Overall, there are far more convenience stores in southern China than in northern cities, but why Dongguan?
Author i Zhou Jiali
Coverage i Investment community pedaily
You may not know that the largest convenience store in China comes from Dongguan.
Meiyijia, a convenience store that originated in Dongguan, is blossoming all over the country, with 24,000 stores so far, and is the largest convenience store brand in China except for the petroleum department. The person who single-handedly built this convenience store is Ye Zhijian, who is now 70 years old. As the soul of Meiyijia, he successfully played his own piece of the country under the siege of foreign retail giants, and is a veritable "convenience store king".
Behind Ye Zhijian and Mei Yijia, Dongguan convenience stores are full of heroes, and they each occupy the door school, so that the city has set the record of the first convenience store density in the country and created the "convenience store capital". Nowadays, in the whole country, in addition to Mei Jiayi, Tianfu and Shanghao convenience stores that came out of Dongguan are on the list. What is little known is that the heads of these two convenience stores were once Ye Zhijian's subordinates. They once said: "All convenience store companies in Dongguan basically have the pedigree of Meiyijia. ”
Convenience stores, which often reflect the efficiency of a city's operations, are also the warmest corners of a busy city. At this stage, domestic convenience stores show a situation of division of princes - there are more regional leaders, such as Fujian Jianfu, Shanxi Golden Tiger, Zhejiang Shizu and so on. Overall, there are far more convenience stores in southern China than in northern cities, and even Beijing is known as a desert of convenience stores. This jianghu is still turbulent - even Lei Jun has entered the game, and the Xiaomi ecological chain has opened a lazy convenience store.
70-year-old convenience store king
With 24,000 stores, it is a hidden champion
Ye Zhijian is the soul of The Jianghu of Chinese convenience stores.
Ye Zhijian, picture from: Meiyijia official website
In 1951, Ye Zhijian was born in an ordinary family in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, and because of his poor family, he dropped out of junior high school to go out to do business. With the unique sense of smell of Dongguan people, Ye Zhijian is keenly aware that China's candy, tobacco and alcohol have a lot of room for development, and it is in the era of planned economy, so he quietly started the candy business. Later, with the tide of reform and opening up rushing in, Ye Zhijian seized this huge historical opportunity and finally moved the tobacco, alcohol and candy business to the front of the curtain.
For a long time thereafter, Ye Zhijian also served as the deputy director of the Dongguan Municipal Bureau of Commerce, during which time he introduced international consumer goods giants such as Nestlé to Dongguan. In 1990, the 39-year-old Ye Zhijian was transferred to Dongguan Sugar and Wine Company as general manager, thus starting his own retail giant road. One day in August of this year, Ye Zhijian was always thinking about one thing in his heart: why not try to introduce the popular supermarket chain model from abroad to China? When all was said and done, he immediately led the team to Humen Town, Dongguan to open a small supermarket - Meijia Supermarket.
At that time, convenience store-style retail formats were rare in the Chinese market. It can be said that the bright and spacious shopping environment of Meijia Supermarket and the open shopping method of self-selection have opened up a new understanding of shopping in Dongguan. Once opened, the business was very hot, and in the second year, 8 new supermarkets were opened in a row. By 1996, the total number of Meijia supermarket stores in Dongguan reached nearly 50, covering most of the townships and towns in Dongguan.
The business situation was very good, but Ye Zhijian began to worry. This year, the international retail giant Wal-Mart completed its entry into China's first stop - Shenzhen, and further extended its tentacles to Dongguan, followed by carrefour and other foreign-funded retail companies have also settled in Dongguan, coupled with dazzling promotional offers, setting off a wave of large shopping supermarket trends, invisibly impacting Mega Supermarket.
In the face of such a situation, Ye Zhijian repeatedly thought: whether to make it bigger or smaller. Based on the practical problems of capital, technology and talent team at that time, and combined with the convenience store business opportunities found in the process of operation and continuous expansion of Meijia Supermarket, he finally decided to misplace the competition and take a differentiated path - to make the store small and transform the franchise as the main model of the 24-hour convenience store.
In 1997, the first Meiyijia convenience store was officially opened next to the Wancheng Garden New Village Farmers' Market, with reference to the international advanced chain operation model, Meiyijia adopted unified procurement, unified image and unified management. In a city with a large floating population like Dongguan, unlike the cumbersome procedures of large supermarkets, this new model of 24-hour operation is unexpectedly popular with local consumers.
Subsequently, Meiyijia took the step of expansion and quickly wrapped up the entire Pearl River Delta region - in November 2003, Guangzhou opened its first store; in August 2004, Shenzhen opened its first store... By 2007, MeiYijia opened its 1,000th store in Houjie, Dongguan. It can be said that in Guangdong, there is a Meiyijia on every other street.
