Author Ji Yiyi
Edited by Qin Tuo
Last year, the "giant" of the snack industry, three squirrels (300783), did not have a good time.
On April 25, Three Squirrels released their 2022 annual report.
According to the annual report, the total operating income of the three squirrels in 2022 will be 7.293 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 25.35%; The net profit attributable to the parent company was 129 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 68.81%.
In fact, compared with the decline in revenue and profit, the revenue of Three Squirrels has declined for 3 consecutive years.
It is difficult to blame this dismal performance on the "big picture".
Taking the snack peer good shop as an example, the total operating income in 2022 will be 9.440 billion, a year-on-year increase of 1.24%, achieving six consecutive increases; The net profit attributable to the parent company was 335 million yuan, up 19.16% from the same period last year.
Three squirrels to the left, and the good shop to the right.
The three squirrels, which were once the "first stock of national snacks", are now falling into path dependence, their performance is falling endlessly, and the transformation is difficult.
1
The "power of life and death" of the three squirrels
Firmly controlled by the "Tao family"
In 2012, Three Squirrels was founded.
Zhang Liaoyuan, the founder of Three Squirrels with a keen sense of smell, seized the spring wind of China's second-generation Internet development and relied on the rapid expansion of "Taojie" e-commerce.
The first Double 11 after the establishment of Three Squirrels, a single store sold 7.66 million yuan per day, breaking the Tmall food industry record.
From 2014 to 2016, Three Squirrels' revenue increased from 924 million yuan to 4.423 billion yuan.
In 2019, the revenue of three squirrels exceeded 10 billion, firmly ranking as the "first brother" in the industry; And successfully landed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the stock price rose more than 4 times in one year, reaching a maximum of 90 yuan.
Stephen Zweig wrote in "The Severed Head", "All gifts from fate have long been secretly marked with a price." ”
On the one hand, the threshold of the leisure snack industry is low, and the competition for platform traffic is becoming more and more fierce, and the cost of customer acquisition is rising.
According to the statistics of Huaan Securities, the online customer acquisition cost of three squirrels rose from 6 yuan / piece in 2018 to 10 yuan / piece in the first half of 2019.
Not only that, the service fee of the three squirrels Internet platform is also increasing year by year.
The growth rate in 2018 and 2019 was 37% and 68%, respectively, which was much higher than the growth rate of revenue; During the same period, the revenue of Three Squirrels increased by 26.05% and 45.30% respectively.
On the other hand, the three squirrels have also been "linked" in the competition of e-commerce platforms because they are too deeply bound to the "Tao family".
On "Double 11" in 2015, the "cat and dog war" between Alibaba and JD.com began.
Three squirrels said they would not participate in the platform battle, but the JD.com store was still taken down.
After urgent communication, the store went online again after 17 hours.
In 2016, some media said that three squirrels launched the APP, which means that "no platform is needed and can be operated independently." ”
On the day the article was released, Zhang Liaoyuan contacted Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang (Xiaoyaozi), saying that the media was sowing discord, and the three squirrels would still fully support Alibaba.
Behind the "show of loyalty" is Zhang Liaoyuan's fear of the "Tao family" holding the "power of life and death" of the three squirrels.
You know, the three squirrels once had nearly 70% of their revenue from Tmall.
According to the 2022 annual report of Three Squirrels, the revenue of third-party e-commerce platforms was 4.788 billion yuan, of which Tmall revenue was 1.980 billion yuan, contributing 41% of e-commerce revenue.
On the other hand, in addition to Tmall, the sales scale of good shops Jingdong self-operated stores and Pinduoduo flagship stores has reached the first in the industry.
In 2022, in the Douyin "Super Product Day" event in August, the sales of good shops ranked first in the industry.
In 2022, the main business revenue of Good Shop Online will reach 4.698 billion yuan, almost the same as the three squirrels.
2
Zhang Liaoyuan's offline expansion "ambition"
Scribbled the end of the pandemic
Three Squirrels once concluded in 2021, "The era of entrepreneurship with e-commerce as the core is over." ”
In fact, when it comes to the snack industry, e-commerce may never have occupied a central position.
According to the data, in the leisure snack industry in 2022, offline channels still account for 85.9%, and the online penetration rate is only 14.1%, even lower than in 2021.
Snack specialty stores, convenience stores, and traditional mom-and-pop stores are still mainstream channels.
For this point, Zhang Liaoyuan is very clear.
As early as the establishment of Three Squirrels, Zhang Liaoyuan predicted that the O2O model would become an inevitable trend in the future, and enterprises would eventually achieve online and offline integration.
Unfortunately, the three squirrels failed to seize the opportunity to succeed in transformation.
Affected by path dependence, Three Squirrels began to set up offline stores in 2106, and by June 2019, there were only 73 self-operated food stores, and 78 alliance small stores in the franchise mode; However, in the first half of 2019, online sales still accounted for 88.62%.
