Convenience Store Roll Crazy: Convenience Bee, Rosen, EasyJet "Guild Wars"

Drawable from Canva

Wen | Liu Kuang

Convenience stores play a variety of roles in life, such as the "restaurant" of white-collar workers, the "grocery store" of small town residents, the "resting place" of long-distance transport drivers, and the "food supply station" of the epidemic city.

Behind the multiple roles of convenience stores is the support of tens of thousands of stores, and there are convenience stores almost where there are people. According to network data, in 2015, the number of convenience stores in China was only 91,000, and by 2021, it has reached 157,000, and it is expected to reach 185,000 in 2023.

Convenience stores are opening more and more, and the market size is getting bigger and bigger. Ai Media Consulting data shows that in 2015, the market size of China's convenience store industry has reached 118.1 billion yuan, exceeded 200 billion yuan in 2018, reached 298.8 billion in 2021, and is expected to reach 356.6 billion in 2023.

The convenience store track is vast and crowded, the vastness lies in the low saturation of the sinking market, the large room for growth, the crowding lies in the gathering of head convenience store brands such as Lawson, convenience bee, and easyJet, and the market Matthew effect is prominent and there is no shortage of new brands that have just entered the game, and the dispute over categories, channels, and the number of stores has become more and more intense.

The fierce store battle

The number of stores is an important criterion for measuring the competitive strength of a convenience store brand, because the store is an important traffic entrance for convenience stores, and the number of stores also covers a wider range of people, which is conducive to improving the brand's popularity and reputation in the new generation of consumers, and is also conducive to the improvement of performance.

Judging from the pace of opening stores of head brands such as Lawson, Convenience Bee, and EasyJet, expanding stores in 2022 is still the main theme of convenience store brand competition.

1. Convenient bee slow direct operation

The convenience bee with its own Internet gene follows the expansion law of the Internet market "burning money to grab the market".

On the one hand, convenience bees continue to obtain financing to hoard "grain and grass" for expansion. It is reported that the A round of financing of 300 million US dollars, B round financing of 1.6 billion US dollars, C round financing of hundreds of millions of DOLLARs, investors are not lacking hillhouse capital, Tencent investment, Zebra investment and other well-known investment institutions. On the other hand, convenience bees have explored a digitally driven operating model that can achieve rapid expansion of multiple stores by efficiently replicating the operating system.

To this day, the expansion plan of the convenience bee is still being implemented in an orderly manner. Previously, its official revealed: "In terms of scale expansion, convenience bee has 2,000 stores, and is expected to expand to 4,000 stores in 2021, and open tens of thousands of stores in 2023, with the increase concentrated in second- and third-tier cities." ”

In contrast, the number and expansion of convenience bee stores are not as fast as brands such as Lawson and EasyJet. The reason is that the convenience bee only does direct stores, has absolute control, can uniformly manage funds, material resources and human resources, and directly earn higher operating profits, but the expansion speed is not as fast as the franchise model, and there are deficiencies and advantages.

There are both joys and worries, and the recent market has come to the news of the large-scale closure of stores by the convenience bees. In this regard, the convenience bee official said: "Due to the epidemic situation, logistics, transportation and other difficulties have occurred, and the convenience bee has to temporarily close a small number of stores. The words revealed that the store expansion plan during the epidemic in 2022 is difficult to implement.

2. Rosen crazy "direct sales + franchise"

Compared to the speed of opening the store of the convenience bee, Rosen is even more than that.

Rosen not only directly operates and joins at the same time, but also innovates and sets up a more flexible franchise model such as regional authorization, close franchise, and large regional franchise. The characteristics of these franchise models are that when opening up new regions, they first establish cooperation with large regional partners, rely on the resources of large regional partners to open stores, and localized management efficiency is higher.

According to official data, as of the end of December 2021, Lawson had 19,000 stores worldwide, including 4,500 stores in China. According to its goal, Lawson will have 6,000 convenience stores in China by 2022 and plans to increase the number of stores to 10,000 by 2025.

