There is a topic on a social platform: What to do with your own corpse after death?
In addition to traditional cremation and burial, technology has changed the form of handling corpses, sea burial, painting burial, water burial, diamond burial, space burial... The topic is very well viewed, but there is little interaction, and death is still a taboo topic.
Birth, old age, illness and death are experienced by everyone in their lifetime.
People happily discuss "life" and do not mind discussing "old" and "sick", but they are secretive about "death".
In modern society, science and technology have accelerated the development of everything, life and life change every year, but death and burial remain unchanged for thousands of years. In terms of business, mother and baby, pension, and medical care are all sunrise industries, and although the funeral industry is rarely mentioned, it has made a lot of money.
Everyone has to get off at the end of their lives, and everyone in the funeral industry will eventually be a consumer.
In all businesses, the high profit of funeral is not much different from Moutai.
It is much higher than the finance, Internet, real estate and other industries, and because of the particularity of the industry, it is also the only industry that will not be used for bargaining.
Not only that, but it is also full of metaphysics, and many industries have been derived through the three stages of "funeral, burial, and sacrifice".
In each subdivided industry, no one occupies the mountain as the king, but works separately, scattered in every online and offline street, industrial park, and industry street.
Since it is inevitable, and it is still a business full of metaphysics and profiteering, why can't it be widely discussed? What is the trap that has been criticized as "profiteering"? When the Internet + the sun shines on everything, what can it bring to this industry? Would the existence of a death reminder app like WeCroak make funerals a business ahead of time?
Everything, worth exploring.
Ordinary people dare not think that capital has appeared
Let's start with how big this market is.
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2019, the annual birth population in China was 14.65 million, and the birth rate was 10.48‰; The number of deaths was 9.98 million, and the death rate of the population was 7.14 per thousand.
From 2013 to 2019, except for a slight decline in 2015, the number of deaths in the mainland maintained a steady growth trend, and it is estimated that the number of deaths in the mainland in 2020 will be about 10 million.
In other words, with about 19 deaths per minute and 0.3 deaths per second, the funeral industry has a considerable "money scene".
There is a word in China called "coffin book", which is the best explanation of the concept of funeral consumption from ancient times to the present, and many people have been saving for the aftermath very early on, and they will not be soft when spending money.
According to a 2020 survey report by SunLife, a British life insurance agency, China's funeral expenses are the second largest in the world, with an average per capita of about 37,375 yuan, accounting for 45.4% of the average annual salary, second only to Japan.
According to the Prospective Industry Research Institute, even if the average annual consumer expenditure growth rate is 8%, even if 10 million deaths per year and conservatively calculated, the market size of China's funeral industry will reach 500 billion yuan in 2020.
The China Funeral Association predicts that the scale of China's funeral industry will reach 1 trillion yuan in 2023.
The funeral industry can be divided into three stages: "funeral, burial, and sacrifice".
"Funeral" is the stage from home to funeral home, "funeral" is the stage from funeral home to cemetery, "sacrifice" is the collective name of all sacrifices and memorials, funeral and burial is a one-time business, and sacrifice is long-term.
According to Tianyan Investigation, as of March 2021, there were 79,000 funeral-related enterprises in mainland China, and 14,000 newly registered enterprises in 2020, an increase of 8.7% year-on-year. Since 2021, 2,863 new funeral enterprises have been registered.
At the same time, because of the empowerment of Internet +, many traditional funeral companies have begun new explorations and even been affirmed by capital.
In 2015, the "other side", which focuses on the funeral e-commerce model, received angel investment from angel investor Xu Xiaoping at the beginning of its establishment.
Founded in 2013, "Aiyouhui" provides one-stop services such as funeral, burial and sacrifice, including funeral services, cemetery services and online farewell cemetery, QR code tomb sweeping, pre-death contract insurance and other product services. In particular, the "pre-mortem contract insurance" inside is a very innovative entry angle for connected funeral.
In 2015, Enxue Angel, which received 2 million angel investment before it was launched, positioned its products as "the largest and most authoritative information and trading platform in China's funeral field", serving many merchants and many customers in the funeral field.
Internet life etiquette service provider "Yuanzhou Life" was established in 2016, integrating hospice, funeral services, branded funeral supplies, funeral planning and design, funeral Internet and other comprehensive service institutions.
