When the times abandon you, you won’t even say goodbye.

Since the development of e-commerce for more than a decade, the penetration rate has been very high, and the development model of pure e-commerce has also touched the ceiling. When the online traffic dividend bottomed out, the profit rate of traditional e-commerce began to slow down, so the capitalists changed their way, hoping to use offline behavior to influence online shopping, and then more and more consumption patterns emerged in the market, new The retail team is also growing.

In 2018, it can be said that the new retail market has been blowing very hard. Many companies have made a fortune with the wind, but many companies have fallen into the air, and several families are happy. Looking back at 2018, the whole business landscape is quite interesting. However, with regard to the development of new retail in 2019, there are still five questions that need to be answered by the industry.

1. How can the new retail giants change?

With the new retail winds, a battle for a new retail market is exploding with Tencent Jingdong against Ali. The new retail market began to take the "Tencent Department" and "Ali Department" two camps, and the traditional merchants also actively invested in the giants. Among them, Wal-Mart, Yonghui, Carrefour and so on into the Tencent camp, RT-Mart, Sanjiang, Xinhuadu, Yintai and other into the Ali camp.

In the lineup, foreign veterans Wal-Mart and Carrefour, as well as Yonghui Tongtong belong to the Tencent team, so Tencent may be more prosperous. But Alibaba is a retailer and has a variety of businesses around the backbone of retail. When there is a bottleneck in online traffic, Ali's urgency for offline traffic is no less than Tencent.

Therefore, we may wish to predict that in the next 2019, under the guidance of Ali, can the traditional merchants under the Ali system complete the transformation in the new retail reform? In addition, the current box horse fresh life is already in a profitable state. Perhaps in the new year, Ali will carry out the transformation of RT-Mart in the box.

In the data displayed in the 2017 China Supermarket Top 100 list, China Resources Vanguard ranked first, Kang Cheng Investment's RT-Mart ranked second, and Wal-Mart ranked third. Among them, RT-Mart's tax-included sales in 2017 was 95.4 billion yuan, while Wal-Mart China's tax-included sales were 80.278 billion yuan. The gap between the two is not too large. However, under the guidance of Ali and the high penetration rate of RT-Mart in the whole country, it is not impossible to open the distance with the follower Wal-Mart if it is really integrated into the model of box horse fresh.

But then again, under the leadership of Tencent, which has Internet genes, we will use WeChat's more than one billion users to divert it to the traditional Shangchao, especially with Wal-Mart. Perhaps Wal-Mart China will surpass RT-Mart in the future, and even worse. It is not impossible to ban the status of China Resources Vanguard. It is not impossible to directly stand in the first place. Because WeChat has completely infiltrated into national life, people are still willing to accept a series of marketing activities launched by WeChat, such as the promotion of WeChat applet. Therefore, after Wal-Mart, Carrefour, and Yonghui have access to Tencent, many WeChat users will be able to foresee in the future.

However, in any case, the new retail pattern in the next few years will be divided by Tencent and Ali, and there should be no changes in a short period of time. However, under the reform of Tencent and Ali, it is the Tencent Department of Supermarkets who are more eye-catching, or the Alis are more eye-catching, they are all uncertain, after all, Tencent and Ali's teaching materials are different. This giant-led war to transform the traditional Shang Chao, 2019 deer dead Tencent, or deer dead Ali hand? We will wait and see.

2. Can the new retail reform direction be unified?

Sharing a set of interesting data, the total retail sales of consumer goods in 2017 was 36.6 trillion, of which 85% were offline and 15% were online, so even though e-commerce is in full swing, it is actually making money offline. Big head. Therefore, the traditional e-commerce is thinking about how to combine the offline loss of the demographic dividend, while the offline physical retail actively embraces the Internet, hoping to use external forces to prevent themselves from being eliminated too quickly.

However, whether it is the Internet giant or the traditional retailer, the concept of the new retail is not the same. Because the industry does not have a fixed direction, what kind of market model is new retail all the way to now? No one can explain it clearly, and it has led many people to vaguely believe that the direction of new retail refers to the combination of online and offline giants and merchants.

In addition, many viewpoints have begun to conclude that “new retail is the deep integration of O2O”, “new retail is a system that drives traditional retail with smart technology”, and “new retail is a project of big data, intelligent logistics, artificial intelligence. Service retail"...

Or you can temporarily define it as a new, new, and consumer-friendly model that has not been seen before. For example, the "food + supermarket + O2O" model represented by box horse fresh and super species, or Jingdong home, Wal-Mart multi-point mall delivery, daily fresh and fresh home mode.

So, can the new retail in the future be clearer and more specific in the direction of reform? At the very least, the company can have a direction so that consumers can see the difference after the upgrade.

Moreover, the game has rules for the game, and the industry should also have rules for the industry. If the market rules are unclear, the possibility of market chaos will increase. So in the future, we can predict that in the new first year of new retail, that is, in 2019, there should be a new set of rules to unify the future development direction, because the new retail model will be the dominant market in the next few decades. mode.

Third, the loss, the collapse into the normal state, in the future can turn losses into profit?

Although Ali's box horse fresh has an industry breakthrough in the new retail model, and according to Box Horse CEO Hou Yi, the store has more than 1.5 years of box horse fresh food store single store ping effect more than 50,000 yuan, single store daily sales of more than 80 Ten thousand yuan.

However, there are also examples in the industry where Yonghui burns money to invest in super-species, but in the end it is stripped out of Yonghui due to the continued loss of super-species. The data shows that the loss of Yonghui Yunchuang in the first three quarters of 2018 reached 617 million yuan.

