Gome enters the instant retail
Gome's self-help methods, one after another.
Recently, GOME held the "2024 Instant Departure" press conference in Hangzhou, officially releasing the "GOME Instant Warehouse" and "GOME Convenience Store", announcing its entry into the instant retail track.
GOME Instant Retail Launch
At the meeting, Gome, Yicai Business School and Pistachio Digital Intelligence jointly released the "Instant Retail Four-wheel Drive Chain Model", and signed cooperation agreements with Meituan Morning Glory, Good Thoughts, Jiangtian Agriculture, Cui Lele, Mayor of Kuanzhou Town, Qingjian County, Yicai Business School and many other intending franchisees.
Gome's layout of instant retail actually started half a year ago. Tianyancha shows that in September 2023, Gome Neighborhood (Zhejiang) Technology Co., Ltd. will be established to carry out business with the instant retail ecological chain as the main direction.
Source: Tianyancha APP
At the press conference, it was revealed that on the one hand, Gome will increase its efforts to transform traditional pure offline physical stores to empower more physical small businesses, and on the other hand, Gome also plans to closely integrate instant retail with rural revitalization and land in the county economy.
Regarding the current progress of Gome's instant retail, Luo Jing, CEO of Gome Neighborhood, said: "We have completed the link closed loop of the upstream and downstream of the overall business, completed the first phase of supply chain services and middle office operation services to ensure the operation of our physical store operators, and completed the integration of our own systems and service-oriented platforms in stages, and we will open up more traffic platforms through API interfaces in the future to complete iterations." ”
Just a month ago, Gome released its 2023 financial report. According to the financial report, the group's sales revenue last year was 647 million yuan, a decrease of 96.29% compared with 2022, and the loss attributable to owners of the parent company was 10.057 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 49.60%.
The significant decrease in revenue was due to the suspension of supplies from major suppliers and the closure of a large number of Gome Appliance stores. The decrease in losses was due to project cancellations, large layoffs, and a sharp reduction in marketing and administrative expenses. As of the end of 2023, Gome is still burdened with current liabilities of 38.3 billion yuan, and the current total market value of Gome is less than 1 billion Hong Kong dollars, which can be described as shaky.
Therefore, the layout of just-in-time retail is quite crucial, if it succeeds, it will be a self-help that will go down in the history of the industry, and if it fails, it will be just a useless death struggle.
Gome's road to self-help
In February 2021, Huang Guangyu issued a public internal speech, "Strive to use the next 18 months to restore the company's original market position." ”
However, now 38 months have passed, and Gome is still in turmoil and has not shown signs of improvement.
Looking back on Gome's self-help path, it can be seen that its "desire to survive" is very strong, and almost all the methods it can think of have been used.
In January 2021, the GOME App was officially renamed as the "True Happiness" APP, and Wang Wei, Vice President of GOME Retail Holdings, emphasized that the "True Happiness" APP is a new retail species that is entertaining and social. Since then, Gome has invested a lot of resources in the True Happy APP, spending 962 million yuan in advertising expenses a year, trying to catch up with the last train in the era of live broadcast e-commerce.
For example, in 2021, the True Happiness APP will launch live broadcast columns such as "Live ZAO Moving Station", and launch the "National Happy Season" promotion live broadcast on Double 11, as well as the "99 Member" welfare mechanism, through ultra-low discounts on goods, exclusive manual customer service, 36 freight subsidy coupons throughout the year, 0 yuan privileges and other benefits to attract more consumers.
In 2022, GOME True Happiness APP will launch the "Channel F" channel, broadcasting 400 minutes of original programs every day, and continuing to increase the content. On November 24, Gome Electric announced that it would focus on live streaming to build a nationwide store live broadcast network, and began to implement a private domain distribution system "National Promoter" to encourage Gome employees and all kinds of social personnel to use their own private domain channels to share platform products and earn commissions.