Launched in 2017, the funeral worry-free network uses the B2B2C + O2O model to create a one-stop funeral service platform for future life.
The "One Flower, One World" life culture platform was officially launched in 2021. The platform adopts a new service management method of "Internet + funeral", and is committed to creating a public service system for the hospice industry that integrates raising, prospecting, funeral, burial, sacrifice and bequest.
From the first year of the concentrated outbreak of "Internet + funeral" in 2015 to 2021, many companies have stepped into the funeral industry.
They are not afraid to seek business opportunities and get a piece of the pie in an industry that has not yet been overcapitalized.
Profiteering and controversy coexist, and the industry needs to be optimized
Another function of the Internet is to make traditional funerals start to be discussed.
"Cemeteries are getting more expensive", "There are more and more funeral tricks", "the money of the dead is better earned than that of the living" ... It is the voice of the industry for funeral profiteering.
Is funeral really a profiteering industry? Where does the profiteering appear?
For example, in 2020, the gross profit margin of Kweichow Moutai is 91.48%, which is a very mythical number, and half of the gross profit margin of Moutai in the general industry can be regarded as extremely high profits.
The funeral industry, on the other hand, can be close to equal.
Taking Chinese funeral industry giant Fucheng as an example, according to the company's financial report data in 2020, its gross profit margin is 81.01%. Another Hong Kong-listed funeral service company, China Wantong Garden, had a gross profit margin of 84.6% in 2020, a year-on-year increase of 4.7%.
Intuitive comparison, in the domestic real estate industry, the gross profit margin of upstream enterprises is between 25%~30%, even Zhonghai, which is regarded as the "profit king", the gross profit margin in 2020 is only 30.05%.
From this point of view, funeral is indeed muffled wealth.
So how did windfall profits appear?
For many bereaved loved ones, death is an intensive process, and the traditional Chinese concept of "thick burial" is the final solution to filial piety.
From the initial purchase of birthday clothes, urns, cemeteries, to the complete set of ceremonies to bid farewell to the deceased, to the ritual cleaning activities after death, there is huge demand hidden in the entire link, and the profit margin is also huge - the concept of filial piety makes bargaining awkward.
First of all, the cemetery is expensive, and the housing price is beyond reach.
Entering the soil for the safety is the most important thing for the deceased, but the price of entering the soil for the safety is jaw-dropping, and the cost of the cemetery has always been the bulk of the funeral.
It is not an exaggeration to call it "underground real estate", compared with the continuous decline in real estate profits, the funeral industry has maintained stable "windfall profits" all year round, and the profit margin is even several times that of real estate.
Among the 30 major cities in the country, Shanghai, which ranks first, has a high-end cemetery close to 300,000 yuan, and the average price per square meter in the city exceeds 60,000; In Beijing, the price of cemeteries with "good feng shui" is basically 150,000 yuan per piece, which is the price of 6 years ago.
Cemetery prices are rising faster than house prices.
Taking Fushouyuan, the "flagship of China's funeral industry", as an example, the average sales price of Fushouyuan cemetery increased by 5% in 2020. According to the "Changes in the Sales Prices of Commercial Housing in 70 Large and Medium-sized Cities in December 2020" released by the National Bureau of Statistics, only 21 cities increased their house prices by more than 5%.
In the past year, Fushouyuan sold a total of 13,083 operational cemeteries, with each cemetery selling for an average of 108,000 yuan.
And another concern is that the cemetery fee is not the final cost, because the length of the cemetery's life is basically a legal gap.
Not only China, but a cemetery in Japan costs at least 4 million yen.
The cost of "entering the earth for safety" from the United States is also varied, with a coffin of $1,298, a cemetery of $1,000, a stone tombstone of $1,500, a digging and covering of soil of $1,200, a metal shell outside the coffin of $2,395, plus a memorial service of $4,805 and other expenses, a total of at least $12,198.
Big "homes" are expensive, and small "homes" are not cheap.
The first house of the deceased in Hades, the urn, is also a heavy burden on the living. The profit margin of the urn has been surprisingly large, a cost of about 2,000 yuan urn, the price of 85,000 to 120,000.
Cao County, Shandong is frequently searched because of the coffin business.
