Internet Business Thinking

Chapter 27 Early Entry, Early Profit - Internet Awareness in Traditional Industries (3)
Another challenge that affects the stability of the supply chain comes from the inventory risk in the fresh food sector. The root cause of the inventory crisis lies in the information asymmetry between the production end and the market end—the production that does not meet the real market demand may lead to high prices, reduced production, and harvest losses. large fluctuations.Tang Zhong believes that the membership system of on-demand production is an effective way to smooth out fluctuations.At present, Liangshi.com has developed more than 2 members, and the transaction data of each member can be truly presented. Liangshi.com customizes production for them based on these data.

Control the freshness of arrival
Although shortening the supply chain has greatly improved the circulation speed of fresh food in terms of mode, it is obviously not enough for the fresh food operation platform.In the e-commerce where the delivery of standardized products is rushing to rush, fresh food seems to have a reason to further speed up the delivery.

Tang Zhong's practice shows that not only must be fast, but also must be able to control the freshness of the food when it arrives.The former is not difficult to achieve, but for non-standardized and easily lost fresh food, the latter is not easy to grasp.The reason is that many fresh food e-commerce companies will avoid using preservatives for high-end fresh food and let it be cooked naturally.So, how to control the maturity of food in picking, storage, transportation and other links?The approach of Liangshi.com is to control the transportation radius and the freshness when picking.

Liangshi.com has strict transportation radius requirements for fresh products such as vegetables and fruits. The maximum distance is between 200 and 300 kilometers, which is the closest distance to the final consumption point.Such a transportation radius requirement can not only guarantee the transportation cost, but also reduce the loss of fresh food during transportation.Take the fruit production base of Liangshi.com as an example. The base is located in an ecological farm in Haifeng County, Shanwei, about 200 kilometers away from Shenzhen, and Shenzhen is just within its transportation radius.

On this farm base, the fruit is picked when it is nearly nine ripe.For example, the fruits picked on Sunday will be delivered to the Shenzhen warehouse on Monday through cold chain vehicles.Currently, Liangshi.com has warehouses with five temperatures in Shenzhen, namely minus 5°C, 18°C, between 0-0°C, around 5°C, and ordinary warehouses. Different foods will be placed in different warehouses.After sorting, this batch of fruits will be delivered on Tuesday and Wednesday.Since Liangshi.com only conducts localized business, when these fruits arrive at the user's home, they are naturally ripe.

Therefore, Tang Zhong believes that fresh food delivery is not as fast as possible within the time agreed with the user. Only by properly controlling the freshness of the food when it arrives at home can a better user experience be won.

Reduce trial and error costs
Shortening the supply chain and controlling the freshness of the goods are both very stable and effective strategies, which allow Liangshi.com to survive and develop rapidly in the brutal fresh food e-commerce battle.At present, Liangshi.com, which has been established for three years, has begun to realize monthly profits, but the cost is still a mountain on its head.Liangshi.com, which is in its infancy, had to run with heavy loads.

Regarding the cost, Tang Zhong had calculated such an account.Assuming that the price of a vegetable is 10 yuan, its production cost accounts for half (including the wages of front-line production employees, etc.), and transportation and storage costs account for 20% to 30%. These two major costs have already accounted for nearly 80%. , as well as variable marketing and management costs.

As for the production cost which accounts for the largest proportion, Tang Zhong admits that this is due to the organic production method.Tang Zhong believes that the organic production method will bring two disadvantages to profitability: First, the low output will affect the overall operating income.The same cabbage can be picked in 30 days with chemical fertilizers, and about 50 days without chemical fertilizers.The second is that it is much more laborious than the modern method of planting with pesticides and fertilizers.For example, weeding, if spraying herbicides, one person can get ten acres of land in half a day; if using manual or weeding machines, it takes a few people a day to get rid of one mu of land, which is very inefficient.

"Fresh food is used by ordinary people in daily life, so it is impossible to make lucrative luxury goods. However, no matter in the field of agriculture or e-commerce, fresh food is a new industry that will involve many aspects. Because In the early stage, it needs to invest in production links, logistics links, marketing links, etc., so there will be input costs and trial-and-error costs. However, with steady progress, trial-and-error costs will gradually decrease. better." Tang Zhong told reporters.

