Two years ago, Alibaba and JD.COM, the first and fourth largest Internet listed companies in China, respectively joined hands with Suning Yunshang and Yonghui Supermarket, and their transformation from "electricity" to "store" was regarded by the outside world as the horn of e-commerce bosses to go offline.
Arribe cast a dense net. In November 2016, Sanjiang Shopping Announcement introduced Alibaba Zetai as its strategic investor, with an investment of 2.15 billion yuan. If Hangzhou Alibaba Zetai converts all exchangeable corporate bonds into shares, the shareholding ratio can reach 35%.
In December 2016, Yiguo Fresh, which was invested by Ali, "took over" 237 million domestic shares of Lianhua Supermarket sold by Yonghui Supermarket (accounting for 21.17% of the total share capital of Lianhua Supermarket) and became the second shareholder of Lianhua Supermarket. Bailian is still the controlling shareholder of Lianhua Supermarket, holding a total of 42.73% of its shares.
In January 2017, Yintai Commercial announced the privatization, in which Ali participated and will become its controlling shareholder with a shareholding ratio of 74%.
In February 2017, Alibaba and Bailian Group announced a strategic cooperation.
Similarly, JD.COM’s actions are actually quite a few.
In June 2016, after JD.COM acquired No.1 Store, it started in-depth cooperation with Wal-Mart behind the latter. Wal-Mart will provide rich commodities through its global supply chain, and its physical stores in China will be connected to Dada, a crowdsourcing logistics platform invested by JD.COM and JD.COM.
It is not difficult to see that the retail industry is quietly storing the kinetic energy of change.
According to Chen Weihao, a partner of Huaping Investment, new retail has two main components: the first is the change of consumption demand of a new generation of consumers. Now the mainstream consumers after 70-90 are completely different from the previous generation. They pay more attention to product quality and service, personalization and technology, and at the same time, they have more disposable income and time. Under such circumstances, how can we meet the consumer demand? This is what the retail industry needs to respond to now.
The second point is technological innovation. For example, he said that few people used Alipay three years ago, and there was no WeChat payment. E-commerce began to rise on the PC side, and the real O2O has not yet begun. The smart phone has brought an earth-shaking change to the whole mobile Internet. All these new retails are good for technology and consumers’ information collection and feedback, all of which are achieved by the further development of Internet technology.
On October 13th, 2016, at the Alibaba Cloud Habitat Conference, Ma Yun first put forward the concept of "new retail" in his speech. Ma Yun asserted that "the era of pure e-commerce will soon end. In the next ten or twenty years, there is no such thing as e-commerce. Only new retail, that is, online and offline and logistics must be combined, can a real new retail be born."
The new retail concept was quickly accepted. All the giants in the retail industry will no longer talk about e-commerce and online shopping in 2017, but will advance on the new retail road. Fresh goods have always been the category that consumers buy the most frequently, and it seems logical for "new retail" to land here.
In January 2016, Hou Yi, the former director of Jingdong Logistics, founded Boxma Xiansheng in Shanghai, and later received a high investment from Ali. Boxma Xiansheng adopted the business model of "online e-commerce+offline stores", and the functions carried by the stores further increased compared with traditional retail, integrating "fresh supermarket+catering experience+online business warehousing". It is generally believed that Boxma Xiansheng will become the No.1 project of Ali’s new retail. Up to now, Boxma Xiansheng has opened 13 stores covering Beijing, Shanghai and Ningbo.
JD.COM is naturally unwilling to wait and die. In early 2016, JD.COM Fresh Food Division was established to accelerate the expansion of fresh food categories, quality control and cold chain logistics. Just after the Spring Festival in 2017, JD.COM set up a "secret force" outside the fresh food department. This organization is to do preparatory work for the development of offline fresh food stores in JD.COM. It is reported that the location of the offline fresh food store in JD.COM has been preliminarily determined: the first store is located in Yizhuang Dazu Square near JD.COM headquarters, with a business area of 4,000 square meters, and the second store is located in Wucai City, Qinghe Middle Street, Haidian District, with a business area of about 2,000 square meters.