As the online dividend weakened and the cost of customer acquisition rose, the three squirrels began to make an aggressive layout of offline channels.
In 2020, under the repeated epidemic situation, the three squirrels strongly completed the goal of 1,000 stores.
Among them, 78 new restaurants were opened, for a total of 171, and 641 alliance stores were opened, reaching 872.
This extensive expansion, which only counts quantity and does not pay attention to effect, soon brings bad results.
In 2021, Three Squirrels ushered in the first wave of store closures, opening 12 new restaurants and closing 43 stores that year; 341 new alliance stores were opened and 288 were closed.
In 2022, a more severe wave of store closures followed, with 118 new stores opened in the three squirrels and closed, leaving only 23 at the end of the year; Alliance stores opened 44 and closed 431, bringing the total to 538 at the end of the year.
As for the reasons for large-scale store closures, the explanation of the three squirrels is that based on the transformation strategy, the store strategy has shifted from large-scale and extensive expansion in the past to sustainable operation of high-quality stores.
Unlike the rush to become three squirrels, the good shop is much more relaxed in store expansion.
In 2022, a total of 661 new stores will be opened, including 166 directly operated stores and 495 franchised stores, bringing the cumulative number of stores to 3,200.
Not only that, the good shop selected high-quality store locations, so that Hillhouse Capital, one of the company's investors, sent a big data team to enter the company and introduced a big data store predictive location model to select the location of its stores and enhance the ability of store drainage.
3
The industry is highly competitive and the concentration is declining
Three squirrels bet on nuts by mistake
At the beginning of its creation, the three squirrels were able to overwhelm their peers, relying on nuts.
In 2012, nuts continued to heat up on the consumption side, domestic consumers' income generally increased, health value was popularized, and China's consumer demand entered a historic upgrade period.
Not only three squirrels, but also Voron, famous for its "daily nuts", was also founded in 2012.
At that time, the industry standard for nuts was "scattered and poor"; And after the nut explosion, the "giants" in the industry such as Qiaqia and Laiyifen did not "enter" in time.
The favorable growth environment allowed the three squirrels to successfully "occupy a place".
But the low threshold of the nut industry, the phenomenon of "no one competing" did not last long.
Taking the top 10 Tmall nut market sales data in November 2022 as an example, three squirrels ranked first, followed by Baicao Wei, Mi Ling, Liangpin Shop, Wolong, Everover Time, Laojiekou, Qiaqia, Tianhong Brand, and Bibi Fried.
According to data from Tmall New Product Innovation Center, the sales of the top 10 nuts brand accounted for 41% in 2022, and the growth rate of brand concentration fell by 3.3%.
The nut track is becoming more crowded, the industry concentration rate is declining, and the imagination of the three squirrel nuts was abandoned by hand a few years ago.
After 5 years of sitting in the "first place" in the field of Tmall nuts and snacks, the three squirrels took the initiative to reduce the category and continue to "bet" on the nut field.
In 2020, the main product styles of the three squirrels were sharply reduced from more than 500 models in 2019 to about 400 models, and said that they would continue to optimize.
Three squirrels have said that although the reduction of SKUs has led to a certain loss in revenue of other categories, the revenue and proportion of nuts have increased steadily, and at the same time, based on the scale effect of nuts, the cost has been further optimized, and the gross profit margin of nuts has risen well.
Zhang Liaoyuan also stressed that "we must clear ourselves from all the nuts sellers, we are different from them."
However, the nut business is difficult to differentiate, and the taste is homogeneous, not to mention that the industry is mainly OEM, including three squirrels.
When Zhang Liaoyuan's "iron heart" made nuts and sifted out other products, the good shop continued to make more products, and bet on a number of "explosive models" with sales of more than 10 million.
In 2022, there will be 603 SKUs of new products on the good shop, of which 17 are "explosive"; By the end of 2022, there were 1,655 omni-channel SKUs in Good Shop.
In fact, most nut consumers don't just buy nuts when they buy nuts.
According to data from Tmall New Product Innovation Center, in 2022, 61% of consumers in the snack market will buy multiple snacks at once; Only 39% of consumers buy a snack.
And snack combinations with nuts, up to 7%, pastries, biscuits, preserves, chocolate are often paired with nuts.
Zhang Liaoyuan understood this truth.
At the end of 2011, before the three squirrels were officially established, Zhang Liao issued an article "The Last Chance of E-commerce, and the Beginning of the Demise of E-commerce":
The article mentioned that in every era of transformation, there must be some successful people, which is the product of transformation, but also the product of opportunity.
Ultimately, this opportunity needs to be transformed into strength, and success can be long-term, otherwise there will be no good results.
Now it seems like the life of three squirrels.