Recently, Filsch Shop, which has captured many young women, has cancelled many of its companies and gradually withdrawn from the Chinese market.
South Korean affordable beauty and skin care brands with similar positioning face a similar fate: in 2021, Etude House closed all offline stores in China, and at the end of 2022, it closed its official flagship stores on Tmall and JD.com; At the beginning of 2022, innisfree closed more than 600 stores in China.
The situation for other Korean goods is not much better: in April 2021, LG announced its withdrawal from the mobile phone market; Since 2016, the overall sales of Korean automobiles have declined significantly, and the number of dealers has shrunk by nearly 30%, and the market share in February 2021 has been as low as 2.5%; Samsung mobile phones have long fallen from the throne of the first domestic market share at its peak, and only 0.8% of the market cake was shared in 2018.
How popular Korean goods used to be
The popularity of Korean mobile phones and cosmetics in China is closely related to the prevalence of Hallyu culture in the past.
The heroines of Korean dramas from the chaebol parents and princesses to the slum Cinderella are all Samsung flagship mobile phones in the quarter of that year; Popular idols endorse major makeup brands is also a common operation in the industry. Therefore, fans of Korean dramas and K-POP have naturally become a potential user group of Korean goods.
Before the advent of the smartphone era, LG mobile phones were definitely phenomenal products that should not be underestimated - although they have now become tears of the times.
The pleasing design of the ultra-thin slide, capacitive touch navigation keys, one-touch red navigation keys... The output of these novel concepts was really eye-catching.
In addition, the luxurious endorsement lineup composed of actors Hyun Bin and Kim Tae-hee and popular idol groups Girls' Generation and f(x) also added a lot to the "chocolate" and "ice cream" series of mobile phones.
Samsung has taken large-screen mobile phones as a stepping stone, riding the hurricane of the era of smart phones, and gradually gaining a foothold in the domestic market.
At its peak, in 2013, Samsung became the best-selling mobile phone brand in China with a market share of 20%. The Samsung Galaxy S4 mobile phone launched in the same year can be said to be equal to the iPhone 5s.
Korean cosmetics have a complete range of cosmetics, low prices, fast product updates, and young packaging design, which well filled the gap in the domestic low-end cosmetics market in that year.
At the same time, brand image and temperament shaping are its strengths, such as innisfree's Jeju natural and healthy skin care, or Etudi's house pink and delicate princess style.
At its peak, Etude House opened 85 brand direct stores in 25 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Tianjin and Nanjing, and it can even be seen on Nanjing East Road in Shanghai.
In those years, basically every girl's makeup bag had one or two star products of Korean makeup, and the Korean drama heroine makeup represented by flat eyebrows, lip biting makeup, and watery skin was also the "top stream" in the beauty industry, becoming a paradigm for thousands of girls to emulate.
For the student party, the cheap open-shelf products of Korean brands are an indispensable novice equipment when they start learning makeup.
Compared with small expenses, people's consumption of goods such as automobiles tends to be more rational, and they will consider factors such as product quality and cost performance.
Although Korean cars have never become mainstream in China, their ultra-high cost performance and beautiful design once made them the best choice between European, American and Japanese cars and domestic cars.
Since 2013, Beijing Hyundai has entered the "million era" and has become the fourth largest car company in the Chinese market. In the following four years, Beijing Hyundai played steadily and maintained an average annual sales of millions of dollars, until the situation took a sharp turn in 2017.
Overnight, Korean products are not popular?
Samsung, innisfree minstrels, Chengye Hallyu, defeat also Hallyu.
After the THAAD incident in 2016, various Korean star concerts and meetings were stopped, and the influence of the Korean wave in China plummeted.
At the same time that Korean brands have entered a dilemma in China, domestic brands have made efforts to further compress their living space.
First of all, domestic mobile phones have sprung up, whether it is channel width and depth, or product cost performance are comparable to or even surpass Samsung, making Samsung in the low-end mobile phone market stretched.
The loss of market share of Samsung mobile phones is not unrelated to the decline in competitiveness of its products themselves, and the lack of after-sales and public relations.
Samsung's high-end flagship models are benchmarked against Apple's mobile phones, but Apple's smooth operating system and self-contained ecological closed loop make it difficult for other manufacturers to catch up.
In addition, the price of Samsung mobile phones has also been criticized, compared to Apple's mobile phones to ensure more. High-end flagship machines do not yet have the stamina to break Apple's ceiling, and the low-end market is seized by domestic mobile phones, and Samsung's situation in China can be said to be an enemy in the belly.
The last straw that overwhelmed the camel was the PR rollover of the Note7 bombing, which was large enough to be included in PR textbooks as a typical failure.
