Hema is recovering the "Hema it once was"
April 24th
Hema officially restarted the opening of X Gold and X Diamond members
Renew the service
At the same time, the rights and interests of the original members will be upgraded and adjusted
Shipping rules are also adjusted:
The free shipping threshold will be adjusted to 49 yuan, and the insufficient will be charged at 6 yuan per order
The resumption of the Hema paid membership system has announced a vigorous discount reform that has lasted for half a year, and is turning around at a rapid pace
"X members are one of the most important customer groups"
Hema is a pioneer of paid membership supermarkets in China.
After the domestic explosion of membership-based warehouse supermarkets such as Costco and Sam's, Hema launched a paid membership service in 2019, with an annual fee of 218 yuan that is not only slightly lower than the annual membership fee of similar competing products, but also supports the shopping of Hema X member stores, and can also enjoy the exclusive membership discounts of Hema fresh stores.
No threshold, free shipping, free vegetables, discounts, members-only prices...... Relying on rich membership benefits and cost performance, the Hema X membership system has attracted nearly 3 million paid members in just three years, accounting for 5% of the registered members, and the annual membership fee is a single revenue of more than 500 million yuan.
"The success of the Hema paid membership business is almost inevitable. Sam's has done a good job of educating consumers on their willingness to pay in the early stage, and the positioning of paid members and Hema mid-to-high-end boutique supermarkets matches each other, and the most important thing is that the exclusive services of Hema X members cover member stores and fresh stores, and the audience penetration is higher. A person close to the Hema business told reporters that Sam's and Costco's customers are mainly in first-tier cities, while Hema fresh stores are deeply involved in many second- and third-tier markets, with more than 340 stores across the country, which has a certain first-mover advantage.
Hema Resume X Member Announcement
At the same time, the membership system can achieve the purpose of stimulating consumption through preferential rights and interests, and has the functions of locking users without losing them, improving the repurchase rate, cultivating user consumption habits, and increasing sustainability.
Hema officials also recognize this statement, "X members are one of the most important user groups of Freshippo". According to the data disclosed by Hema to reporters, the monthly purchase frequency of X members is 2.5 times that of ordinary members, and the unit price of customers is 2.8 times that of ordinary members, which has strong consumption stickiness and spending power.
Perhaps because it has always been optimistic about the prospects of paid membership, Hema will upgrade the X membership system in 2023: the new X diamond member, with an annual fee of 658 yuan, and the original X member will become an X gold member, and the annual fee will rise to 258 yuan.
The price will be "down or centered"
As the saying goes, there is no such thing as a hundred days of redness. Since the second half of last year, Hema has relied on the "durian mille-feuille cake" to have a hard-hitting price war with Sam's, which has kicked off the discount reform and put the paid membership system into the "cold palace".
"Discounting is a battle of life and death for Freshippo, and if you can't win, there will be no future. After Hou Yi, the founder and CEO of Hema at the time, announced the discount reform, Hema immediately reduced the number of more than 8,000 product categories in the store to 5,000, and the prices of dairy products, convenient fast food, cleaning and care, frozen meat, poultry and aquatic products and other categories were also reduced by 20%.
Subsequently, Hema launched the "offline exclusive price", which cannot be used in conjunction with the X member discount, and the "offline exclusive price" of individual products is cheaper than the X member price, which has caused a large number of members to be dissatisfied, among which the negative evaluation involves many aspects such as "fewer types of goods", "poor quality control of own products", "low service quality" and so on.
The "discount reform" may have allowed Hema to gain new price-sensitive customers, but it has also hurt more loyal old users. Especially since December last year, Hema said that due to business adjustments, it does not support the opening or renewal of Hema X members, which has also caused many old users to be puzzled. Hema insiders explained that after the "offline exclusive price" is fully rolled out, all users can buy low-priced products and no longer need to buy additional paid memberships.