Until April 2014, Meiyijia was no longer limited to its development in Guangdong Province, and began to enter other provinces, and opened its first branch outside the province in Xiamen in April of the same year. In the following two years, Meiyijia has continuously invaded Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and other provinces, with a total number of stores exceeding 10,000, becoming the largest dark horse in China's convenience store industry.
Today, Meiyijia is already the largest chain convenience store brand with the largest number of stores in the Chinese mainland market, in addition to the petroleum department. According to the data on the official website of Meiyijia, as of July this year, Meiyijia has entered 24,000 stores in 20 provinces and cities across the country. According to the "2021 China Convenience Store Top 100 List" released by the China Chain Store & Franchise Association in April this year, there were 3 companies with more than 20,000 stores, and at that time, Meiyijia had become the first non-oil convenience store with the number of stores of 22394 second only to Sinopec's EasyJet (27,600).
Dominating the retail landscape of the Pearl River Delta and single-handedly building the king of China's convenience stores, Ye Zhijian won the ccfa China Chain Industry Lifetime Achievement Award, the highest award in China's retail industry, in 2016. Now 70-year-old Ye Zhijian has rarely appeared, looking back at the ups and downs experienced along the way, he once sighed, "Meiyijia's development road is actually not without temptation, but also missed a lot of opportunities, but in the past 20 years, because of calming down, in order to achieve today's scale, the key is to focus on the industry and stick to yourself." ”
Why Dongguan?
With a population of 10 million, a convenience store giant was born
Dongguan, not only the birth of Meiyijia. Ye Zhijian, known as the "godfather" of Dongguan convenience stores, has also walked out of several fierce people.
In the 1990s, Ouyang Huajin, who graduated from the department of Chinese at Jinan University, entered the Dongguan Sugar and Wine Group where Ye Zhijian worked. It is rumored that he was The Secretary of Ye Zhijian and also participated in the establishment of the "Meiyijia" chain brand by chance. In 2003, in the wave of state-owned enterprise reform, Ouyang Huajin gave up the executive position that everyone envied, and carried 500,000 yuan of start-up capital to start a business.
In July 2004, Ouyang Huajin and a group of young people jointly founded Tianfu Convenience Store, in order to differentiate between Japanese convenience stores and local convenience store brands that have made a world of success, Ouyang Huajin planned Tianfu as a chain brand that meets the daily needs of consumers and is higher than the operating standards of husband and wife stores. "It is impossible to open a chain enterprise for 500,000, what we can do is to integrate upstream and downstream resources and make up for the shortage of entrepreneurial funds through the form of franchise." Ouyang Huajin once said.
At the beginning of the business, Ouyang Huajin and his partner came out early and returned to the outlets early and late, in order to gain the trust of suppliers, no matter how every time they took the goods, they paid in cash. At the same time, in order to reduce operating costs, he also built his own logistics company, unified delivery for franchise stores, and created profit space by reducing intermediate links.
This also accelerated the pace of operation and expansion of Tianfu convenience stores. According to the data, in the first year of the establishment of Tianfu Convenience Store, there were 100 franchise stores in Dongguan City alone, and then walked out of Dongguan and successively ran a race in Guangdong Province, Hunan, Jiangxi and other regions, and now has more than 6,000 stores, ranking fourth in the country on the "Top 100 Convenience Stores in China". If you put aside the oil-based convenience store, Tianfu is the second largest convenience store in China after Meiyijia.
Also from the "Whampoa Military Academy" in the convenience store industry, the head of the good convenience store, Zhou Xingke, was also a subordinate of Ye Zhijian. In 1994, Zhou Xingke, a Hubei Xuan'en, decided to go south to Guangdong to work, and at the beginning he went to Dongguan to set up a stall as a porter, which was very difficult. By chance, he was hired to work as a buyer at Mega Supermarket, and until 1998, he had been working at Meiyijia convenience store for more than a year, and was the first generation of Meiyijia's store owner.
During this period, he realized the future of the retail industry of convenience stores, and Dongguan has unique conditions for opening convenience stores, so he founded another way to create "Shanghao Convenience Store", and opened nearly 10 stores in Houjie and Nancheng in Dongguan in only two years. With the "direct operation + transformation + hosting + regional agent" mode of operation, Shanghao convenience store has grown rapidly, and currently has more than 2,000 chain stores in the country, which is the third largest convenience store in Dongguan, and has also been listed in the "Top Ten in China's Convenience Store Industry".
It has given birth to a number of Chinese convenience store celebrities, and Dongguan has been named the "convenience store capital". Someone once joked that in Dongguan, a wrestler may fall in front of a convenience store. According to the data, the density of convenience stores in Dongguan reached 1242 people/store, ranking first in the country, which is 7 times that of Beijing. At the same time, 61.38% of the convenience stores in Dongguan are 24-hour convenience stores – that is, one in every two convenience stores in Dongguan is open all day.
