After everything can be Antarctic people, it will turn to self-operation and go to the middle and high-end, and Antarctic e-commerce will be busy transforming. On April 23, a reporter from Beijing Business Daily learned that Antarctic E-commerce has released its 2023 financial report, with a decline in revenue and no substantial increase in net profit. At the same time, under the decline in performance for many years, Antarctic e-commerce has to transform, but it is not wise for Antarctic e-commerce to pin its hopes on the reshaping of the Antarctic brand.
In 2023, the performance of Antarctic e-commerce will not improve substantially. According to the financial report data, the operating income of Antarctic e-commerce this year was 2.692 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 18.66%, and the net profit was 112 million yuan.
Antarctic E-commerce admitted in the financial report: "The net profit growth is mainly due to the provision of 456 million for the impairment of the goodwill of Time Internet in the same period last year, excluding the impact, the net profit declined year-on-year." "In 2022, the loss of Antarctic e-commerce will be about 298 million yuan, which means that Antarctic e-commerce will not only lose money but also lose money in 2023.
In response to the decline in performance, Antarctic E-commerce attributed it to the decline in revenue from the brand's comprehensive service business. According to the financial report information, in 2023, the optimization of time interconnection of Antarctic e-commerce subsidiaries will shrink some uncertain business lines, and the subdivision adjustment of some media agency categories will lead to a decline in the business scale of the mobile Internet media delivery platform. On the other hand, due to the adjustment of the business structure of the Antarctic e-commerce headquarters during the reporting period, the core categories of some Antarctic brands changed from the original brand authorization and comprehensive service model to the self-operated model, which led to a certain degree of decline in the brand comprehensive service business year-on-year.
Judging from the performance in recent years, the development of Antarctic e-commerce is not optimistic. According to the financial report data, in 2022, Antarctic e-commerce revenue will decline by 14.88%, with a loss of 297.6 million yuan, revenue will decline by 6.8% in 2021, net profit will fall by 59.84%, and in 2020, net profit will decline by 1.5%.
According to Cheng Weixiong, an independent analyst in the fashion industry and founder of Shanghai Liangqi Brand Management Co., Ltd., this behavior of selling bids in all categories is itself a process of diminishing brand value. Antarctic e-commerce can be authorized for everything, and the development model of selling bids may have certain opportunities in the era of traditional e-commerce. However, with the further development of the consumer market, when this model cannot meet the needs of users in terms of experience and service, there is no future just to have brand awareness.
Antarctic e-commerce is also aware of this, in the financial report, Antarctic e-commerce said that in the new consumption environment, good goods have new standards, not only to have commodity value, but also to meet spiritual value. In the more fierce market competition, the excessive pursuit of efficiency, scale and cost performance has produced inefficient involution in the original system, which can no longer fully meet consumers' demands for good goods.
When selling tags cannot meet the current consumer demand and can no longer promote performance growth, Antarctic e-commerce began to transform. Antarctic e-commerce said in its financial report that in 2023, Antarctic e-commerce will transform and upgrade its business structure.
This year, Antarctic E-commerce took the brand as the center and split the original brand comprehensive service business into three parts, namely strategic cooperation licensing services, fashion licensing services and self-operated retail. Among them, key brands such as Antarctica and Cadilla Crocodile are classified as strategic cooperation licensing services, new brands such as Baijiahao and its brands and Bella Villa are included in the fashion licensing service, and Antarctica men's, women's and underwear categories are self-operated retail.
It is understood that the self-operated retail of Antarctic e-commerce will focus on Antarctic men's clothing, women's clothing and underwear, establish a new one-stop industrial chain cooperation model integrating source procurement, design and development, and offline sales, focus on mid-to-high-end products, and provide consumers with basic and commuting outdoor clothes with a sense of ceremony.
At present, Antarctica has launched the "Antarctic Milestone Series" new products, including sun-protective clothing and sun-protective pants, etc., with a single product priced between 150 yuan and 250 yuan - comparable to the price band of sunscreen clothing of brands such as Bananai, Banana, and Camel. Antarctic E-commerce said at the brokerage strategy meeting in February 2024 that its self-operated business is benchmarked against the standards of big-name products and adopts a centralized procurement, processing management and franchise sales model.
