BESTORE, take off the "long shirt"

The latest financial report has once again bound the word "stall" to BESTORE.

文丨猎云精选 ID:lieyunjingxuan

Author丨Han Wenjing

"At present, what is in front of us is not only the question of how difficult it is to live, but also the question of whether we can live. ”

An open letter that puts the difficulties of BESTORE in the spotlight.

On November 29, Yang Yinfen, the newly appointed chairman and general manager of BESTORE, burned the "first fire" in office, saying that it would launch a new round of reform, return to the image of BESTORE as a neighbor, and move towards the route of good quality and affordable price.

This is the largest price reduction in the 17 years since the establishment of BESTORE. The average price of more than 300 top-notch and popular products was reduced by 22%, and the maximum price was reduced by 45%.

Behind the price reduction of "inward", the anxiety of BESTORE is fully reflected.

Entering 2023, BESTORE, once the "first stock of high-end snacks", is facing the dilemma of performance stalling, shareholders taking turns to reduce their holdings, and evaporating market value, compared with the highest point of 86.75 yuan in July 2020, the overall share price of BESTORE has fallen by more than 70%, and the market value has evaporated by more than 20 billion.

At the same time, the snack track has also undergone earth-shaking changes.

Snack collection stores are blooming everywhere, and cutting-edge brands such as "Zhao Yiming Snacks" and "Snacks are very busy" have won the favor of capital, speeding up the pace of "horse racing".

Shortly after the opening of the market on December 1, the share price of BESTORE soared to 21.32 yuan per share, with a total market value of 8.549 billion. Can this change in price lead BESTORE through the cycle?

BESTORE "Moving Bones"

Under the change of "price reduction", there is an undercurrent of personnel changes in BESTORE.

On the evening of November 27, BESTORE announced the change of management. According to its announcement, Yang Hongchun, the company's former chairman and general manager, resigned, and Yang Yinfen will serve as chairman and general manager.

After this change, Yang Hongchun no longer serves as chairman and general manager, but still serves as a director of the company.

In fact, Yang Hongchun and Yang Yinfen are both core members of the founding team of BESTORE, and both of them worked in Guangdong Kelon Electric Co., Ltd.

In 2006, Yang Hongchun borrowed more than 600,000 yuan from relatives and friends, and together with his old classmate Zhang Guoqiang, he opened the first good store in Wuhan. Two years later, Yang Hongchun brought his former colleague Yang Yinfen to join BESTORE.

In 2012, the scale of BESTORE exceeded 1,000. With the emergence of Internet snack brands such as Three Squirrels, BESTORE began to plan the development of e-commerce, and Yang Hongchun also retreated into the background at this time, in-depth research on products, and handed over the e-commerce operation to Yang Yinfen.

A person close to BESTORE said that Yang Yinfen, as one of the founders of the company, has led BESTORE to achieve many milestone breakthroughs such as online channel layout and listing on the main board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, and has a deep understanding of the food and retail industries.

In September 2022, Yang Yinfen, then the general manager of BESTORE, proposed to resign from the position of general manager of the company due to work adjustments. Yang Hongchun was appointed as the general manager of the company.

Now, after a year, Yang Yinfen is the general manager of BESTORE again.

According to BESTORE, the new team of directors, supervisors and senior executives was elected after careful consideration and communication, extensive consultation and full research and exchange by the actual controller team, and the company's founder team will continue to support the company's development.

In the announcement, BESTORE also mentioned that Mr. Ke Bingrong, Ms. Xu Ran, Ms. Liu Ling, Ms. Li Haohao and Mr. Jin An were appointed as the company's deputy general managers, and Ms. Xu Ran was appointed as the secretary of the company's board of directors and the person in charge of finance. The term of office of the above senior management is consistent with that of the third board of directors of the company.

Yang Yinfen expressed her gratitude in the internal letter, "Especially the trust and support from Mr. Yang, I feel that this trust and support is priceless. To be honest, in this society, no one can entrust me with billions of net worth and let me manage it all. In my heart, I have always asked myself not to live up to this trust that transcends brotherhood under any circumstances!"

After taking office, Yang Yinfen cut the first knife of change to the price.

