "receiving box" can be installed in the kitchen, because most of people's daily consumer goods are related to food.
The "Express Trolley", "Transit Trolley" and "Receiving Box" are all designed to be a unified size of 25 cm wide, 30 cm high and 40 cm deep, which refers to the maximum capacity of the Fengchao express cabinet to ensure that most express delivery parts can be placed in it.
At present, it takes about 90 seconds from the system receiving the delivery instruction to the time the courier is loaded into the "transit car", and Chen Tianxiao hopes to finally compress the whole process, that is, the time taken from the community to the residents' doorway, to less than 1 minute.
In the pilot youth apartment in Guangsheng Village, according to the on-site commissioning staff, according to the distance of the floor where the residents are located, the delivery takes 5 to 10 minutes. The slowness is mainly due to the fact that they are currently in the commissioning phase, so they have reduced the speed of the track.
"In fact, the lifting speed can reach 2 meters / s, even if you live on the tenth floor, that is, tens of seconds to send." Chen Tian smiled. At present, the problems to be solved are mainly how to improve the speed of pickup and transit, and how to ensure that the express delivery is not dumped during the transit process, such as a bowl of soup to be delivered.
Compared with the first generation of the system, the third generation of the system mainly solves the two major pain points of the nascent generation of products - the lack of safety and stability, which is also the reason for preventing the first generation of products from being officially put into use.
Insufficient safety is largely a problem caused by the irrational design of the track.
The circular track around the building can easily become a ready-made "clothes rail" for residents, while other foreign objects on the track will block the normal operation of the "express car", on the other hand, as netizens raised in the video comment area, the circular track may indeed provide convenience for thieves to climb.
The lack of stability is due to the lack of refinement of the division of labor of the "express car", which means that a "express car" needs to undertake all the distribution tasks from the intelligent express cabinet to the resident's home, so it needs to constantly switch between the vertical track and the horizontal track to adjust the running route, and frequent entry and exit of the track can easily lead to instability in the track structure and then lead to derailment.
Therefore, in the third generation of products, Chen Tianxiao and his team improved the logistics track to a vertical shaft, and added a number of "transit trolleys" relay distribution between the "express delivery car" and the "receiving box".
"Each 'trolley' only does one thing on a fixed track, the more stable the task is, and the 'trolleys' at different stages do not interfere with each other and can work in parallel." Chen Tianxiao introduced.
Changing the logistics track from a horizontal rail to a vertical rail also improves the overall aesthetics of the equipment, is more visually in harmony with the direction of the building, and can even hide the track inside the building wall. This is also Chen Tianxiao's original idea - at the beginning of the planning and construction of the community, a logistics and transportation channel was reserved.
His logistics system blueprint includes two stages: the first step is to spend 5 years to achieve point-to-point distribution from the entrance of the community to each household; the second step, the longer-term planning is to connect the community with the surrounding shopping malls, supermarkets, food streets, and express delivery stations to form the city's logistics system.
"After 5 years and 10 years, it is impossible for the takeaway brother to ride a battery car full of streets to deliver takeaway to you, and there will be more advanced solutions to solve the logistics and distribution problem." In the long run, in the future, every household may have a logistics terminal, and the city will establish an independent people-cargo diversion transportation system. In Nanshan, order a takeaway in a Luohu restaurant, delivered home in 15 minutes, still warm. Chen Tian thought with a smile.
How to go about the business model
After the initial development of the express delivery system, Chen Tianxiao and his team initially found a local developer in Shenzhen to discuss cooperation, hoping that the developer would plan the system in the residential construction stage. The housing company showed interest, but then the question was realistic, "How many households have you installed now?" Chen Tianxiao's answer was zero. Housing enterprises are not willing to take this risk, replying "When you have done at least 10,000 households, I will talk to you again."
Plan B is to talk directly with the community about the transformation, but soon, Chen Tianxiao found that the amount of project is too large, "the community to do large-scale reconstruction must be a household to sign a cooperation with the owner, even if 1,000 households, a day to sign a household, but also to sign for three years." ”
Finally, they concluded that apartments with single property rights and ready-made households were the most suitable pilot installation objects. Therefore, Chen Tianxiao joined the Shenzhen Apartment Association, in an industry visit organized by the association, after listening to his report, Tao Xianman took the initiative to find out, "I have an apartment in Bao'an just doing decoration, maybe everyone can cooperate to try it."
Tao Xianman has been working in the urban village since 2007, and for the first ten years, he lived on the first floor of the residential building he contracted, working as a manager, a finance, maintenance worker, cleaner, etc., which also cultivated his keen insight into young tenants.
As an apartment operator, he knows that "the management of express delivery is a service that the youth apartment must provide", which is also a headache for the owner of the apartment, the current practice is to set aside an open space at the front desk, install a courier rack to store the tenant's courier, but the courier is more or less tidy, it is easy to pile up, "ugly and chaotic and easy to take the wrong". He had also thought about installing a Fengchao express cabinet, but it had limited capacity.
The recurrence of the epidemic has also made Tao Xianman think about how to reduce the direct contact between tenants and delivery personnel and reduce the risk of infection. In addition, from a security point of view, he hopes to reduce the daily movement of outsiders in the apartment. Therefore, when he saw the new thing of the express delivery delivery system at the visit event, Tao Xian was full of joy.
The cooperation was finalized in June last year, and then submitted for approval, and the first pilot invested more than 600,000 yuan, borne by the new box technology company, and the installation cost of each household was close to 8,000 yuan, which far exceeded their initial expectations of 5,000 yuan / household.
In fact, Chen Tianxiao hopes to reduce the cost to less than 3,000 yuan per household, and only by doing this can the return cycle be guaranteed within two years. He knows that if the products developed by the company want to be rapidly popularized, they cannot let the apartment pay a penny, and their model is not to sell equipment, but to build a platform, that is, after the platform is built, to help merchants improve the delivery efficiency, while charging them, the user side is free and open.
The merchant side includes not only courier companies, but also any supermarkets, dry cleaners, pharmacies, restaurants, beverage vending machines, etc. that want to distribute goods through the logistics system. In the commercial application scenario envisioned by Chen Tianxiao, there are already automated vending machines and express delivery delivery system connected, and after the user places an order, the goods transmitted from the vending machine can be received within a limited time.
Since the investment in the early stage of equipment is borne by the company, Chen Tianxiao has calculated that the income that each household can bring to the platform every year due to the sending and receiving of express delivery is 2600 yuan, plus the research and development cost of the amortization stage, and the installation cost of 3000 yuan can guarantee that the project needs about two years to return the cost. For the capital market, the investment risk of early projects is obviously greater, if possible, everyone is willing to see benefits in the short term, and two years is a watershed for capital to be more willing to enter.
After spending money to buy experience in the first construction, Chen Tianxiao hopes to reduce the cost to 5,000 yuan per household for the second pilot project, including the use of more professional construction teams. With the expansion of mass production scale, it is not impossible to replace sheet metal processing with molds, and it is not impossible to compress the future installation cost to 3,000 yuan / household.
(At the request of the interviewee, Yangyang and Kobayashi are pseudonyms in the text)