Wen 丨 Lee Teng-wah
Produced by 丨 Niu Dao CaiJing (niudaocaijing)
Tea Yan Yue color launched Yuanyang coffee, NaiXue's tea announced profitability, all indications show that the new tea began to enter a new round of competition, one direction is to refine the operation to improve the profitability of a single store, the other direction is to expand the category, the experience and industry capabilities reuse.
Consumer goods will eventually return to the logic of consumer goods, and from this point of view, it is not difficult to understand the recent new consumption changes.
The current new consumer market is divided. Is there a bubble in new consumption? Will new consumption move towards greater segmentation and quality? How can a consumer brand stay evergreen and grow? These are all questions that the market urgently needs to answer.
At the same time, as the head brand of new consumption, Heytea's frequent investment actions have attracted market attention. As a leader in new consumption, what enlightenment can Heytea bring to the industry?
1. Xicha "expansion"
Heytea is rapidly expanding in the new consumption sector through investment and mergers and acquisitions. In July last year, Heytea took a stake in Seesaw Coffee, which was also the beginning of Heytea's frequent investments.
In the following months, the action of Heytea investment became more frequent.
In August 2021, Heytea acquired lemon tea brand Wang Lemon, accounting for 70% of the shares; In September, Heytea invested in the oat milk brand "Wild Plant YePlant"; In October, Heytea invested two consecutive investments, namely, it invested in the tea brand and peach peach, and participated in the A round of financing of the pre-mixed wine brand WAT; In November, Heytea announced the acquisition of the molecular juice "Wild Cuishan brand."
In the past six months, Xicha has been shot 6 times, and the investment objects cover coffee, juice, oats, alcohol and other categories.
Frequent investment shots have made a voice appear in the market, that is, Heytea began to take the investment route, through investment to form a moat for the second half of new consumption.
Previously, the advantage of Heytea has always been the ability of Heytea itself in the supply chain, stores, brands, and products.
As we all know, the large number of stores is both a challenge and an industry advantage for business management. Through the scale of procurement and transportation management, price and cost control advantages in the industrial supply chain can be obtained.
Founded in 2012, after 9 years of development, the number of stores in 60 cities across the country has exceeded 800, and the huge number of stores has established the foundation for the supply chain of Heytea.
The industry advantages of Xicha are also obviously felt on the consumer side.
With the development of nearly ten years, Xicha has strict standards in the selection of raw materials and the production of fruit tea, which is also the reason why consumers can feel the freshness of Heytea's fruit tea.
In addition, Heytea is committed to the digital management of stores, which is also a significant advantage of Heytea that distinguishes it from general offline stores.
From self-strengthening to today's investment expansion, in fact, Heytea's strategy has entered the next stage, that is, to empower new enterprises through its own experience and copy more segments of "Heytea".
Take Lemon Tea as an example.
Wang Lemon Tea is a tea brand that focuses on "authentic Guangdong lemon tea", the reason why it is favored by Xi Tea is because wang lemon tea product ability is outstanding, it has created Tai Liang 2.0, ShiLi Lemon Tea King, Lemon Milk Tea and other explosive products, not only loved by consumers, but also led the lemon tea industry trend.
But at the same time, there are also problems in the development of Wang Lemon Lemon Tea itself.
The first is that there are fewer stores of Lemon Tea and a small coverage area. Although lemon tea is a traditional drink in Guangdong, it has not been popular in Guangdong. For Wang Lemon Tea, if you want to open a store nationwide, in addition to excellent product capabilities, store operations, cross-regional management, brand building capabilities, etc. are very lacking.
And that's what Heytea excels at.
After Xi Tea invested in the acquisition of Wang Lemon Tea, it began to go nationwide, opening a number of stores in Beijing, Shenzhen and Chengdu, and was deeply loved by local consumers.
Taking the Beijing market as an example, the Beijing store once occupied the top spot in the beijing beverage store hot list for several months. In November last year, Wang Lemon Tea entered Shanghai, and the first store in Shanghai has firmly ranked first in the popular list of Shanghai Dianping beverage stores and the popularity list of beverage stores in Xuhui District of Shanghai Meituan.
After accepting the investment of Xicha, Wang Lemon Tea grew rapidly and became the first lemon tea brand in China to open up the situation in the northern market and the southwest market and detonate word of mouth, which created conditions for going out of Guangdong and becoming a national drink.
More importantly, through the success of Wang Lemon Tea, XiCha has also verified that it can promote the success of new brands through experience and ability output.
2, from the speed of spelling to the quality of spelling
New consumption has begun to move towards the second half, and there are two keywords in the second half, one is high-quality development, and the other is a new track with more segmentation.
The rapid development of the first half has brought about market indigestion in the consumer sector.
Naixue's tea was finally listed after the rapid expansion of the store, but because the long-term loss capital market was not optimistic, the stock price fell all the way after the listing is currently less than half.
