Image source @ Visual China
Wen | understand finance and economics, and the author | On Monday, the editor | Xia Yijun
More than 40 years ago, a "muscle man eraser" gacha toy swept through Japan's major primary and secondary schools overnight. In just 4 years, 180 million were sold. To a certain extent, it is the prototype of the current hot "blind box".
No one expected that today, 40 years later, in the vast land of China, the blind box will be played by a company called Bubble Mart, and it will far exceed the size of the Japanese market. According to Ai Media Consulting data, the size of China's tide play market in 2020 is close to 30 billion yuan, and it is expected that the market size will reach 57.1 billion yuan in 2023, while the Japanese market size is only 9 billion yuan.
The huge market size has also made many companies jump into the game. In addition to the well-known bubble mart, TOP TOY and other consumer companies launched tide play products, Youku, B station and other Internet companies have also launched a lot of tide play products. For example, UTS, a tide play sub-brand established by Youku, launched the "Country Love" and "Mountain and River Order" series; B stationed on the magic mulberry to launch the "Vegetable Genie" series, all of which achieved good results.
Behind the influx of many players, an important reason is that the concentration of the fast-growing Chinese tide play market is still very low. The data shows that China's tide play CR3 is 19.5%, compared with 48% of Japan's CR3, there is still a lot of distance.
High expectations and low concentration make the curtain of competition for domestic tide play is opening. On the one hand, most companies are upgrading their processes and grabbing more markets; on the other hand, the emergence of digital collection tides has also added a hint of uncertainty to the track.
The tide of playing retail has risen, who will become the "darling" in the wave, and can the temporary leading leader maintain the advantage? It can only be said that everything is undecided, and everything is possible.
01 The past and present lives of the blind box
Originated in the United States, flourished in Japan, and flourished in China
Speaking of tide play, blind box is a "key word" that has to be mentioned. In a sense, it is the blind box that has knocked open the door of the domestic tide play market.
Pulling the timeline back three years ago, at the two key nodes of Tmall's "618" and "Double 11" in 2019, Bubble Mart pushed the blind box's gameplay to a whole new height.
On the "618", Bubble Mart first launched a new blind box play, that is, users can eliminate blind boxes that they do not want to draw online through the exclusion method, increasing sales interest, this sales strategy has aroused great interest from users; when "Double 11", Bubble Mart directly offered a big move, launched a new preferential gift package, after purchase, the next year can receive 1 blind box every month, this product is only sold on Double Eleven.
This set of combination punches completely detonated the blind box market. In 2019, the sales of "Double 11" Bubble Mart on the day were 82.52 million, winning the first place in the Tmall toy category, completely bringing the blind box into the public eye. Previously, most of the blind boxes were only stored in stores in commercial centers such as CapitaLand, Hang Lung and Joy City.
But tracing back to the roots, the "originator" of the blind box game is an American named Hardman. In 1880, there were many vending machines in the United States such as grocery stores and baseball stadiums, and in order to beat other opponents, Hardman would randomly give some small toys when buying candy. Once this was promoted, it was a great success.
This is the original prototype of the gacha.
Since then, the gameplay of gacha has flourished in Japan. A Japanese businessman named Ryuzo Shigeta introduced him to Japan and founded the Bandai Nangong Dream company. It followed the gameplay of the Gacha Candy Machine, first launching the "Gluten Man Rubber Maple" gacha toy with great success.
Since then, around the core gameplay of gacha, core IPs such as "Dragon Ball" and "Voyage King" have been collected through mergers and acquisitions. And launched "Dragon Ball", "Miss Cup Edge" and other adult groups of gacha toys.
With this move, the population covered has also expanded from the children's group to the adult group, and Bandai Nangong Dream has gradually become the largest trendy play company in Japan. Guoyuan Securities shows that in 2022, bandai Nangongmeng's market share in the gacha market is close to 50%.
Admittedly, the gacha game has been successfully promoted in Japan, but its great success is in China. In 2020, the size of Japan's tide play market is less than 10 billion yuan. In the same period, the domestic tide play market size reached nearly 30 billion yuan, and the market size is expected to reach 57.1 billion yuan in 2023.
The above dividends are also reflected in Bubble Mart. In just a few years, Bubble Mart's performance has grown rapidly. The financial report shows that the compound annual growth rate of Bubble Mart in 2017-2019 reached 226.3%.
The reason for the rapid development of blind boxes is also understandable. From the origin of the United States to the prosperity of Japan, and then to the great rejuvenation of China, it is essentially a change in consumer consciousness. Japanese writer Jun Miura mentioned in "The Fourth Era of Consumption" that there are huge differences in consumer awareness at different stages of social development, roughly following the four consumption stages of must - brand - personality - sharing.
Therefore, we will see that Japan, which took the lead in entering the fourth stage of consumption, gave birth to industry giants such as Bandai Nangongmeng early. At present, with the gradual improvement of China's consumption power, China is gradually entering the fourth consumption era mentioned in the "Fourth Consumption Era" by Miura Exhibition, and consumers will pay more attention to personalized expression and the demand for spiritual consumption.
All the time comes and goes. The tide of blind box play has risen, and a curtain on the blind box tide playing with the deer is slowly opening.
02 Two models, the same kind of business
In the eyes of many people, the blind box is equivalent to the tide play, and such an expression is not accurate. In fact, the blind box is a more mainstream sales method in the tide play track.