Online sales have become popular, more than 130 online stores have opened, and in 2018, the sales volume of Double 11 won the title of "Top 100 Counties in Online Sales" in one fell swoop, and has become the second largest Taobao village cluster in the country after Yiwu, Zhejiang, and has sold coffins all over the world.
But entering the soil for peace is not a hundred.
The traditional funeral industry is too lengthy in the middle link is also a prominent problem, the deceased before the burial of various mourning ceremonies, as well as burial and subsequent sacrifices, these two parts need to purchase a few, as few as a dozen, as many as dozens or hundreds.
However, the traditional funeral industry is mostly scattered, and most businesses only provide goods or services in a certain aspect, resulting in too complicated intermediate links.
The sacrificial supplies on the market have gradually become diverse from ordinary yellow paper and coins, and various special "sets" have been launched in turn: Hermes suits, Mercedes-Benz cars with drivers, iPhone sets, and epidemic prevention sets.
There are living people, and the deceased are no less, and they are often more involuted. If a roll of ordinary yellow paper is 5 yuan, the price of the "special set" will be several times higher, and the styles of the coin have long become diverse.
This coin, which costs a few yuan, has supported many companies. Among them, the more well-known is Guangdong Yixiang Folk Culture, which applied to be listed on the New Third Board in 2015, and according to its public information, its net profit in 2014 reached 2.081 million.
The most prominent defects are the opaque and unfair prices caused by information asymmetry, uneven quality and service of goods, and too many intermediate links.
"Each life dress wholesale has a profit of 20~100 yuan; The retail profit is as high as 600~1000 yuan. This is an advertisement launched by Jiangsu "Shengxian" brand life clothing factory to attract customers.
Someone once used a story to ridicule the chaos of the traditional funeral industry, the same purchase cost of 200 products, see you drive a small electric to buy, sell you seven or eight hundred, see you drive a car to buy, then selling you two or three thousand is not too much.
In Mibei Paper Flower Market, the largest funeral market in China, Langfang, Hebei, hundreds of funeral goods shops look very simple, concentrated in a street of only 1 kilometer, but the average annual turnover is billions of yuan.
Here, a paper house with a retail price of 200 yuan can be bought for only 12 yuan, and you can imagine how high the profits obtained by the distributor channel in the middle are.
The traditional taboo industry needs new ideas
In 2020, the Ministry of Civil Affairs changed "thick and thin burial" to "thick and thin burial", which can be regarded as a bellwether for the reform of the funeral industry.
The traditional funeral industry has long had enough reasons to become Internet-oriented, and even if there is no influx of capital, people engaged in the funeral industry have long had the idea of touching the Internet.
For the merchants of Mibei Paper Flower Market in Langfang, Hebei Province, Internetization is the direction of their new growth, and middleman channel vendors monopolize 60%~70% of the profits of the funeral industry, leaving them market space, which is very tight.
The Internet + funeral industry will provide a national uniform price and one-stop funeral services to help families with complicated affairs save a lot of trouble after the death of a loved one.
Japan's Yoriso is committed to becoming a funeral chronicle in the field of memorial services, offering photos, videos and discounted funeral plans for less than half the price of traditional services.
In 2019, it raised about $18.8 million from institutions such as SBI Investments, bringing the total amount raised to date to be about $30.7 million.
The cemetery with the highest cost, there are already many foreign companies trying new possibilities.
Japan's Shinkyo Temple has been transformed into a stunningly modern seven-story facility that looks like a high-end hotel or spa, hidden in the cemetery of the Usamae Mausoleum, and the temple's most striking feature is its computer-controlled, card-activated automatic columbarium system that adds a touch of high-tech to the traditional ancestor worship experience.
Malaysia's funeral industry giant "Rich Life", the memorial of the deceased is to visit a large library, relatives come to the "cemetery" of formal books to mourn and commemorate.
Both in terms of cost and memorial, it gives traditional high-consumption cemeteries a new choice.
The Internet is changing the traditional funeral industry, but the road to the industrialization of funeral Internet is not easy to follow.
"The other side", the once most optimistic Internet funeral platform collapsed in 2017, "Enxue Angel" disappeared after two years of establishment and operation, and "Yuanzhou Life" was online for no more than two years...
There are many Internet funeral projects that even have time to open up market visibility in the future, which have long been strangled in the cradle.
The touch of the net of funerals is still difficult.