Thanks to the growth in the number of Lawson stores, Lawson's revenue in China has continued to increase and it has achieved profitability. According to Japan's Lawson financial report, Lawson's net profit from March to November 2021 reached 24.3 billion yen (about 1.3 billion yuan), twice that of the same period last year, and revenue increased by 5% year-on-year, of which the Chinese business developed well, with a profit of 1.8 billion yen (about 100 million yuan).

Lawson stores rank among the top ten in the industry, but the larger the store size, the more difficult it is to manage. On March 15, some media broke out that Rosen's "expired buns are still sold, and the discarded oden is boiled and then cooked" and other food safety problems, and the defects and loopholes in the expansion of the franchise model are exposed. The management of franchisees is related to brand reputation, and Rosen must pay attention to it if he wants to develop well and quickly.

3. EasyJet stores are the first in scale

As we all know, easyJet is a service brand of Sinopec to carry out non-oil business, almost where there are Sinopec gas stations, there are easyJet convenience stores, with the advantage of scale, easyJet has occupied the market dominance for a long time.

According to the "2021 China Convenience Store TOP100 List" released by the China Chain Store & Franchise Association, there are 3 convenience store brands with more than 20,000 stores in China, and Sinopec's easyJet convenience store ranks first with the number of stores with 27,600 stores, which is 5206 more than the number of stores in the second place, 7388 more than the third place - PetroChina Kunlun Hospitality, and the number of stores is less than 5000.

The difference in the number of stores is the difference in operational strength, and the scale, footfall, sales, etc. of easyJet stores are far ahead, and other convenience store brands cannot be compared. However, the location of easyJet stores is different from the location of Lawson and Convenience Bee, easyJet is located in the traffic artery, while Lawson and Convenience Bee are located in communities and business circles, avoiding positive conflicts.

Each has its own genre gameplay

Consumers in different regions have different consumer needs, convenience store brands need to create differentiated categories and services, improve customer acquisition ability and user viscosity to ensure competitiveness. Simply put, products and services are the key to convenience store brands winning, and product and service innovation development is a protracted battle.

1. Convenient bee "seasonal limited"

The goods sold in convenience stores are generally daily necessities, snacks and beverages, as well as bread, rice balls, Oden and other foods, for consumers, these conventional goods are not unusual, nor are they much attractive. In order to attract more consumers, Convenience Bee develops its own fresh food products such as bread and cakes, and has launched a very creative "seasonal limited" food service.

What is "Seasonal Limit"? That is, the use of seasonal fruits, flowers to develop a variety of related fresh food products, to meet the different consumer needs of consumers for seasonal ingredients, taking the "strawberry season" as an example, in the season of strawberry production, convenient bees on the new strawberry-based beverages, biscuits, sugar and other foods.

The theme of convenience bees using seasonal ingredients as a product is very flattering and attractive.

First, seasonal food has a high degree of attention, topicality and popularity, which is conducive to creating explosive items. Second, for a long time, consumers have developed the habit of eating seasonal food, and the "seasonal limit" of convenient bees is in line with consumer consumption habits. Third, it is convenient for bees to choose strawberries, cherry blossoms and other high-value ingredients, and develop more new flavors, which is conducive to publicity and promotion.

2. Rosen "Internet celebrity hit"

How many people know Rosen as a convenience store brand because of the ice skin moon cake?

Lawson was the first foreign convenience store to enter the East China market in 1996, but it was around 2020. The reason for the fire is that the expansion of stores has increased brand awareness, the second is driven by the internet celebrity economy, and the third is the success of localization of daily fresh food products.

As one of the giants of Japanese convenience stores, daily food products are Lawson's "golden signboard".

After the food that should have been in the snack street, such as bento, rice balls, sandwiches, oden, and fried foods, entered the convenience store, it was served 24 hours a day, and the convenience store environment and service were better. In addition, Lawson actively develops daily fresh food products that meet the habits and tastes of local consumers, such as hot box lunches, desserts, bread, buns, etc., which are favored by consumers.