JD.COM’s own new retail boots have not yet landed. On July 19th, the first store of "octopus (octopus) fresh", a new online and offline integrated retail format led by Meituan, officially opened.
Regardless of whether Meituan and JD.COM are benchmarking with Ali’s Boxma Xiansheng in the industry, this online and offline integration model can prove to some extent that new retail has been deeply cultivated from the past conceptual stage.
The cost of online traffic is getting higher and higher, while the proportion of commercial property leasing cost in the total cost of some physical retailers has dropped to less than 10%, and the gap between online and offline customer acquisition costs is narrowing or even reversing. Therefore, the continuous growth of pure e-commerce enterprises needs to rely on the integration and penetration of physical retail, and online and offline move from division to integration.
Xue Yu, senior analyst of IDC China, said that the continuous improvement of user experience and operational efficiency is the core requirement for business transformation, and the trends of standardization, interactivity, integration and globalization will become the main features of the "new retail" era. The core of new retail is the supply chain and ecosystem formed with consumers as the center.
Online is virtual, seemingly ethereal, and killing people is invisible; The offline is the truth. Although it is heavy, the knife is deadly. In the past, e-commerce enjoyed the benefits of online traffic, but ignored the fact that everyone was offline traffic before becoming online traffic, and offline traffic still had a lot of potential to be tapped, and offline also had many incomparable advantages online.
The new circulation is to serve the new consumer demand and guide the changes of the upstream industrial chain through the satisfaction of consumer demand. According to the reporter’s understanding, it is generally believed in the industry that the advantages of offline Shangchao have always focused on the satisfaction of customer experience. In the future competition, physical retailing will face more challenges focusing on how to manage users well and complete the changes in the new retail era through social networks, big data and logistics.
"E-commerce has inherent technological advantages under the transfer line. All innovative models are based on technical support, and the concept is also one of the advantages. The so-called concept is that the previous circulation is the terminal channel of production enterprises, but the new circulation form is for consumers, with the consumer demand as the core, because there is big data behind it." Li Mingtao, Dean of China International Electronic Commerce Center Research Institute, told reporters. The era of pure e-commerce will soon end, the form of pure retail will also be broken, and new retail will lead a new business model in the future.
Cao Lei, director of China E-commerce Research Center, once said: "In the past, online and offline retailing was in a state of’ with you and without me, with me and without you’. However, since last year, the integration of online and offline, from O2O to new retail, has become a broad consensus in the industry. Everyone began to think about complementing each other’s advantages, jointly doing a good job in product and service experience, and jointly dividing this cake, not just competition. "
Anxin county is rich in water resources. Baiyangdian Lake in Anxin County is an important water conservancy hub of Daqing River system, with an average total water resource of 41.24 million cubic meters for many years. The aquatic organisms in Baiyangdian Lake include plankton, benthos, fish and aquatic plants. At the same time, there are 26 species of birds belonging to 19 families, forming a good food chain structure and becoming an important aquatic product base in North China.
In order to truly replace the traditional retail model, "unmanned supermarket" must be better than "manned supermarket" on the basis of the existing model. So what does it take to be better than "someone"? Where are the benefits to consumers? Do we really need nobody?
In the short term, "unmanned supermarket" is difficult to replace the traditional retail business model, but intelligent supermarket is an inevitable trend of retail industry. Now it can occupy a place in the market by satisfying people’s curiosity, but to completely replace the traditional retail model, it is necessary to keep up with the rapid development of science and technology and study a better technical support and service model.
However, if only the hot concept hype of "unmanned supermarket" appears, it will be dispersed in a hubbub after the bubble is set off, and a new industry will not actually be formed. Then this technical concept of no hard goods is even more out of reach from the real retail reform.
"Unmanned supermarket" is indeed one of many possibilities for the retail industry in the future, but now, it is still far from enough.