The funeral industry is inherently hazy and is a gray area that is unwilling to be discussed, which determines that the process of the Internet in the funeral industry is still slow.
The Internet is an industry that needs marketing, which is a gap that is difficult for funerals to cross.
Imagine that on a dark night, you open your mobile phone and click on the push, and an advertisement about the funeral jumps in front of you, which not only seeps people, but also makes you feel extremely embarrassed.
Similarly, it is precisely because of the "obscure" attribute that it is difficult for the Internet to use the conventional routine to copy and create the so-called "explosive model", there is no way to promote users, the store can not be too conspicuous, there is no way to pull new ones, and there is no way to fight for half the price of the urn... The Internet, in front of the funeral, hit a nose of ashes.
Traditional Internet e-commerce commonly used promotion, shopping, social sharing, live broadcast... Any tool that is used frequently will be muted in front of the funeral.
Moreover, there is the low-frequency problem of the funeral industry, and the cost of acquiring customers is high.
Many businesses are doing repeat customers, and they are frequently using the Internet for publicity, but the funeral industry cannot, and the funeral industry can almost say that there are no repeat customers.
Moreover, the funeral industry is mostly a "sudden" business.
Even if the e-commerce system has been so perfect today, customers will not stock up on a few funeral supplies because of promotions, and buy two more urns because of discounts, and it is precisely because of this that funeral offline physical stores can be prosperous for a long time, and the Internet e-commerce model has not been effective.
Finally, and the main difficulty, there is a monopoly problem in the funeral industry.
The funeral industry itself has the characteristics of public welfare services, has strong government control, and does not have sufficient market-oriented characteristics. And because the funeral industry is constrained by hardware conditions such as regional population, mortality, and cremation rate, it presents the characteristics of natural monopoly, therefore, the entry threshold of the funeral industry is extremely high.
However, although the process of the funeral industry Internet is hindered and the development is slow, the choice of capital to enter proves that this industry is not without gaps.
The Internet of Things, mobile Internet, and big data will connect the funeral industry, and even 3D printing, virtual robots, etc. may enter the funeral industry, which is a technological trend.
In the future, the consumer body of the funeral service industry will be a generation that grew up in the era of online shopping and is good at using online information, and they are no longer concerned about how to dispose of it but experience, which is the trend of users.
From the above two points, the business opportunities and integration space of the funeral industry in the future are still very large.
The changes brought by the Internet to traditional funerals are not only that, but even young people begin to face "death", and their attitude towards life and death is indeed very indifferent.
Searching for funeral topics, their brains are big and impressive.
For the question "What song or music do you want to put at your funeral", some people want to play "I want to live another 500 years", some people think that it is better to cry than to have a song "It's better to dance", and some people do not forget to make a little joke with friends and decide to put "Do you know I'm waiting for you"...
When talking about funerals and death is no longer careful, the meaning of life is magnified.
More and more companies are smelling business opportunities and entering the field of digital wills, digital estate planning, and Internet funeral services.
Apps such as "Centennial Testament", "Eternal Information" or "Epilogue" have emerged. They offer a service for uploading wills to help users record everything from funeral preferences to guidelines for caring for families and pets in advance.
Lantern, an American funeral service provider, has raised $2.3 million in two rounds of funding since its inception in 2018.
Users first need to fill out a "posthumous list", including: can fill in 9 final wishes to relatives and friends, choose the form of their funeral, write a review of their life, estate planning, how to deal with digital accounts, personal social security welfare information to fill in, etc.
When we reach the end of life, we may have to face loneliness alone.
When we are able to treat our death as personally as we get married or decorate, we feel the control of life's greatest uncertainty.
WeCroak, a death alert app, even pushes notifications to users five times a day that read, "Don't forget, you're going to die."
"Coco" is a movie that many people like, subverting our understanding of life and death, although life is as brilliant as summer flowers, but death can still be used to ridicule and celebrate.
The Internetization of the funeral industry has long not needed any standard answers, there is no should or not, only whether it is following the gears of the times.
The funeral industry is undoubtedly on the road to the Internet, and what we have to do is to wait and watch the wind rise and watch the rain stop.
"The Si people have passed away, and they worship the ghosts and gods and stay away." Only life is truly reverent.
Today, the shame and taboo for the younger generation to talk about death has been greatly reduced.
They want to have as much control as possible over the "end of life."