Text/Photo by Yangcheng Evening News reporter Ding Ling Xu Zhangchao
The three squirrels (300783), the "first share of Internet casual snacks", have been under a lot of pressure recently.
From the performance point of view, 2021 is considered to be a "near surprise". Although the revenue has dropped slightly, the net profit attributable to the parent has increased significantly, breaking the previous situation of "increasing revenue but not profit"; in the first quarter of this year, operating income, return The net profit of the parent company has both declined.
Looking at the company's stock price performance, in the early days of listing in 2019, the stock prices of the three squirrels rose rapidly, with a market value of over 36 billion yuan at their peak.
As of the close on April 25, the three squirrels reported 24.02 yuan, with a total market value of only 9.632 billion yuan.
How does the sales of food e-commerce change the situation of high product homogeneity, and how to break through the development bottleneck?
Yangcheng Evening News reporter conducted an interview on this.
Operating income and net profit both declined
According to the 2021 annual report disclosed by the three squirrels on the evening of April 23, the revenue in 2021 will drop slightly by 0.24% to 9.77 billion yuan, and the net profit attributable to the parent company will increase by 36.43% to 411 million yuan.
Among them, the operating income of the third-party e-commerce platform was 6.479 billion yuan, accounting for 66.31% of the total revenue.
Specifically, Tmall-based platforms contributed 2.956 billion yuan in revenue, down 22.30% year-on-year; Jingdong-based platforms contributed 2.408 billion yuan, down 11.84% year-on-year.
In addition, according to the first quarter report of 2022 released on the same day, in the first quarter, the operating income of the three squirrels was 3.089 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 15.85%; the net profit attributable to the parent company was 161 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 48.75%.
In this regard, the three squirrels said they were affected by factors such as the high base in the previous year, rising raw material costs, and high advertising costs.
It is worth mentioning that in the same period, the three squirrels released an "important announcement on comprehensively promoting strategic transformation and upgrading and moving towards high-quality development". The announcement mentioned that the three squirrels are transforming and upgrading their development model - from e-commerce. Transform to omni-channel, transform from single brand to multi-brand, rebuild brand power, channel power and product power.
The announcement said: "For this reason, the company has fully suspended store expansion, and has made great efforts to close stores that do not meet long-term positioning and poor performance. The next step will be to improve the profitability of a single store."
In a nutshell, online and offline sales have been combined to optimize production lines and focus on products with their own advantages.
Returning to the old bank still faces difficulties
At the time of the broken arm, the three squirrels who started with nuts decisively chose to focus on superior nut products, launched SUPER nuts using saturated heat-killing process, and distributed nut star products using vacuum packaging.
From the perspective of research and development expenses, the investment of the three squirrels in 2021 will be 57.5437 million yuan, and the peer BESTORE will be 39.6656 million yuan.
The strategic shift and reinvestment in R&D have begun to yield some results.
At present, the three squirrels have created a variety of popular items such as daily nuts, pecans, macadamia nuts, paper walnuts, hand peeled almonds, cashews, and pistachios.
For the whole year of 2021, the revenue of the nut category of the three squirrels was 5.058 billion yuan, and the gross profit margin of the category reached 29.14%, a year-on-year increase of 4.33%.
The shelf layout of physical stores also confirms this.
In the three squirrel direct-operated store located in Tianhe City, Beijing Road, Guangzhou, a reporter from Yangcheng Evening News noticed that although the store has conventional food lines such as meat stew, biscuits, as well as derivative products such as national tide blind boxes and toys, nut products still occupy a considerable share. Proportion.
However, in the eyes of industry insiders, although many companies, including the three squirrels, have spent money on research and development and playing new tricks, in fact, companies are still facing the dilemma of insufficient product innovation capabilities, which also makes food e-commerce companies face serious challenges. Homogeneous competition.
"Some companies have relied on one product for many years, but they have not launched alternative products." Zhang Yi, CEO and chief analyst of iiMedia Research, said in an interview with a reporter from Yangcheng Evening News that the overall market potential has not yet been fully stimulated. However, there are obvious innovation problems in the products of the merchants.