From December 9th to 12th of the same year, Gome and well-known home appliance manufacturers such as Haier and Midea created four live broadcast activities to connect with the local life center of Douyin; on December 30, Huang Xiuhong, chairman of Gome, even went down in person to partner with Liu Jianhong, a former CCTV host and well-known football commentator, to bring goods live.
Source: GOME APP
However, after a busy time, the Really Happy APP still hasn't been done. According to Analysys Qianfan data, the monthly active data of the "True Happiness" App has been less than one million since February 2022. In January 2023, the True Happy APP was renamed "Gome APP", and everything seems to be back to square one.
However, these setbacks did not make Huang Guangyu admit defeat, and after entering 2023, Gome's self-help actions will become more frequent.
The first is to continue to focus on content. Since April 2023, Gome has expanded its live broadcast position from the Gome APP to Douyin and Kuaishou, and held the "818 First Gome Electrical Appliances Live Festival". But judging from the data, the sales of this live broadcast are only more than 3 million, which is comparable to the anchor with goods in the waist, and the audience in its Doukuai live broadcast room is also very few, and the average number of fans of multiple accounts is not more than 10,000.
Source: Gome Electrical Appliances official account
Then there is the sale of assets. In 2023, Gome Retail sold a number of properties to save itself, and its China Beauty Holding Group Co., Ltd. transferred 100% of the equity of Sanya Gome Tourism Co., Ltd. to Zhongrong International Trust Co., Ltd., and the company's Sanya "Gome Haitang Bay" is Gome's first project to enter the tourism real estate. Zhongrong Trust is a subsidiary of Zhongzhi Group, which also took over Gome's Changsha Xiangjiang Jiuhao project.
Then there is unmanned retail. In October 2023, Huang Guangyu personally led the construction of the unmanned retail project team, and made a clear positioning of the business, that is, to supplement the shopping needs between e-commerce and community supermarkets, and create a convenient retail ecology with a response time of no more than 5 minutes. April 8 of this year. The signing meeting of Gome's unmanned retail ecological business suppliers was officially held at the headquarters of Gome Pengrun Building.
From physical commerce to live streaming, from unmanned retail to instant retail, Gome can be said to have tried the possibilities of the retail industry, but it seems that it has not found the right answer after all.
Instant retail is a piece of "sweet and sweet"
Having said that, it is not surprising that Gome chose instant retail as a life-saving straw, because instant retail is one of the hottest tracks in the current industry, and all major giants are vying for layout.
For example, Meituan has been making continuous moves in the field of instant retail, focusing on both self-operated and platform models. In December last year, Meituan's Meituan Maicai was upgraded to Little Elephant Supermarket, trying to further build local warehousing and logistics to deliver the goods needed by users to their homes instantly. Almost at the same time, Meituan Flash Sale also announced that it plans to give birth to 30,000 stores with daily sales of more than 10,000 yuan and 100 billion-level brands by 2026.
In terms of delivery speed, major platforms are also scrambling. For example, after Apple's new product launch last year, Hema announced that it would simultaneously start selling the iPhone 15 series, and consumers can place orders directly on the Hema App, and users of the "Box Room" can get the spot in 18 minutes at the earliest. During the Double 11 period, JD Instant Retail also rolled up the timeliness, and it only took 9 minutes for the fastest order to be delivered in the country.
The fierce competition among the giants is because instant retail is one of the few incremental markets at the moment. According to the "2023 White Paper on Instant Retail Development Trends" released by the China International Electronic Commerce Center, the scale of the mainland instant retail market will exceed 590 billion yuan in 2022, equivalent to 1.4% of the total retail sales of consumer goods, and it is expected that by 2030, the scale of the instant retail market will increase to 3.6 trillion yuan, equivalent to 6% of the total retail sales of consumer goods in the same period.
Indeed, in a social environment full of "uncertainty", consumers are demanding more and more "certainty". The high certainty of instant retail "buy and enjoy" conforms to the needs of consumers and is becoming a new blue ocean in the online and offline markets.
It's just that Gome, which has already fallen behind, will it still have time to get a piece of the pie in this emerging market? There is not much time left for Huang Guangyu.
Author | The wind is clear