#精品长文创作季#
Meiyijia has upgraded from the original "small business" to today's "big territory", and there are three secrets behind it.
Author: Lv Xinyi Editor: He Xiang
出品：零售商业财经 ID：Retail-Finance
Do you know which is the best convenience store in China?
Up to the north, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, down to the fifth and sixth tier towns, you can see its figure, 27 years of deep cultivation, the number of stores more than 35,000, it is from Dongguan local Meiyijia.
Source: Brand official
At a time when many retail companies choose to expand stores cautiously, Meiyijia has opened stores against the trend, whether it is in terms of the number of cities covered, the number of stores, or the performance growth brought about by its digital transformation, Meiyijia's development has attracted the attention of the industry.
So, as the "king of convenience stores in China", what is the key to Meiyijia's success?
The reasons behind this can be attributed to the following three points:
First, open franchise + sinking routes, second, upgrade supply chain capabilities, and third, deepen digital layout.
In 1990, Meijia Supermarket, the predecessor of Meiyijia, was established in Dongguan, Guangdong, which is also the first supermarket chain in China, and its annual turnover can reach hundreds of millions of yuan in the era of "10,000 households".
In 1997, Meiyijia, which had a new look, opened its first convenience store. In the early stage of expansion, Meiyijia deployed the supply system with a very cutting-edge strategic vision, and on the basis of the supply system of Meijia supermarket, it established a direct delivery business with Dongguan Weisheng Beverage Co., Ltd. to better meet the needs of store operation.
Source: Internet
There is an iron law for the large-scale expansion of chain brands, the early stage (100 stores) tests the store operation and standardization, the medium term (1,000 stores) spells the back-end and supply chain depth, and the later stage (10,000 stores) will change from a trade-oriented retail enterprise to a manufacturing retail enterprise, and the scale promotes the transformation of the enterprise to realize the process from quantitative change to qualitative change.
At the beginning of its establishment, Meiyijia established a community site selection route and franchise operation mode, and in 2016, Meiyijia launched a new model of "partnership and franchise" on this basis to further separate investment rights and management rights. Three years later, Meiyijia increased the pilot of the regional authorization model, which quickly copied the stores to the whole country.
In addition to a more flexible franchise model, Meiyijia's site selection route is more inclined to the sinking market. At the end of 2022, the store density of "1 Meiyijia in every 10 townships" is difficult for other convenience store brands to match.
Since then, Meiyijia has tried to add fresh food, coffee and other categories, and tried various formats such as convenience stores + pharmacies and Meiyijia snack stores to cope with the increasingly diversified consumption trend. So far, Meiyijia has upgraded from the original "small business" to today's "big territory".
Source: Internet
Of course, this is only the first step, and the reason why Meiyijia can rank first in convenience stores depends more on its emphasis on forging supply chain capabilities.
In the process of achieving national expansion, Meiyijia has gradually transformed from traditional retail to manufacturing-oriented retail, trying to build its own logistics, cold chain distribution centers, food processing plants and other supporting industries, and upgrading its supply chain from various dimensions of commodity power, warehousing capacity and fulfillment capacity.
Since then, Meiyijia has also established a profit model of "cash sale + takeaway + e-commerce + value-added services", gradually opening up a series of supply chain links such as procurement, storage, transportation, and management, and improving the profitability index of a single store while expanding on a large scale.
Source: Internet
In terms of digitalization, Meiyijia is one of the earliest convenience store brands in the industry to implement digitalization, attaching great importance to intelligence, data, and visualization, and even investing more than 100 million yuan to upgrade.
Originally, Meiyijia could only open 200 stores in a few years, but since 2002, after using Haiding information system, the management efficiency of goods and stores has been improved, and more than 100 new stores have been added every year.
In other words, Meiyijia has completed the improvement of operations and supply chain when it has more than 200 stores, and it has the configuration that can only be matched by 800 stores.
When reviewing the development and digitalization process in 2023, Zhang Guoheng, chairman of Meiyijia, said: The company's ability to achieve outstanding results in the cold winter of the industry reflects the value of Meiyijia's digital transformation in recent years. In the future, Meiyijia will make great strides towards the vision of "becoming a convenience store brand that the nation is proud of".
Source: The brand's official website
The front-end operation management, the back-end focus on the supply chain, and the digital transformation and upgrading strung together the before, middle and late stages of the development of brand convenience stores, and Meiyijia took off completely. For other local convenience store companies, Meiyijia can be called a real dimensionality reduction blow.
It took 20 years for Meiyijia to achieve the scale of 10,000 stores in the early days, and then it took only 28 months to open stores from 20,000 to 30,000, with an average of 12 new stores per day. When the overall capability matures, there are tens of thousands of stores as endorsements, and the siphon effect of Meiyijia has gradually emerged, giving it advantages in many links such as talent absorption and high-quality suppliers.
When the positive closed loop is formed, Meiyijia's next 35,000 stores will not be too far away.