After the bombing, Samsung's arrogant attitude of treating Chinese users differently and delaying the recall of problematic products has caused it to lose the hearts of the people in China. The Note7, which was resold after replacing the battery after a foreign recall, was still exposed to spontaneous combustion. Although Samsung was later pressured to apologize to Chinese users and compensate, it has been overwhelmed.
On October 26, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 battery exploded
LG's several yaw strategies in the smartphone era - successively launched flashy products, the market response was dismal, directly led to the collapse of its mobile phone business. Although LG found the endorsement of the big star BTS in the universe and wanted to regain the benefits of ghost advertising and marketing, it was "a bamboo basket empty" after all.
Korean beauty brands have shown obvious "water and soil dissatisfaction" under the thriving new format of the domestic makeup market.
At a time when e-commerce is prosperous and traffic is the truth, single-brand makeup stores opened in core business districts have been abandoned by the times, and the epidemic has dealt them a fatal blow.
The national trend makeup, represented by Perfect Diary and Orange Blossom, started online at the beginning, relying on the traffic of the platform and Internet celebrity KOLs to quickly attack the city and capture the hearts of the younger generation of women.
AT THE SAME TIME, LOCAL MAKEUP COLLECTION STORES THECOLORIST AND WOW COLOUR ARE POPULAR, FURTHER BROADENING THE SALES CHANNELS OF DOMESTIC MAKEUP.
A variety of product choices, a real offline trial experience, and the word-of-mouth and popularity accumulated by each settled brand on the e-commerce platform in the early stage have made the store respond well.
These collection stores are often located in large shopping malls in first- and second-tier cities, with bold and trendy decoration styles, and giant backdrops made of makeup elements have become a hot trend.
In this way, Korean makeup has been bombarded by domestic traffic marketing + offline collection stores, and it has been defeated.
And Korean cars that are not too high in their own sense of existence now have to accept that their own cost performance is not as high as that of domestic cars, their reputation is not as good as that of German cars, and the embarrassing situation of saving fuel and easy to use is not as good as Japanese cars.
In the early years, when Korean cars entered the domestic market, the signboard was low price. Although this brand positioning brought it short-term prosperity, it also created a situation that was difficult to turn over in the later stage.
In fact, the Korean Hyundai in the European and American auto markets is basically at the same premium level as the Japanese Honda, Toyota, and German Volkswagen. Korean cars, which are known for their cost performance, can only continue to grit their teeth and fight price wars in the face of the reality of declining sales after 2017. Behind the price reduction is the reduction of allocation, which has since started a vicious cycle and damaged the brand image one after another.
In addition, in the past ten years, Korean cars have been lackluster in both model design and intelligent process, and they have not been able to carry innovations with memory points.
And the worrying quality problem is a blow to consumers, which is prohibitive for consumers.
One of the most representative is the Hyundai Tucson model, which entered the Chinese market in 2015 and has been recalled six times due to various faults in five years on the market. According to car owners, after the vehicles returned to the factory for maintenance, not only the old problems could not be solved, but also new problems such as increased fuel consumption, weakened power and abnormal noise were added, forcing them to embark on a long road of rights protection.
On March 16, 2021, about 425,200 more Tucson vehicles were urgently recalled by the manufacturer, this time due to a possible short circuit inside the vehicle's HECU (hydraulic electronic control unit), which in extreme cases could cause a fire in the engine compartment.
But no one wants to give up the Chinese market. In the competitive environment of survival of the fittest, the former Korean brands are also planning to lay out articles in order to get a piece of the pie.
Samsung has increased its investment in high-end manufacturing in China, and has successively deployed semiconductor production plants in Suzhou, Xi'an and Tianjin, the world's leading automotive MLCC factory and power battery production line and other high-end manufacturing projects.
In addition to optimizing the investment structure, Samsung also continues to innovate products, launching the world's first mass-produced folding screen mobile phone Galaxy Fold in 2019. According to the DSCC report, more than ninety percent of the market share of folding screen mobile phones in the third and fourth quarters of 2020 was occupied by Samsung, and its annual share was 87%.
According to the ranking of the number of international metaverse patents released by data research companies, LG climbed to the current first place in the industry.
But can Korean goods capture the hearts of Chinese consumers again? Perhaps there is not much time left for them.
Reference Articles:
"The Great Defeat of Korean Cars in China" _AI Finance and Economics
"Korean cosmetics are now closing stores, single-brand stores that take the mass route are not fragrant" _Interface News
"Samsung is gone, Samsung is here again" _ Tokawa Business Review
"Samsung mobile phone is still the world's first, but Chinese has abandoned it" _ New Weekly
"LG mobile phone that quietly disappeared, not even the tears of the times" _ New Weekly
"Domestic beauty line chess game: perfect diary to the left, orange blossoms to the right" _36 Krypton
Written by: Sonny Button
Some pictures are from Visual China & Oriental IC
The rest comes from the Internet, and the copyright belongs to the original author