In order to build momentum for this brand, Antarctic E-commerce also invited Nicholas Tse to be the spokesperson of the brand, and packaged large-screen advertisements at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport and Pudong Airport, and also started social media marketing on Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Douyin and other platforms from 2024, and replaced the brand logo from the original "Nanjiren" with white on a red background to "NANJIREN" with black on a white background.
However, the industry is not optimistic about this transformation. Ma Gang, an independent retail commentator, told a reporter from Beijing Business Daily that the tag business of Antarctic e-commerce means that it is uncontrollable, including uncontrollable sales and uncontrollable brand reputation. But it is not easy for Antarctic e-commerce to be mid-to-high-end. From the perspective of the entire development history, Antarctic e-commerce lacks high-end experience and talents.
On issues related to performance and transformation, a reporter from Beijing Business Daily interviewed Antarctic e-commerce, but did not receive a reply as of press time.
In the face of the reality of "everything can be Antarctic people", how competitive can it be to turn to self-management and benchmark big-name Antarctic people's clothing?
In fact, in the early vision of Zhang Yuxiang, the founder of Antarctic e-commerce, it was to build an Antarctic universe kingdom, and through brand authorization, it was to sell tag business.
In 2008, under the leadership of Zhang Yuxiang, Antarctic changed from self-operated production and sales to the business model of "brand authorization", and directly cut the production and sales ends. In December 2010, Antarctica put forward the business model of "NGTT" community (also known as "Antarctic community"), saying that it would unite upstream suppliers and downstream distributors to create a "full-category consumer goods kingdom".
Zhang Yuxiang is lucky, in the following years, the rise of the Internet, the rapid development of e-commerce business, based on the e-commerce platform for brand authorization of Antarctic people rapid development, tags sold more and more widely, from clothing, home textiles step by step to outdoor products, toys and even food field. In 2015, Antarctic people made a price of 2.344 billion yuan to go public through Xinmin Technology, changing from Antarctic to "Antarctic e-commerce".
It is worth mentioning that Antarctic e-commerce not only buys the tags of Antarctic people to all walks of life. In 2016, Antarctic E-commerce acquired a majority stake in Cadilla Crocodile, and in December, it acquired 100% of the equity of Xinyu Co., Ltd. and completed the acquisition of "Classic Teddy" series of Chinese and graphic trademarks in classes 1-35. In February 2022, Antarctic E-commerce acquired the Korean women's clothing brand Baijiahao, and in August 2022, it acquired the clothing brand Bella Vera. And these have become the tag resources of Antarctic e-commerce.
The stock price of Antarctic e-commerce, which has no worries at all on the production side and sales side, has been rising since its listing, and it is highly sought after, and the stock price has risen to 24.24 yuan in July 2020, and the total market value once reached nearly 60 billion yuan. According to public data, from 2015 to 2021, in six years, the number of suppliers of Antarctic e-commerce increased from 422 to 1,839, more than quadrupled, and the number of dealers increased from 1,053 to 10,311, an increase of more than 9 times.
After more than ten years of development, Zhang Yuxiang's initial idea seems to have really been achieved, and Antarctic people's products are all over the field. Consumer Muzi complained to a reporter from Beijing Business Daily: "It's really strange that Antarctic people actually have snail noodles." "On major e-commerce platforms, Antarctic underwear and socks, Antarctic clothing, Antarctic cosmetics, Antarctic coffee, Antarctic masks...... Although everything can be Antarctic, it has nothing to do with the middle and high-end. Even today's Antarctic people can't even complete the basic performance support.
Cheng Weixiong said that the so-called retraction of Antarctic e-commerce to do high-end self-operation may be just wishful thinking, Antarctic people in the past years of authorization, has been shaped into a very low-end brand in consumer cognition, and now it is difficult to reshape. If you have to do the middle and high-end, Antarctic e-commerce needs to spend a huge investment to reshape, and the results of this investment may not be successful.
In addition, in addition to the low-end cognition, the quality problems faced by the Antarctic brand are still severe. It is understood that since 2018, Antarctic people have been on the "blacklist" of unqualified products of the national quality supervision department and local consumer associations many times, including silk quilts, underwear, children's clothing, jackets, etc. In addition, the newly acquired Baijiahao of Antarctic E-commerce has also recently been on the quality inspection black list of the Municipal Supervision Bureau due to unqualified products.
Beijing Business Daily reporter Zhang Junhua
Edited by Topol