In the past two years, domestic apparel brands have invariably begun to lay out outdoor product lines, and Anta, as the leading domestic sports brand, (02020. HK) began to get involved in outdoor brands very early, and in December 2018, it announced that it had eaten the Finnish sporting goods brand Amer Sport for 4.6 billion euros (about 36 billion yuan), and the market was skeptical at that time. It is also understandable, after all, it was not until 2022 that Amalfen Sports officially became profitable. At the end of 2022, Amalfen began to plan for the listing of the U.S. stock market, and in September 2023, it submitted the documents for the initial listing in the United States in a low-key manner, with a valuation of about 70 billion yuan.
In recent years, jackets have gradually moved from professional outdoor scenes to white-collar workers in major cities in the offices and streets, and have become a trendy fashion item. For example, high-end international brands such as Archaeopteryx, mountain rats, and mammoths that cost thousands of yuan, or even nearly 10,000 yuan, as well as domestic brands that focus on cost performance, basically meet the needs of the public for simple and easy outdoor scenes. At the 2023 Double 11 Shopping Festival, there was a rare "awakening" of men's spending power, which has been neglected. And one of the "passwords" is the outdoor jacket. According to Tmall's sales data, on the first day of the Double 11 promotion, the jacket entered the top three of the "male consumption list", with a sales increase of 90%.
However, as early as 15 years ago, a domestic local outdoor brand was listed on the A-share market, known as the pathfinder of "the first share of outdoor products" (300005. SZ) peak market value has also exceeded 30 billion yuan, but due to long-term performance less than expected, weak growth, resulting in a serious shrinkage of the current market value, I don't know if this domestic outdoor brand "old gun" can take advantage of this round of outdoor tide to regain momentum.
01
Misplaced quality control leads to a crisis of trust
Founded in 1999, Pathfinder has been deeply involved in the outdoor products market since its establishment. The company, which specializes in the R&D, design, operation and sales of outdoor products, has developed into a leading enterprise in the domestic outdoor products industry. The company's product lines include Pathfinder, Pathfinder children's wear, TOREAD. X three series. However, for market consumers, the market awareness of these sub-brands of Pathfinder is not high, especially Pathfinder and Pathfinder children's clothing, and there is even overlap. From the perspective of the company's product revenue, the company's main outdoor clothing revenue has shrunk from 1.021 billion in 2019 to 873 million in 2022, and even the revenue of outdoor information services in 2022 has been zero.
The downward trend of the pathfinder is mainly due to the loss of quality control.
For a long time, outdoor clothing products are different from ordinary clothing products, and their core competitiveness lies in science and technology. Since 2015, Pathfinder has been widely criticized for its product quality for eight years. In 2023, there have been as many as 126 complaints against the Pathfinder brand on the Black Cat complaint platform, reflecting problems such as poor product quality, flooding with fakes, and the refusal of shopping platforms to return goods. Product quality is inevitably the lifeline of an enterprise and brand, especially outdoor products, which have higher requirements for product quality. Because the scenario of consumers of outdoor products is to face a natural environment that is more complex and dangerous than ordinary life scenes.
This also traces back to Pathfinder's business model. The company's upstream supply chain is outsourced, and even the research and development of products will rely on manufacturers. Moreover, the Pathfinder has a longer product line and a wider product line width. The R&D and production mode of such products is almost a shortcoming that is difficult for Pathfinder to overcome. Although in the October 2023 survey, the company said that the core products are self-produced, it does not seem to have reversed the market's reputation for the products. For professional outdoor sports consumers, although the price sensitivity is low, the awareness and loyalty to the product are quite high, and once the brand has a crisis of trust, the loyalty to the product is almost irreversible.
At present, as many sports shoes and clothing manufacturers have transformed and begun to seize the outdoor products market, the outdoor track has been full of contention and wolf smoke. Moreover, foreign brands are also eyeing the domestic market, high-end birds, rats, elephants, the three major brands, niche Patagonia, Descente, etc., needless to say, the mid-end North Face, Colombian outdoor products are still strong competitors that domestic outdoor brands can not avoid.
In such a competitive situation, Pathfinder is losing quality control, which is a devastating blow.
02
Blindly pursue the development of dual main businesses
Generally speaking, the second business curve of the enterprise is to stand out in the market competition in the past and the overall performance growth has slowed down significantly, so it will come to build the second curve on the original brand to seek new growth, such as Dongpeng Special Drink, Nongfu Spring, etc., which are the beneficiaries of brand diversification. But the same routine is not suitable for pathfinders, let alone cross-border.
Pathfinder embarked on the path of finding the company's second growth curve as early as the beginning of 2021.
In September 2021, Pathfinder successfully acquired a 60% stake in Beijing Xineng Electronic Technology Co., Ltd., thus announcing a cross-border semiconductor business, involving display driver chip design, R&D and chip packaging products. This move can be described as a big surprise, since the announcement, its stock price fell sharply, and the cumulative decline in a week is more than 29%. It can be understood that the last round of stock price speculation has come to an end, but in the long run, the market is not optimistic about this crossover.
In 2023, Pathfinder will continue to lay out the chip industry, and in March, it completed the cross-border acquisition of G2 Touch chip design company for US$38,520,207 (about 273 million yuan). Founded in 2009, the chip company provides customers with a full range of touch application solutions based on independent patents, including chip design in the fields of touch laptops, smartphones and tablets. So far, Pathfinder has completed the dual main business strategy of "outdoor business + chip business".
Purely from the perspective of acquisitions, the acquisition of overseas chip companies at the beginning of 2023 is indeed a low-level bottom-take, and the chip boom was low at that time. In terms of chip business in the third quarter of 2023, G2 Touch's operating performance was better than expected, with operating income of 146 million yuan in the first three quarters, an increase of 84.03% over the same period of the previous year, and a net profit of 59.1397 million yuan.
However, from the original outdoor product business, perhaps "far water does not quench the thirst of the near".
Externally, Pathfinder has been emphasizing that cross-border chips are to empower outdoor products. In December 2021, Pathfinder launched the Beidou version of the cold-proof suit, which provides an exploration for the realization of intelligent outdoor clothing in China, and in August 2022, Pathfinder launched two satellite communication products, which can be used for outdoor adventure, off-road self-driving and other scenarios to provide communication services. Although there is a certain space for the combination of outdoor clothing and intelligence, and outdoor equipment combined with chip technology can develop a series of high-tech products, in the final analysis, it is only a niche market and has contributed little to the performance growth of outdoor products. For the apparel consumer industry, the core scenario of the current digital intelligence is supply chain management, rather than end products, after all, not all consumers can climb Mount Everest or go to the vast no-man's land.
Having said that, from the frequent reduction of holdings by the actual controller and the huge bet on the chip industry, the pathfinder may be in the next big game of chess, gradually divesting the outdoor product business, and then comprehensively transforming the chip industry.
本文作者 | 刘超然 来源 | 英才杂志