What is the charm of this city? As one of the prefecture-level cities in Guangdong Province, Dongguan is the first of the "Four Little Tigers of Guangdong" and has its own unique historical and social factors. The rapid urbanization construction and the unique pattern of municipal management and town have made the industrial output value of Dongguan towns not inferior to that of the central city, and was once known as the "world factory". In the past 30 years, tens of millions of young boys and girls from other provinces across the country have come to Dongguan and entered the factory assembly line.
Behind the rise of urban convenience stores, it is inseparable from the main consumer army after 8090. According to a data, in the top 10 cities of the 100 cities youth index, Dongguan ranks first with 77.31% of the youth inflow. This means that a large group of young people with consumer demand and the ability to work are speeding up the influx into Dongguan, accounting for more than half of the entire Pearl River Delta's foreign population.
Of course, it is undeniable that due to the low threshold, convenience stores are also the projects chosen by many Dongguan entrepreneurs, and a wave of foreign populations also hope to join convenience stores to start a business to achieve the "boss dream". Various factors have made Dongguan a "city of entrepreneurship" for convenience stores.
Why is the north a desert of convenience stores
The largest traffic entrance of the line, Lei Jun also came
Looking at the whole country, local convenience store brands have blossomed everywhere, showing a situation of separation among the princes: Xiamen Jianfu, Taiyuan Tangjiu, Shanxi Golden Tiger, Hunan Xinjiayi, Zhejiang Shizu, Hebei 365... Beijing, however, has become a desert city of convenience stores. Overall, there are far more convenience stores in southern China than in northern cities.
According to the "China Urban Convenience Store Development Index" data released by the China Chain Store and Franchise Association in 2020, the saturation of convenience stores in Beijing is 8889 people per store, ranking outside the twenty. This also means that it takes a little time to find a chain convenience store in the vast city of Beijing.
Perhaps many people still remember the great retreat of convenience store brands in Beijing two years ago. In 2018, the shareholders of the neighbor convenience store broke the capital chain and closed all 168 stores overnight; in September of the same year, the 131 convenience store was dismissed due to capital turnover problems, and the founder lost contact; then, after the full-time convenience store closed more than 90 stores before and after, it also ushered in the closure and splitting in February 2019... These convenience store brands, which have closed their stores, have been open for only a few years, and after a brief boom, they have come to an end, and the convenience store industry in Beijing has entered the winter.
Why is it so hard for a convenience store brand in Beijing? Many years ago, some insiders analyzed the climate of Beijing: compared with most cities, Beijing has a long winter and a sandstorm in the spring, affecting travel; more closed, semi-enclosed communities, wide streets similar to Chang'an Avenue are also more, and the radiation range is limited, which objectively restricts the development of convenience stores.
At the same time, there are few convenience stores in Beijing and many deep mansion compounds in Beijing, and the lack of street culture; and the lack of commercial streets and shops near the subway are also considered to be factors restricting the opening of convenience stores in Beijing. At the same time, compared with many southern cities, foreign convenience stores entered Beijing relatively late, the consumption awareness of convenience stores is relatively weak, and it takes time for local brands to catch up.
Still, Beijing has never given up on convenience stores. As early as the 12th and 13th Five-Year Plans, Beijing has repeatedly emphasized the need to attach importance to the development of convenience store formats. In order to solve the shortage of convenience stores, Beijing has relaxed and introduced support policies, mentioning in the "Several Measures on Further Promoting the Development of Convenience Stores" issued in October 2018 that "no less than 1 convenience store will be built in each community, and full coverage of urban communities will be achieved by the end of 2020".
In July this year, a subway convenience store was opened at Hepingli North Street Station on Line 5 of the Beijing Subway, Qingnian Road Station on Line 6, and Caishikou Station on Line 7. After 17 years, the subway station convenience store finally returned to Beijing, and once rushed to the Weibo topic hot search.
Regarded as the largest traffic entrance offline, convenience stores are still a good business. Not long ago, Xiaomi's ecological chain enterprise "Rice Sugar" completed tens of millions of yuan a round of financing, and its more well-known is the "Lazy Convenience Store", which focuses on Japanese style. Convenience stores, which have always been regarded as the closest offline retail format to young people, have even come to Lei Jun.
Convenience stores have long been considered to be the capillaries of efficient operation of cities, which not only reflect the commercial maturity of the city, but also highlight the temperature of a city. It is a place of escape between the work of hit workers, and it is also a place where you can still forage for food in the middle of the night. In an urban area wrapped up in stress and inward spirals, convenience stores have become a warm presence that can slow down for a moment to feel life.