Our reporter Li Chunlian
Since the beginning of the year, the coffee industry has been surging, and it has become one of the most intense tracks for "involution".
Starbucks, Ruixing and others have raised prices successively, causing a lot of controversy.
Recently, China Post's first coffee shop officially opened in Xiamen, a move that marked China Post's official entry into the coffee industry.
"China's coffee market has a vast space, and it is one of the high-frequency and just-needed consumer goods most favored by young consumer groups." Li Xinyi, an analyst in the brand retail industry of Analysys, told the "Securities Daily" reporter that coffee is a category with a high degree of standardization. Easy to scale expansion.
Can it be the first in the country if it is rolled out?
China Post is not the first giant to open coffee across borders.
Previously, Sinopec, with its advantage of having 30,000 gas stations, was considered by the market to be No. 1 in the country as long as it was rolled out.
On September 3, 2019, Sinopec Yijie released a new brand "Easy Coffee", the first store was located in Suzhou, and Sinopec's gas station coffee was officially launched.
The partner chosen by Sinopec Yijie this time is "Link Coffee", the creator of the Internet coffee category.
More than two years later, the reporter of "Securities Daily" found through inquiry that up to now, in addition to Suzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and other cities have three or four Sinopec Yijie Coffee.
The data shows that China Post, relying on its advantages in urban and rural areas and covering the whole country, has nearly 9,000 investment departments, 54,000 business branches and 420,000 cooperative mail Tesco site resources with complete information systems.
This means that China Post will have at least 50,000 stores that can be used to sell coffee in the future.
It is not only China Post and Sinopec that want to be the first in the country.
As early as 2018, the Kunlun Hospitality Coffee Project, a subsidiary of PetroChina, began to set up freshly ground coffee in convenience stores.
Today, the arrival of China Post has also added more variables to the highly competitive coffee market.
Li Xinyi believes that China Post has a huge postal network, and cross-border coffee production is easy to form a scale, and the brand of China Post itself has a brand effect, which has eliminated many obstacles in opening consumer awareness.
Cross-border coffee production faces competition from professional coffee brands. How to do a good job in product quality, user management, brand operation, and supply chain management and control are all new challenges for China Post.
The scale of the industry continues to expand
The reason why big names such as Sinopec and China Post continue to enter the coffee market is that the industry's broad prospects are "attractive".
According to iiMedia Research, the market size of China's coffee industry will reach 300 billion yuan in 2020, and the market size of China's coffee industry is expected to maintain an upward trend of 27.2%, much higher than the global average growth rate of 2%.
In 2025, the market size of China's coffee industry will reach 1 trillion yuan, and the overall trend will continue to expand.
According to a research report released by Guotai Junan, the Chinese coffee market is expected to continue to grow rapidly in the future, thanks to the consumption upgrade trend under the increase of residents' disposable income and the accelerated education of consumers by the money-burning subsidies of domestic brands.
In fact, Starbucks, as an established coffee brand, has been under more and more impact, and the status of "one brother" has become more and more unstable.
In this context, Starbucks and Ruixing have successively announced an increase in coffee prices.
At the same time, emerging coffee brands rely on their own advantages to continuously seize market segments, which also leads to a high degree of investment and financing activity in the coffee market.
Among them, Santonban is mainly engaged in boutique instant coffee, and its target customers are students and young office workers in first- and second-tier cities. It will receive B+ round of financing in June 2021.
Manner Coffee is a coffee chain brand that combines the high quality of specialty coffee with the affordable pricing of everyday drinks. The target customer group is mainly young white-collar workers in first- and second-tier cities. It will receive B+ round of financing in June 2021.
Analysys analysis related research reports also mentioned that the valuation of Manner Coffee brand has soared to 2 billion US dollars, and the valuation of a single store has exceeded 100 million US dollars, far exceeding the third space such as Starbucks or high-end specialty coffee. 400.
At the same time, new tea companies such as HEYTEA and Nai Xue の tea have also entered the coffee market, and the time-honored Chinese brand Tong Ren Tang has also sold health coffee across the border.
"At present, I am more optimistic about the affordable coffee market. Its market space is larger than that of specialty coffee, and it is easier to scale. There should be one or two leading brands in this segment." Li Xinyi believes that China's coffee market is still relatively In the early days, the consumption potential was huge. Freshly ground coffee was high-frequency, just in demand, and could meet the needs of the younger generation for a sense of life ritual. It was the hottest spot in each coffee segment, and the growth potential was expected.
"Beverage" and "parity" are the two major development trends in China's freshly ground coffee market, and local cost-effective coffee brands have the greatest potential.
(Securities Daily)