At the same time, Zhang Yi said that some nut products that mainly target young consumer groups do not take into account the needs of consumers in the combination of nuts, and there are many discomforts such as getting angry after eating.
"Tear off the trademarks of those nut products, can you tell which one is which? What can homogenized food e-commerce companies rely on to turn around?" Zhang Yi suggested that food e-commerce companies should improve their product innovation capabilities, according to consumption Consumer demand continues to drive product category innovation and product iteration, and there is still huge room for growth in this direction.
In addition, new social e-commerce models such as live broadcast e-commerce can intuitively display product culture and product performance to consumers, and have great scalability in terms of online channel expansion.
Omni-channel operation is still very difficult
In terms of channel expansion, different from peers such as BESTORE and Laiyifen, which started to focus on offline channels at the beginning of their fortunes, the three squirrels that started e-commerce started laying offline channels much later, so it is naturally not difficult to achieve omni-channel sales. Small.
At first, the founder Zhang Liaoyuan put the main channel of the three squirrels online.
Until 2017, its offline revenue only accounted for 4.5%.
Tmall and JD.com are the absolute protagonists. In 2020, the Tmall channel accounts for 52% of the online business revenue of the three squirrels, and JD.com accounts for 38%.
In other words, 90% of the revenue comes from these two major e-commerce platforms.
But concentration also means over-reliance, and with the increasing cost of customer acquisition for food e-commerce, the advantages of online channels are gradually disappearing, and seeking multi-channel development has become an inevitable choice for the three squirrels.
"The era of entrepreneurship with e-commerce as the core of the three squirrels is over." The company's annual report in 2021 mentioned that the three squirrels are transforming from e-commerce to omni-channel.
In this regard, the three squirrels have opened three types of offline stores - self-operated "food stores", franchised "Squirrel Stores", and "offline convenience stores" in cooperation with e-commerce.
The vision is beautiful, but the process is difficult.
The data shows that in 2021, 12 new direct-operated catering stores will be opened and 43 stores will be closed. As of the end of the period, a total of 140 stores will contribute to revenue of 818 million yuan, down 6.39% from the same period last year, accounting for 8.37% of total revenue; franchised stores 341 new stores were opened and 288 stores were closed, with a total of 925 stores by the end of the period, with a revenue of 749 million yuan, an increase of 63.3% over the same period of the previous year, accounting for 7.67% of the total revenue.
The staff of the Three Squirrels Direct Store in Tianhe City, Beijing Road, Guangzhou told the Yangcheng Evening News reporter that the Three Squirrels currently only have two stores in Guangzhou. The Three Squirrels Broadway store in Shipai, Tianhe District, has been closed and has been affected by the epidemic recently. Affected, the store traffic is not much.
In addition, according to some franchisees of the three squirrels, relative to the online price of products, after deducting costs such as rent and operation, the price advantage of offline channels is unclear, and even led to franchisees choosing to close stores.
"The price concession is not the most important part. The key problem is that the product does not match the consumer group." Zhang Yi said that the three squirrel online channels mainly target young consumers, but young people are not the main consumers of offline channels. In fact, no differentiated products are produced for different consumer groups.
"The proportion of online sales and offline sales of the three squirrels is very different, which shows that the company has not achieved the mutual integration of online and offline resources, and has not achieved the short-board complementation between online and offline." Analysis of China's food industry Shi Zhu Danpeng spoke bluntly to the reporter of the Yangcheng Evening News.
It is worth mentioning that, despite the development challenges faced by directly-operated catering stores and franchise stores, on the offline business side, after the release of the distribution strategy in October 2021, the three squirrels launched the "Hot List Snacks" and settled in Yonghui and Walmart. , RT-Mart and other large supermarket shelves, the revenue in one year exceeded 1.6 billion yuan, accounting for 17%.
In this regard, Zhu Danpeng said that from the perspective of the cooperation between the three squirrels and the supermarket, it is only to expand the channels. In fact, it is still a great challenge for the three squirrels to realize the omni-channel operation mode.
"To truly realize omni-channel operation, food e-commerce first depends on brand effect, second on scale effect, and more on the support of the entire food safety, quality, service system, customer stickiness, scene innovation, etc. It also needs to be maintained." Zhu Danpeng said.