(Section [-]) Use e-commerce to retrieve the taste of memory

He has worked in the financial industry for nearly 20 years. He suddenly jumped into the irrelevant field of ecological agriculture to start a business. He put on a bamboo hat and returned to the countryside. Eat the delicious and safe food in your memory.

Different from many entrepreneurs who "hope to achieve a career or realize self-worth" and other entrepreneurial motivations, Qiu Daliang, a former cadre of the China Securities Regulatory Bureau and former vice president of Zhongshan Securities, chose to start a business because of a simple and true nostalgia - "I grew up From a peasant family, I was very impressed by the native food that I ate in my hometown when I was a child. But now, we can hardly find such delicious and safe food on our table. I hope that people in the city will also I can eat back the feeling I remember.” So, in 2011, Qiu Daliang gave up his annual salary of one million yuan, put on a bamboo hat and returned to the countryside, from a financial executive to a farmer of the Qiuchu Chicken Ecological Farm.

Jump into the sea to find the Chicken in the Hill

After working in the financial industry for nearly 20 years, he suddenly made a "jump" to start a business in the irrelevant field of ecological agriculture. Qiu Daliang joked that his actions were not jumping into the sea or jumping into the sea, but that he plunged to the end.However, the reason why he made the move of "jumping into the sea" was after careful consideration.

With the impact of environmental pollution and other factors in recent years, more and more people have begun to pay attention to food safety issues. The pursuit of healthy life has made the demand for ecological food continue to increase. This allows Qiu Daliang to see the bright future of the industry.At the same time, when Qiu Daliang's friends learned that he was asked to build an ecological farm, they all enthusiastically supported him, invested in it, and participated in this cause together. Among them were bank presidents, securities company executives, fund managers, listed Company executives, private business owners, etc., the investment amount ranges from tens of thousands to several 10 yuan.At present, the total investment of Qiuchu Chicken Farm has exceeded 1400 million yuan, and many people who have learned about its brand and story are joining in one after another.Such resource strength greatly increased Qiu Daliang's confidence.

After repeated arguments, Qiu Daliang decided to start a business in his hometown of Longmen Mountain in northern Sichuan. It is a natural ecological environment that has never been polluted since ancient times. It is very suitable for raising livestock and poultry products under the forest and producing safe ecological meat and egg food.In this way, Qiu Daliang first started from raising healthy white meat food native chickens, and invested in the construction of more than 700 mu of native chickens under the forest.Qiu Daliang said with a smile that because he once served as the director of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, his colleagues and friends called him "Qiu Chu".Everyone yelled a lot, and he listened to it, so he simply registered the brand trademark "Qiuchu Chicken".

It is not an easy task to bring the original ecological chicken food to the dining table in the city.At present, the frequent occurrence of food safety accidents in China not only proves that businessmen are greedy for profit, but also shows that the operation of ecological food and safe food is a very systematic and high-tech project.

Since most chicken breeds are broilers, or hybrids of broilers and native chickens, even in the mountains, there are not many purebred native chickens left.In order to find the pure native chicken breed, Qiu Daliang and several like-minded friends started the search for "native chicken on the tip of the tongue" in the countryside of Dashan, Beichuan since 2009.They searched from village to village, and encountered car traps and mudslides many times. It was not until the beginning of 2011 that they selected several native chicken breeds and succeeded in trial breeding.Then, they sent the meat and egg samples to an authoritative testing agency for testing. After judging data such as taste, nutrition and genetics, they finally selected two dominant varieties.

Why is seed selection important?Qiu Daliang used the most intuitive comparison. The white feather chickens of KFC and McDonald's can grow into a big man of five or six catties in 45 days, while the Qiuchu chickens take 180 days to grow to more than three catties. The difference between chicken species is evident .

New e-commerce from farm to table
In order to turn his farm into an advanced systematic project, Qiu Daliang really took great pains.He chose the farm in a remote mountainous area, away from industrial and urban pollution sources, and took advantage of the excellent ecological environment to implement low-density, all-weather stocking and traditional feeding of whole grains to ensure that the quality of local chicken eggs is natural, safe and delicious.Qiu Daliang also made great efforts to build a standardized stocking production system. By attracting professionals with many years of ecological breeding experience to join in, he continued to study and summarize the production technology and experience of stocking under forests, and explored and established a set of standardized systems.