Not only Nai Xue, Changsha's local tea drinking head enterprise tea face is also quite unhappy in the near future. In November last year, Cha Yan Yue announced the closure of 87 stores in Changsha due to the previous layout being too dense. In addition, at the beginning of the year and in July, Cha Yan Yue has experienced two closures.
In addition, Cha Yan Yue was exposed to employee salary cuts in disguise, and the company lost 20 million yuan per day.
The rapid expansion of stores has laid the groundwork for the development of many new consumer companies in the later stage.
Moreover, the impact of the epidemic is still continuing, and the catering giant Haidilao has previously closed 300 stores for the winter, which makes the market feel that the bubble in the consumer field is serious.
New consumption has shifted from spelling speed to spelling quality.
In The view of Xicha, the logical return of the consumer market, high-quality, high-value products, services and experiences are the core, which is also the common temperament of the enterprises in which Heytea is invested.
The characteristics of Seesaw Coffee, an investment company of Heytea, are obvious in this regard. Seesaw coffee was born in Shanghai, which has the highest requirements for coffee quality, in addition, Seesaw takes the boutique route, and the number of stores after ten years of development is only more than 30.
Seesaw attaches great importance to the quality of coffee at the same time, but also attaches great importance to the design of the store, each store is a work, carefully polished store and Heytea on the store's higher design tone in line.
Emerging brands such as Wang Ning, Seesaw, and WAT are all outstanding in product capabilities. In particular, the product tone that conforms to Heytea is the same as the concept of Heytea and can be more integrated into the design and supply chain of Heytea.
In addition to high-quality development, new consumption also shows a trend of more segmentation of the track, and the popularity of products such as lemon tea represented by Wang Lemon and healthy juice represented by Wild Cuishan is an example.
High quality + subdivision constitutes two important elements of the layout of the Heytea industry, and also makes the real intention behind the layout of the Heytea industry revealed.
Through the prediction of the development of the industry, Heytea actively enters the potential new tracks such as coffee and oats, takes high-quality products and services as the support point, and selects enterprises that match the concept and tonality to invest. At the same time, Xicha has empowered emerging enterprises with its stores, brands, digitalization and supply chain management operations over the years, enabling the latter to grow rapidly and become industry leaders.
In this process, Xicha and the invested enterprises have formed a new consumption map of complementary categories and industrial synergy.
3, China's 3G, Parkson?
The investment and development of consumer goods has its own laws and logic.
The reason why the market has a view of Xicha to expand the circle of new consumer circles through investment comes from the common investment method of Internet companies, that is, indirectly realizing traffic realization through financial investment.
The investment logic of consumer goods is different.
One is that consumer goods are actually heavy assets themselves, unlike the virtual assets of Internet companies, and the expansion of the territory of new consumption requires a lot of money.
In addition, the consumer field often involves many links in production, supply chain, and store energy, and the ability to reuse these links is related.
For example, as the world's largest restaurant group, an important cost control strategy of Parkson is to maintain independent operation of its KFC, Pizza Hut and other brands, but it is highly coordinated in the back-end supply chain, and raw materials are uniformly purchased and distributed by the company.
In the consumer world where cost determines life and death, this approach greatly reduces the supply chain pressure of individual brands.
Similarly, consumer brands such as Heytea and Ye Cui Shan and Wang Ming can complement each other on the product side, but are highly identical in the supply chain. Through the empowerment of new brands through the original supply chain of Heytea, the cycle of these consumer goods to build their own supply chains can be shortened, and the high-quality supply chain can be shared while ensuring the quality of raw materials.
In turn, the rapid growth of these new consumer brands will also feed back into the supply chain, providing Xicha with a more bargaining advantage and a more controllable supply chain.
Product concept and enterprise management experience are even more scarce.
3G Capital, a world-renowned consumer goods investment institution, has repeatedly succeeded in the field of consumer goods investment, and an important strategy is post-investment management. Through the output of management experience and industrial empowerment of the invested enterprises, the re-sorting of the marketing system, the introduction of variable remuneration, and the strengthening of quality management, 3G capital has achieved success again and again.
It is with this strategy that 3G Capital, after acquiring Bolang Beer, grew it from a small brewery that was about to collapse to the world's fifth-largest beer manufacturer with 70% of Brazil's share, and since then, through mergers and acquisitions, it has acquired 4 of the world's top 5 beer groups.
The rise of domestic brands, has not been answered, how to emerge a world-class consumer brand?
Pure financial investment, especially in the field of consumer goods investment, is mostly not very powerful. There are too many investments and mergers and acquisitions in the consumer goods sector for the purpose of financial investment, and the final result is not satisfactory.
Throughout the development of the world's consumer industry, in the process of the rise of well-known enterprises and brands, through mergers and acquisitions and active industrial layout is the mainstream path for the growth of consumer goods.
And this is also the path that Xicha is taking.