On the road of 10 billion, Fuling squeezed vegetables planted a heel

Zebra consumption Chen Xiaojing

Just shouted out the new target of 10 billion, Fuling Squeezed Vegetables has invested more than 100 million yuan in advertising for the first time. The result? Advertising expenses were invested, and operating income did not follow, resulting in a decline in performance in the first half of this year.

More importantly, the rising effect of the price of green cabbage, the main raw material of squeezed vegetables, will be reflected in the second half of this year, and whether it will have a significant impact on the company's annual performance is still unknown.

Advertising smashes out of "Wujiang"

Fuling Cai Cai can sit firmly in the position of "Vegetable Juice Boss", which is inseparable from three men: Zhou Binquan, Ye Maozhong and Zhang Tielin.

In 2000, when 37-year-old Zhou Binquan came to Fuling to squeeze vegetables and take up his post, the company was still a small, dilapidated workshop. The annual production capacity is only 10,000 tons, all of which are manual production, and the company still loses millions of dollars a year, and even the wages of employees have not been settled during the New Year.

At that time, he visited dozens of pickle pickles across the country, almost all of which were small workshops with backward production methods.

How should the company go? Do you continue to make vegetables, or do you start a new business? There have been heated arguments in management.

Some suggestions to do mobile phones, high added value; some suggestions to engage in the Internet, can attract investment... Zhou Binquan was really dragged to investigate a CDMA mobile phone project.

In the face of endless controversy at the top, Zhou Binquan only threw out one question to completely quell the controversy.

He asked the executives, "Who of you knows the Internet?" Who has worked in high technology? When all the participants were silent, Zhou Binquan made up his mind to insist on making squeezed vegetables.

First of all, the company spent a lot of money to introduce automated production lines, changed the backward production methods, and created a precedent in the industry.

Solving the problem of capacity and products, branding and sales are still a mess. Fuling Squeezed Vegetables once spent money to smash advertisements, which backfired. The market remembers Fuling's squeezed vegetables, but selectively forgets the brand "Wujiang". As a result, a large number of local miscellaneous brands of squeezed vegetables in Fuling have emerged, and low-price competition has disrupted the market.

It was Zhou Bin who made a decision again, and Sangu Maolu personally invited the planning master Ye Maozhong to come out of the mountain, and signed the "emperor professional household" Zhang Tielin to become the image spokesperson, with the sentence "Wujiang squeezed vegetables, my grandfather's grandfather said good." Although this advertising slogan caused great controversy, it made the market completely remember the "Wujiang" brand.

Since then, Wujiang Juice has firmly ranked first in the vegetable industry and entered the fast lane of development.

He was in charge of Fuling Cai Cai (002507. SZ) ten years later, Zhou Binquan sent the company to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

Planted a heel

It is driven by Fuling cai, which has become the subdivision category with the highest degree of industrialization, standardization and brand concentration in the pickled vegetable industry.

Under the support of brand awareness, Fuling squeezed vegetables from the region to the national market, and the income level has risen. Since then, Fuling Cai has gradually reduced its advertising investment, and even zero advertising costs in some years, and will use the expenses for other marketing promotion means.

Up to now, Fuling Cai has established a dense sales network through more than 2,000 first-class distributors across the country, and achieved full coverage of 34 provincial-level administrative regions across the country.

From 2008 to 2019, the concentration of the packaged squeezed vegetable market continued to increase, CR5 increased from 46.15% to 72.2%, and in the same period, the market share of Fuling squeezed vegetables rose from 21.28% to 36.41%, more than twice as much as the second place.

Although, since its listing, the revenue scale of Fuling Juice has shown a steady growth trend, in addition to the growth of sales, the increase in product prices has contributed to it.

According to media statistics, since 2008, Fuling squeezed vegetables have raised prices at least 12 times, explicitly or implicitly, and the final result is that the amount of squeezed vegetables per bag is getting smaller and smaller, and the price is getting higher and higher. A small bag of squeezed vegetables has gone from 5 cents to about 3 yuan today, and there is not much room for continuous price increases.

A long time ago, in addition to the super single product of squeezed vegetables, Fuling squeezed vegetables laid out radish, kelp and other categories, and also focused on creating squeezed vegetable soy sauce around the main business.

Just because you can make the juice bigger doesn't mean that you can make other categories bigger enough.

Squeezed vegetable soy sauce has been done for many years, and the operating income has always hovered around 2 million yuan. As another major product of the company, radish finally broke through 100 million yuan in 2018, and it stopped moving forward, and even fell below 100 million yuan in 2020.

In 2015, the company acquired Huitong Foods for 130 million yuan and cut into the kimchi business, believing that it was a larger market than squeezed vegetables. However, after the revenue of the product exceeded the scale of 100 million yuan, it is difficult to have a major increase.

In 2018, the company intends to issue shares to raise funds to acquire Sichuan Stellar and Sichuan Flavor, and to advance into the Douban sauce industry. Later, because the target enterprise could not reach an agreement with all the shareholders of its affiliated units in the way to resolve the competition in the same industry, the acquisition was terminated after the merger and acquisition, which was unable to solve the problem of competition in the same industry.

This year, Fuling Cai Cai opened a new strategy and put forward a new goal of moving towards 10 billion. The company once again opened a three-dimensional advertising investment. In the first half of this year alone, the company invested 167 million yuan in brand promotion expenses, setting a record for its own history.

However, the high investment in advertising expenses only brought 12.46% revenue growth in the first half of the year, resulting in a 6.97% decline in net profit attributable to the mother in the reporting period. Especially in the second quarter, the company's revenue and net profit both declined, which is rare in the history of Fuling squeezed vegetables.

The agency fled

The basis for Fuling cai cai shouting out the goal of 10 billion yuan is the reserve of the company's production capacity.

This year, the company completed a fixed increase of 3.3 billion yuan, and the funds raised will be invested in the green intelligent production base and intelligent information system project of Wujiang Fuling juice. The company will build 407,000 tons of raw material cellars, raw material processing workshops and equipment, and 200,000 tons of vegetable production workshops and equipment. After the completion of the project, the company's production capacity will be doubled compared to now.

Fuling squeezed vegetables are known as "squeezed vegetable grass", which was once strongly sought after by the capital market. At the end of June and december 2020, more than 300 institutions held shares in the company.

It is under the support of the institution that the company's stock price has risen, and on September 3 last year, it once touched a record high of 56.24 yuan. In the following six months, after a swing adjustment, on February 19 this year, it climbed to a stage high of 54.2 yuan.

However, the company's stock price then continued to decline, and by the close of yesterday (August 10), it was only 29.63 yuan.

In May this year, 20 institutions that subscribed for the company's non-public shares at 33.58 yuan per share have lost more than 10%. By the end of June this year, there were only 30 institutional shareholders left.