"Seed selection and breeding-feeding processing-whole stocking record-visual traceability-Chinese medicine immunization-environmental management-animal husbandry management-slaughter and packaging-product inspection and quarantine-rapid cooling-the whole process of constant temperature preservation and cold chain real-time distribution", this complete operating system , the industrial chain is very long, but Qiuchu chicken farms are all managed by themselves.Qiu Daliang said that only by strictly controlling every link of the entire industry can the quality of ecological food be achieved, and the brand of Qiuchuji will not be ruined.

In terms of sales model, Qiuchu Chicken Farm is also a company operating in an e-commerce model. Through the Internet, the main local chicken and eggs are directly sold from the farm to the tables of families in first- and second-tier cities. "We have not only established our own e-commerce website, where users can conduct online transactions directly, but also opened a store on the third-party platform Tmall Mall, realizing multi-channel services to users. At the same time, we also assist in online sales. The high-end community has carried out offline promotion and gift tasting experience activities.”

However, the e-commerce operation of fresh food must face extremely critical logistics barriers, such as high logistics costs and violent sorting are all major problems that have to be faced.Especially for eggs, it is the most difficult to ensure integrity in logistics and distribution. Qiuchu Chicken Farm has carried out targeted research and innovation for this purpose.Qiu Daliang specially hired an invention and creation manual expert to design a set of safe anti-collision packaging, which effectively solves the damage of eggs during the logistics process. This set of safe packaging has applied for a technical patent.

As for fresh chicken, Qiuchu Chicken Farm generally uses cold chain logistics to deliver the goods by air the next day.Qiu Daliang said that at present, logistics costs are relatively high, but with the increase in shipments, the shared costs will gradually decrease in the future.Logistics cost is not a big problem for Qiuchu chicken. After all, Qiuchu chicken sells for nearly 20 yuan each, and eggs cost 3 yuan each. Its target market is high-end customers.

Word of mouth opens market gaps
In April 2012, the first batch of chicks from Qiuchu Chicken Farm came in for stocking. After October of that year, the products were officially launched, but soon encountered the spread of bird flu.Although there is no bird flu at all in the place of origin in Sichuan, consumers in the target city immediately turned pale, the market was extremely sluggish, and sales were greatly affected. This undoubtedly gave Qiu Daliang a blow.

But at the most difficult moment, Qiu Daliang was not discouraged, let alone regretted his entrepreneurial choice. He believed that truly safe, nutritious and healthy products would surely impress consumers.For this reason, he used the financial securities circle as a breakthrough in marketing. "At a time when everyone lacks confidence in food safety, people trust recommendations among friends more, and people in the financial circle happen to be a group of people who pay more attention to food safety." Now, his partner investors are facing securities, banks High-end customers recommended Qiuchu chicken products, and gradually opened up the market with word of mouth and reputation. During the Mid-Autumn Festival in 2013, Qiuchu chicken eggs sold nearly one million yuan in the form of ecological gifts.

Qiu Daliang said that the company's next strategic goal is to become a large-scale ecological agricultural enterprise with high brand awareness in China.Among them, the ecological breeding industry will center on Beichuan, not only to establish production bases in the mountainous areas of northern, western, and eastern Sichuan, but also expand to remote mountainous areas in other regions of the country in the future.At the same time, Qiuchu Chicken will also extend to the downstream of the industrial chain. On the one hand, it will actively develop the food deep processing industry, and on the other hand, it will open characteristic ecological restaurants in cities. At the beginning of 2014, the first Qiuchu Chicken Restaurant opened in Mianyang, Sichuan. It is not only a restaurant, but also an offline experience store and offline sales store for the products of Qiuchu Chicken Farm.

(Section [-]) Internet thinking subverts the real estate landscape
The real estate industry serves customers based on the value chain, and forms an interest group integrating the government, banks, materials and builders with real estate companies as the core.The combination of Internet thinking and the real estate industry is worth looking forward to, but there is still a long way to go.On this road, it will take time to clarify issues such as policy obstacles in the real estate industry, obstacles in land use planning by local governments, and financing obstacles.