On the business side, BESTORE focused on the principle of "price reduction without quality reduction", and simultaneously implemented the largest price reduction for the first time in 17 years, with an average price reduction of 22% and a maximum price reduction of 45% for 300 products, mainly "focusing on snacks with cost optimization but not affecting quality and high repurchase rate".

This year, BESTORE was exposed to the "sky-high price" of duck tongue selling at 528.8 yuan/kg, and fell into the controversy of "snack assassin". It is reported that the price reduction products given by BESTORE this time include macadamia nuts, pine nuts, pistachios, cashew nuts and other nuts, meat snacks such as pork jerky, duck neck, grilled sausages, and spicy strips, dried tofu, bread cakes, melon seeds and other popular products with high repurchase rates.

Yang Yinfen said: The reality that consumers think we are "expensive" also shows that the price of our products must be more close to the people, and our quality mentality needs to be further consolidated.

Ryohin 铺子 "Stall"

In fact, the drastic reform is not unrelated to the growth bottleneck encountered by BESTORE. The label of "high-end snacks" that BESTORE has repeatedly emphasized before seems to have never been bought by the market and capital.

Entering 2023, although BESTORE's performance will remain profitable, its revenue and net profit will decline.

In the long term, in 2021 and 2022, BESTORE's performance will be stable, achieving revenue of 9.324 billion and 9.44 billion respectively, and net profit of 282 million and 335 million respectively in the same period.

In the first half of 2023, BESTORE only achieved revenue of 3.987 billion yuan, down 18.55% year-on-year, and net profit of 189 million yuan, down 2.04% year-on-year. This is the worst performance of BESTORE in the three years since its listing, and in the first half of the year, the number of BESTORE stores closed was as high as 250.

In the third quarter, BESTORE's net profit fell sharply.

According to the financial report, BESTORE's revenue in the third quarter was 2.013 billion yuan, down 4.53% year-on-year, and the net profit loss was 2.0788 million yuan, down 102.31% year-on-year.

In response to the decline in net profit in the third quarter, BESTORE said that it was mainly affected by changes in the market and platform, the company's online channel operating income declined, and the gross profit margin in the reporting period decreased compared with the same period, and the proportion of fixed expenses increased.

According to the data, BESTORE's online e-commerce business revenue in the third quarter was 852 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 19.42%, and the gross profit margin decreased by 3.91% year-on-year.

The latest financial report has once again bound the word "stall" to BESTORE. The depressed performance sentiment has also been directly transmitted to the secondary market.

As the "first stock of high-end snacks" in A-shares, BESTORE has gained more than 10 price limits after landing in the capital market in 2020, with the highest price limit of US stocks rising to 86.98 yuan, and the market value reaching 34.8 billion.

How beautiful it was at the beginning of the listing, and how lost it is now.

For a long period of time since 2023, BESTORE's share price has shown a slow downward trend. As of the close of trading on November 30, BESTORE's share price closed down 0.77% at 19.38 per share, down more than 50% from the high of 40 yuan per share in February this year.

In the face of the increasingly dismal performance of BESTORE, the investment institutions that were once optimistic about the company began to withdraw one after another.

Among them, there is Hillhouse Capital, which insists on being a "friend of time".

At the time of BESTORE's IPO, Hillhouse Capital held a total of 46,800,300 shares through Zhuhai Hillhouse, Hong Kong Hillhouse and Ningbo Hillhouse (hereinafter collectively referred to as "Hillhouse"), accounting for 11.67% of the total share capital.

Since the lifting of the ban on the restricted shares of the original shareholders for the first time in February 2021, Hillhouse has successively reduced its holdings in BESTORE.

On February 26, 2021, two days after the lifting of the restricted shares, Hillhouse started the first round of shareholding reduction of BESTORE, the second round of shareholding reduction was on September 30, 2021, and the third round of shareholding reduction was on May 20, 2022.

In June this year, BESTORE announced that Hillhouse Capital planned to reduce its stake in BESTORE again.

Specifically, according to the requirements of the fund term, Hillhouse Capital plans to reduce its holdings of BESTORE by no more than 4.01 million shares through centralized bidding from June 28, 2023 to September 25, 2023, with a total of no more than 1% of the company's total share capital.