Making good use of Internet marketing to create popular food is also one of the important reasons for Rosen's "out of the circle". Internet celebrity economy prevails, Lawson uses Internet marketing to create ice skin moon cake, rice balls, ice mochi and other Internet red foods, and Internet red food has become the driver of Rosen's performance growth.

For Generation Z consumers who like to share food strategies on social platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Circle of Friends, and Weibo, visiting Lawson is not only for consumption but also for punching in to take photos, and "punch-in consumption" ensures the popularity of Lawson products and brand awareness.

3. EasyJet "low price for the people"

Compared with the convenience bee and Rosen, easyJet's selection is much more traditional, there is no specialty product and no net red food, but the marketing methods such as refueling discounts and full reductions are very grounded, and drivers like to hear it.

In terms of catering products, EasyJet only provides convenient fast food, light food, coffee and beverages and other products that meet the needs of drivers to buy, the product category is very conventional, but EasyJet has a location advantage and does not lack passenger flow, and the non-oil binding sales of oil products are convenient bees, Lawson and other brands cannot learn.

In the future, as self-driving travel becomes one of the mainstream tourism methods, easyJet convenience stores with comprehensive services will become a place for people to take a break on their journeys, and the commercial potential that can be tapped is even greater.

Common goal: digital upgrading

Since the outbreak of the epidemic, the importance of the digital upgrading of traditional convenience stores has been further enhanced. According to the "2020 China Convenience Store Prosperity Index Report", in 2020, 85.2% of convenience stores plan to carry out online order business, 67.4% of convenience stores plan to try to carry out home delivery business, and 88.6% of stores plan to carry out online drainage business for in-store.

For a long time, maintaining the relationship between "people and goods" is an important task of convenience store brands, affected by new consumer trends, the relationship between "people and goods stores" has been redefined by technology, and convenience stores have accelerated the progress of digital transformation.

First of all, convenience store brands such as Convenience Bee and Lawson firmly adhere to the concept of digital precision selection. Digital selection, that is, through the integration, analysis and mining of user consumption data, to obtain user consumption preferences, and then according to user preferences to choose the goods sold in stores, the advantage of this is to achieve precision marketing, improve the efficiency of brand commercialization.

Secondly, creating smart stores makes it more convenient for customers to consume and a more comfortable consumer experience. Compared with traditional stores, smart stores can provide consumer experiences such as mobile payment, big data query, and virtual reality shopping, so that consumers are no longer limited by time and space, and optimize the shopping experience and consumption efficiency.

In addition, the digital upgrading of the enterprise management system is also conducive to improving the efficiency of brand operation. The traditional management method is mainly manual, scheduling, ordering, inventory, finance, logistics and other work management and implementation rely on labor, which will not only produce labor costs, but also due to labor errors caused by operational problems, and the use of intelligent management system can avoid these problems.

Convenience store brands such as Rosen, Convenience Bee, and EasyJet are all on the road of intelligence, but they have not reached the end. For example, the five new strategies proposed by Lawson include new technologies; the convenience bee realizes the intelligence of food safety, production, transportation, sales, service and other aspects; easyJet has set up a professional team of Internet operation center to build smart scenarios such as scanning code purchase, easyjet to car, easyjet to home, and unattended car washing.

brief summary

Convenience bee, Lawson, EasyJet and other head convenience store brands are in the state of "short board forging long board".

After the battle to expand the store, the head convenience store brand actively innovated categories to create explosive products, while exploring digital business, trying to win through the advantages of difference. However, throughout the convenience store industry, EasyJet has scale, Rosen has fame, and convenience bees have localization advantages, and the dispute over the C position of convenience stores is difficult to distinguish between victory and defeat for a time.

It is worth mentioning that the recent news on the Internet that many places have resumed the normal operation of convenience stores in order to ensure the supply of epidemic materials, and it is believed that after experiencing the epidemic, consumers' goodwill for convenience stores will be further deepened, and convenience store brands such as Lawson and Convenience Bee will usher in new dividends and competition will become more intense.