Can China's housing prices fall by half?This is the question Lei Jun, Chairman of Xiaomi Technology, asked Yu Liang, President of Vanke.Yu Liang believes that this possibility is not entirely impossible, because there may be spoilers operating in the Internet thinking mode in the real estate industry.

Lei Jun summed up Internet thinking in seven words: focus, extreme, word of mouth, and speed.If combined with traditional marketing theory, "focus and extreme" covers "products and prices"; "word of mouth" represents "customer relationship"; "fast" refers to the acceleration of information transmission and communication; ".

The value chain is the binding of interests
The real estate industry serves customers based on the value chain. Banks, builders, and the government respectively provide funds, materials, engineering, and land for real estate companies, and form an interest group that integrates the government, banks, materials, and builders with real estate companies as the core. .

Housing prices are a social problem.The government must not only strongly control housing prices, but also rely on real estate to stimulate consumption; building materials and construction engineering companies often take advantage of the disadvantages of customers and consumers to commit quality fraud. Customers are the masters; in order to obtain personal loans and investment loans, banks are completely tied to the interests of real estate companies.

From the perspective of banks, real estate companies are not only project investment lenders, but also sales agents for personal loans.The higher the real estate price, the greater the benefits for the government, banks, materials and builders.

Real estate companies are only agents of interests on the supply side, not clients.Because it cannot assume the responsibility for the quality management of materials and builders for customers and consumers, as well as the supervision responsibility for capital costs and financial service quality, let alone the management responsibility for government land costs for customers and consumers.

Can it disrupt the real estate industry?
Based on the above analysis, we can imagine: what will happen if the Internet thinking is implanted in the real estate industry?
First of all, from the perspective of supply and demand, the core of Internet thinking is the idea of ​​user first.The real estate industry dominated by Internet thinking will be a kind of narrow demand. The acquisition and unification of demand will take longer than the demand planning of traditional real estate industry. On another level, such demand will inevitably lead to real estate planning and design. , Construction brings challenges.

Secondly, the dedicated and extreme concept of Internet thinking is already an existing fact in the real estate industry.The emerging real estate disruptors dominated by Internet thinking do not have the deep precipitation of existing real estate companies, and the model of cooperation with external forces can help these disruptors to bridge the gap with existing real estate companies, but it will also bring about the design of cooperation models, etc. series of questions.

Finally, looking at word-of-mouth, real estate is a bulk commodity, a house or even a family or several generations of lifelong purchases. The behavior of multiple home purchases is not only unbearable for ordinary consumers, but also due to the regional characteristics of the real estate industry, housing It is difficult to form word-of-mouth accumulation in real estate products.

The combination of Internet thinking and the real estate industry is still worth looking forward to, but there is still a long way to go.It will take time to clarify issues such as policy obstacles in the real estate industry, obstacles in land use planning by local governments, and financing obstacles.Only when the barriers are removed layer by layer can we have the opportunity to discuss the subversion of Internet thinking to the real estate industry.

(Section [-]) Break through regional bottlenecks and use the Internet to defeat washing machines

Since 2011, some dry cleaners are trying to subvert the entire laundry industry through the Internet. However, they are also facing the difficult problem of expansion that all regional e-commerce companies have to face: as the scope of services expands, the cost of logistics is geometric. increase.In this regard, dry cleaners try to reduce costs through the intensive dry cleaning mode of the central washing factory.

With the rise of the O2O model, the traditional business model of providing local services has ushered in an opportunity for change.Li Jie, the owner of a laundry factory born in 1987, is trying to bring the laundry industry to the Internet.

Difficult Entrepreneurship

At the end of 2011, Li Jie and his friends prepared to establish Shanghai Jinjie Washing Co., Ltd. in partnership.Like most first-time entrepreneurs, the ambitious Li Jie was hit hard by reality.Li Jie said with a wry smile: "When I first selected the factory site, in order to save money, I rented a small warehouse as a washing factory, but I didn't consider the problem of insufficient power and water supply around, which resulted in the factory running completely. I can’t get up.” In the end, Li Jie had to give up his first factory.

(End of this chapter)