As of June 30, 2023, HHLPPZ (HK) Holdings Limited, a subsidiary of Hillhouse, held 18.0001 million shares, with a shareholding ratio of 4.49%.

As of September 30, 2023, the number of shares held by Hillhouse's HHLPPZ (HK) Holdings Limited was 16.0406 million, and the shareholding ratio dropped to 4.00%.

is also not optimistic about the future development of BESTORE, as well as Xu Xin, who is known as the "Queen of the limelight".

On May 17 this year, BESTORE announced that Dayong Co., Ltd. plans to reduce its total holdings of the company's shares by centralized bidding or block trading by no more than 24.06 million shares, that is, no more than 6% of the company's total share capital. Before this reduction, Dayong Limited held 30.30% of the shares, making it the largest external shareholder of BESTORE.

On September 5, BESTORE issued an announcement that the shareholder Dayong Co., Ltd. continued to reduce its shareholding in the company. Up to now, the number of shares held by Dayong Limited is 108 million, and the shareholding ratio is 27.05%.

Dayong Co., Ltd. is a company owned by Xu Xin of Today Capital. According to public information, in 2010, Today Capital invested in BESTORE and became its early shareholder. Xu Xin once praised BESTORE, a traditional enterprise that has stepped out of the speed of the Internet.

Now, today's capital, which has been with BESTORE for more than ten years, has reduced its holdings, which undoubtedly makes the market have more doubts about the development of BESTORE.

When a brand shows signs of slowing down, the valuation logic of the company will naturally change at the same time. It is not surprising that capital is withdrawing at this time.

The snack track is "involuted", and the industry reshuffle is intensified

"There is a real risk that we will lose our qualification at the table. ”

What Yang Yinfen said is true.

From the perspective of the leisure snack industry, at present, online consumption traffic is shifting, competition is intensifying, and various offline snack models are in full bloom.

Almost overnight, snack stores of various brands were popping up everywhere. In February, Zhao Yiming Snacks completed a round of financing of 150 million yuan, and in May, Snacks Youming won a B round of financing. The emergence of a series of new species has put pressure on traditional snack brands such as Three Squirrels and BESTORE.

From the perspective of users' consumption habits, consumption has now entered a rational era, and users pay more attention to prices. With the acceleration of the reshuffle of the snack industry, the "low-price strategy" has become an inevitable choice for the development of enterprises.

BESTORE, known as the "No. 1 stock of high-end snacks", has begun to return to the image of its neighbors and move towards the route of good quality and affordable price.

It should be noted that the low price of BESTORE is based on the premise of "price reduction without quality reduction". In the open letter, Yang Yinfen mentioned the word "quality" several times.

"Snack collection store" has brought new changes to the snack industry, but its essence is still low price. Obviously, BESTORE has a completely different positioning and development path.

"We must unswervingly take the development route of high-quality snacks, if we don't take this road, it is a dead end!" He asked the whole group to implement a new thinking on "quality" from the perspective of users, so that every penny spent on quality can be perceived and recognized by consumers.

Adhering to user demand-oriented product innovation, in the first half of the year, BESTORE children's snack brand "Little Snack Fairy" launched a total of 25 new products, further enriching the product matrix.

In July this year, Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone opened the country's first "Snack Kingdom" store, which covers an area of 1,200 square meters, including more than 3,000 product SKUs, improving the service experience from store design, space layout, zoning functions, product display, etc., and providing consumers with an integrated living and leisure space of "shopping, shopping and resting".

This is a comprehensive implementation of BESTORE's new thinking on the function and value of offline stores. Only with a sufficient scale of channels can BESTORE better grasp the preferences and tastes of consumers and deliver high-quality products to consumers.

"The 17-year-old Liangpin is facing the most difficult challenge since its establishment. At present, this challenge is still intensifying, and in order to stand out from the encirclement, Liangpin must be like a high-flying eagle, fading from aging and regaining life. "Whether Yang Yinfen, who is at the helm of BESTORE, can use the means of price reduction to lead BESTORE through the market cycle remains to be answered.

(Source of the first picture: Courtesy of the enterprise)