Gao Yonghua "Operation Scene": From the president of Lulu Group In China in India to talk about the transformation of the Yiwu market

Because everyone wants to succeed, they must consider both consumers and payers and the habits of users, so they constantly visit various people. I had the privilege of meeting with the President of Lulu Group China in India. After our person in charge briefly introduced our business, the other party directly said his views, which sounded direct and sharp, but these views sounded completely valid and correct to me.

He said that a project like this has been introduced to him by many people, and he said, according to my understanding, because I am a customer, what I want is always a manufacturing plant, not a merchant in the Yiwu market, they do not have this ability.

From a procurement perspective, Indians and Middle Easterners, whose psychology is almost similar, want to be cheap and want good quality. And this point, the factory can meet. To sum up, it is that for a platform like ours, they prefer to have a factory on it.

This point coincides with my previous view. The essential competitiveness of regions and countries is production and manufacturing capacity. Therefore, the transformation of the Yiwu market, without the support of mature manufacturing enterprises, all its transformation is in the treatment of symptoms and not the root cause, such as buying the world and selling the world, or positioning itself as a trade port, there will be no great development. The recent events in Hong Kong have shown that although it is a world-renowned trading port, in the case of global economic transformation, Hong Kong is the first to be affected and the first to feel, which has a lot to do with its trade, that is, people are floating in the air and not grounded. If the development of Yiwu is based on the original market (it can also be regarded as a platform, then it is a platform for success and failure), and it has not kept pace with the times.

At the same time, I would also like to introduce the Lulu Group here.

In 1995, Lulu Group opened its first supermarket in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Later, more Lulu supermarket stores began to be established. In the late 1990s, the company established Lulu Center Department Store and expanded its business to other Countries in the Middle East.

In 2000, the first Lulu supermarket opened in Dubai. After that, the company began to expand wildly. Its business covers: UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and Yemen.

In 2017, Forbes released a list of the "Arab World 100 Indian Business Owners", and the number one in the list was entrepreneur Yusuff Ali, whose Lulu supermarket chain is the largest retail group in the entire Middle East. Research firm Deloitte ranked it as one of the world's 50 fastest-growing retailers. Up to now, Lulu Group of India has 174 supermarket chains around the world.

Lulu Group does not have a large supermarket in China, and its biggest radiation force is in the Middle East. If there is business in China, it is also the procurement center set up in Chinese mainland.

It is difficult to search for valid information on the Internet for specific business models, but it is said that its shopping mall is similar to that of Wanda in China, it is not a simple supermarket, but more like a shopping mall. However, its operating model is different from Wanda, Wanda is a real estate investment model, and Lulu Group is a real estate direct chain model, occasionally merchants settle in, and the procurement right of goods is also required to be uniformly purchased by the headquarters. The complete circulation of goods is a very large retailer, but the real money is in the procurement right.

As I was sorting out this text, one word that came to my mind was "common sense." Many times, I express common sense, and there are not many skills in it. This common sense comes from "professional" rather than amateur. In all my common sense, I have always believed that in the field of strong professionalism, professional players have always been stronger than amateur players.

For those trade promotion platform companies, I would like to analyze why the merchants in the Yiwu market are not optimal? I want to think in reverse.

In the Yiwu market, there are two companies that are more well-known, one is Alibaba, and the other is the "Yicaibao (former Yiwu Purchase)" supported by the local government. Whether it is Alibaba or Yicaibao, although users are using it, their own reputation is not as efficient as its popularity.

One of the biggest problems here is the habit of use. On Alibaba or Yicaibao, the really fresh things do not appear on this, so where is it presented? Under the counter of the market merchants, they are often the best and freshest things are not placed in a conspicuous place, and the people who can see these are basically familiar customers.

In other words, the things that appear on these two platforms can only be called basic data, not the freshest data, which indirectly leads to the limited "traffic" that the platform can give to merchants, which in turn leads to the slipping of the expectations of merchants, in fact, the real problem is caused by the merchants themselves, but they do not think so, they will think that the platform is not caused. This is due to human nature, and among all ordinary people, we tend to blame others for the cause of the problem, rather than reflecting on ourselves.