Many new retailers with “supermarket + catering” have become “martyrs”. For example, the new retail network red enterprise has been exposed to five stores in 11 months of development, while Fuhua has built another The new species D5 kitchen has been closed for less than half a year.

In addition, on August 3, Gome retail released a profit warning notice. As a result of entering the strategic transition period, Gome's sales revenue is expected to decline by about 9% year-on-year, with an estimated loss of RMB 3.8-480 million.

In addition, in 2017, Alibaba invested more than 20 billion to win RT-Mart, but changed the board of directors in less than three months. Despite the support of Ali, RT-Mart is still at the stage of testing the new retail edge.

So overall, the 2018 new retail answer is not very satisfactory. A big reason may be because the new retail reform is still in its infancy, and it may be normal for companies to classify losses as trial and error costs. The confusion in 2018 is still in 2019. Whether the enterprises involved in the new retail in the future will have a qualitative leap in 2019, and each company needs to control the strategic layout.

4. Is there a new breakthrough in technology and experience in new retail?

Without the high-speed Internet dividend of users, the growth rate of e-commerce has slowed down significantly. Gradually, compared to online, the offline experience through scenes seems to enhance consumers' sense of real life experience in quality life, so that consumers may be more likely to form brand awareness for offline brands.

So we saw a phenomenon, the market "unmanned" mode of sales more and more, there are unmanned containers, unmanned supermarkets and so on. In the process of receiving services from the store, smart restaurants, big data orders, AI brush face payment, etc. refreshed people's perception of technology consumption. There is also a drone distribution that replaces the courier. For example, Jingdong, super-species and other brands have started pilot drones.

But then again, this requires a strong technical accumulation and investment.

Take the unmanned supermarket as an example. On the surface, unmanned supermarkets are designed to reduce costs and increase efficiency, but in fact this only saves the cost of cashiers and waiters, because replenishment, finishing shelves, store cleaning or later The staff came to complete. In addition, the equipment will inevitably fail, and in the "no man" mode, the feedback after the failure may not be as fast as the traditional retail supermarket.

Therefore, under the reality of lack of technology and immature mode, the new retailer's excessive rendering on the advertised still can't change the pain point of the unmanned supermarket. As a result, a poor user experience due to immature technology is suffocating to new retailers. Because consumers accept the “new” of new retail, the sense of technology from the new retail can satisfy the consumer's desire for convenience. Therefore, the user experience is a link that new retailers must pay attention to in the past and in the future. .

Whether the above changes can be effective in 2019, whether the technology can be refined in the new year, and whether the user experience can be improved is one of the problems that the new retail industry must solve in 2019.

5. Is new retail a revolution or a life-saving?

If the new retail is the life of traditional retail, then the most obvious example is an old brand in Shenzhen – everyone. According to public information, the net profit in 2014-2017 is negative. As the company has experienced the rapid development of e-commerce in recent years, its operating income has continued to decline. In 2017, it even lost more than 500 million yuan.

But if the new retail is a life-saving straw for traditional retail, Renren Le Supermarket is one of them. Under the promotion of new retail, Renrenle began to cooperate with Internet companies. Renren has maintained different levels of cooperation with Jingdong, Tencent's Internet Micro-Bank, and multi-point Dmall. According to the 2018 annual performance report of Renrenle, it is estimated that the net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies in 2010 will be 10-40 million yuan, which will be turned into a loss.

In addition, in addition to the initial success of Renrenle's new retail transformation, Lianhua Supermarket said that the results turned losses into profit mainly due to the Group's continued transformation and improvement, and the same store performance improvement brought by the results. Relevant media also reported that the net profit growth of Hongqi Chain was mainly due to the company's continued use of big data and analysis this year, continuous adjustment of store product structure, and improved store management efficiency.

It seems that the value of the new retail to the retail model industry is still growing in 2018. That is to say, it is probably the new retail of Cheng, and the new retail. Those who took the lead in the battlefield have become "martyrs". These are ready to play but still do not confirm the direction. The confusing market will always usher in a new pattern.

Everything has just begun, there are still many variables, and there are countless possibilities in the early days of new industries. To evaluate the value of new retail to retail industry in 2018 in the proportion of revolution and life-saving, it may be the latter. New retail has actually helped upgrade traditional retail in the Internet and the Internet of Things. In the next 2019, whether new retail can continue to create value for the retail industry, it seems that the results of the year.

to sum up

The lightness, heavyness, complexity and complexity of the new retail also reflect the different mentality of different players for new retail, but also affect the direction and pattern of new retail. However, it should be noted that today's stock users have been divided by several loops, and the spending power and disposable time of different groups of people are not the same.

Take the middle class as an example. Most of these people are 80 and 90. They are always fresh about new things, pursue high cost performance, and are willing to pay for high quality services. However, the consumption upgrade represented by the new retail does not represent the general consumer demand, so different consumer groups have different consumption concepts.

Therefore, for any business model, no matter how diverse the model is, in the end it is still necessary to settle in the people's final consumer appeal, and satisfying the basic consumer appeal is still the key to solving all development problems.

The current new retail industry seems to be at a crossroads, with a potential traffic dividend to the left and a visible consumption upgrade to the right, and “swinging” has become a new symbol of the era. However, there is no doubt that with the accumulation of time, the track will become wider and wider, and the runners will be more and more diverse, but as long as they seize the best value, there is no chance of an enemy. . What is value is nothing more than a product or service that suits the taste of consumers.

The above five questions, I hope that in 2019, new retail can provide ideas and doubts, and look forward to new breakthroughs in the new retail industry in the new year.