But this explanation was not understood by the members. A Hema X diamond member user expressed his disappointment to reporters: "The cheapness is not as good as Taobao Pinduoduo, the quality is not as good as Sam's Costco, and the preferential policies are also changing day by day, and Hema is not as good as before." ”
Perhaps Hema also noticed the rising negative reviews, and announced the return of the X membership system a month after Hou Yi retired and the CFO filled in. For this reason, industry insiders generally speculate that the revenue effect of Hema has not met expectations during the period of time when the membership system was cancelled in the pilot, and the resumption of X membership is also a timely stop loss.
Now, Hema has canceled the "offline exclusive price" while resuming X membership, but it has not completely abandoned the low-price strategy. Hema made it clear to reporters that the "offline exclusive price" is one of the products of Hema in the process of supply chain optimization, and the ultimate goal is to achieve "good goods are not expensive". The three cities of Beijing, Nanjing and Changsha have taken the lead in canceling the "offline exclusive price" and piloting the same price online and offline. From April 24, Hema will achieve the same price online and offline nationwide, and the price of goods will be "down or in the middle".
Announcement of the resumption of X membership by Freshippo
New retail is in a deep profit dilemma
Freshippo's "repeated horizontal jumps" in the X membership system also reflect the profitability dilemma of new retail in the current economic environment.
"Tossing" is the general perception of the Hema business by the outside world, which is closely related to the founder Hou Yi's character of being willing to explore. In the past 9 years since its birth, Hema has tried 12 business formats, in addition to the three major formats of Hema Fresh, Hema X Membership Store, and Hema NB (Hema Outlet), Hema mini, Hema Station, Hema Premium, and other formats have not caused much "splash".
As the precursor of new retail, Alibaba frequently "crosses the river by feeling the stones" requires a lot of capital and manpower. In October 2016, Ma Yun mentioned at the Yunqi Conference that new retail is the top priority, and Daniel Zhang also proposed, "Go offline and create another Alibaba." Hema is a key chess piece of Alibaba's new retail.
In the early days of its development, Hema was backed by Alibaba, which has deep pockets and encourages innovation, and still has sufficient capital for trial and error. But now, after Alibaba's organizational reform, Hema has tried to get out of its infancy and independent financing, and coupled with the objective factors of sluggish domestic e-commerce growth and economic cycle transformation, Hema has to adjust its strategy.
The financial data can be seen: in the fourth quarter of 2022, Hema Fresh announced that it was fully profitable. Alibaba's fiscal year 2023 shows that more than 90% of its self-operated Hema stores that have been in operation for more than a year during the same period have achieved positive cash flow. However, in Alibaba's financial report for the third quarter of 2024, the performance of Hema is no longer listed separately but attributed to "other segment revenue", which decreased by 7% year-on-year.
The 2023 financial report of Dingdong Food, another member of new retail, also shows that although it achieved annual profit for the first time, the overall revenue for the whole year fell by 17.55% year-on-year, and the growth rate is also declining. The industry believes that the profitability of Dingdong grocery mainly comes from the cost reduction caused by the market contraction.
It can be seen that the road forward of new retail is still tortuous.
Wang Peng, an associate researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, said that the domestic retail market is undergoing profound changes and innovations, with various new formats and models emerging, such as unmanned convenience stores, smart vending machines, and social e-commerce. He also admitted that the increasingly fierce market competition has also led to increased pressure on the profitability of new retail, and the high cost of physical stores and the difficulty of obtaining online traffic have also restricted the development of new retail.
In response to the predicament of Freshippo, Wang Peng believes that new retail requires enterprises to invest a lot of energy and resources, and it takes a certain amount of time to achieve results, "Hema needs to maintain strategic focus, adhere to long-term investment and innovative development, in order to achieve sustainable development and profitability improvement."
"We believe that there is no most suitable business model, only the service provider that best adapts to the changes of the times and best meets the needs of consumers. "Now, after half a year of detours, Hema is trying to turn around and find its former self, and even more importantly, to find the future of new retail.
Source: Oriental Net, News Square, etc
Editor丨Wang Qiutong