The so-called tide play, in a narrow sense, it refers to the trend toy. It is a toy designed through art, and its types include dolls, dolls, building block toys and so on.
With the popularity of the concept of tide play in recent years, various commercial forms of tide play have also appeared in China. Among them, two of the most noteworthy are bubble Mart, which focuses on blind box tide play, and TOP TOY, which focuses on retail.
From the perspective of business model, Bubble Mart is mainly a platform model. The so-called platform model, that is, Bubble Mart covers the whole process stage from IP design to operation to derivative items.
The benefits of the platform model are more obvious. The most immediate benefit is the high gross profit margin, which is reflected in the data, and the gross profit margin of Bubble Mart has been maintained at more than 60% for many consecutive quarters. The reason behind this is that because the platform model covers the entire industry chain, most of the profit links are pinched in their own hands. Especially in the upstream IP design link, Bubble Mart's own IP has achieved more than 70% of revenue.
But the other side of the coin is that it puts forward higher requirements for the IP design capabilities of enterprises. "The IP development of Tide Play is still a metaphysics, and sometimes the IP that is vigorously promoted is not hot, but it is not surprising that the products that are not optimistic are suddenly on fire." An industry insider once told Reader that there is no methodology on the road to continuous output of IP.
The other is the tide play collection store model based on TOP TOY, KKV and other offlines. The so-called collection store model is mainly to play the tide of other content industry IP and concentrate them on offline retail stores for sales. The collection store model does not have the trouble of IP originality.
Taking TOP TOY, the tide play brand under Mingchuang Premium, as an example, the IP of TOP TOY is almost through authorized tide play products, and its main tide play products are mainly created by marvel, Disney and other well-known IP. In other words, the biggest difference between the two is that one is the original image IP, and the other is mainly the reuse of the content IP.
To a certain extent, content IP is deeper than the "barrier" of image IP. The core logic is that content IP can span a longer time dimension, and Wikipedia's latest "Media Franchise Product Bestseller List" shows that among the world's most valuable IP top 30, the image IP is only Hello Kitty, and the others are content IP. Due to the long spanning time dimension, the user group that the content IP can cover is also wider.
Although they are both trendy businesses, there are obvious differences in the underlying logic of the two business models. But there is no doubt that the business of both is a spiritual consumption business.
At present, a clear general trend is that the tide play business is destined to be a teenager core, gradually from teenagers to adults, from women to men. To a certain extent, this is also the path to reproduce the rise of bandai Nangong Dream.
03 Behind the growth of the tide, two problems that cannot be ignored
From the perspective of the industry, the domestic tide play market is still in a stage of accelerated rise. Reflected in the data, Guoyuan Securities data shows that the sales of bubble mart Tmall flagship store in March were 0.48 billion yuan, an increase of 110% year-on-year.
At the same time, despite the impact of the epidemic, the offline store effect of several tide plays has not declined significantly. According to the data, the offline store effect of the Tide Play brand Bubble Mart/Top Toy/Cool Tide Play in February 2022 was 70.6/65.9/264,000 yuan, respectively, and the average monthly store effect in the past 12 months was 65.2/ 86.4/ 26.0 million yuan.
Combining the two data, it is not difficult to see that in the case of macroeconomic pressure, such optional consumer goods as tide play still show strong resilience. This also shows to a certain extent that tide play retail is still in a stage of rapid growth.
But behind the prosperity, there are also two problems in the tide play industry that cannot be ignored. First, the industry is gradually falling into the "inner volume". Due to the continuous increase in top TOY, KKV and other trendy retail stores, the industry competition has gradually become fierce, resulting in a certain amount of internal volume in the industry.
The decline in Bubble Mart's gross margin is a clear industry signal. In the second half of 2021, Bubble Mart gross margin slipped to 60%, compared with the market's consensus expectation of 64%. As mentioned in Bubble Mart's conference call, Bubble Mart upgraded its process in 2021, resulting in higher costs.
Another issue that cannot be ignored is the uncertainty that digital collections bring to the industry track. At present, with the breakthrough of technology, the tide play track is gradually entering the web 3.0 era, the emergence of digital tide play, but also the spiritual consumption needs of many consumers, is shifting from physical to virtual logic.
Nowadays, Internet companies such as iQiyi, Xiaohongshu, and Tencent Music have begun to lay out in the digital tide. iQIYI launched the original virtual idol IP parasitic panda Producer C digital collection blind box; Tmall launched the Dunhuang Feitian, nine-color deer payment code skin digital collection; Xiaohongshu launched the R-Spaceyu digital art platform launched last year.
The threat of other content-based companies laying out digital hits should not be underestimated. On the one hand, digital tide play is consistent with retail tide play, and both have the spiritual consumption attribute of tide play. In addition, the digital tide play is wider than the retail tide play user population, and the marginal cost is almost zero, the potential for commercialization is greater than the tide play retail; on the other hand, the layout of content-based companies is more suitable for the tide play. As mentioned above, the story and vitality of content-based IP are much higher than that of image IP.
But at present, the players who play retail have not yet entered the digital tide to play. In general, tide play retail is a very promising industry, and the future market space is also very large. However, there are also many variables hidden in the direction of industry development, whether it is the dispute between content IP and image IP, or the dispute between retail and digital, which affects the final direction of the industry.
What You Want to Say is that qiankun is undecided, and you and I are both dark horses. Who will become the biggest dark horse is worth waiting and seeing.