At the end of April this year, the TPY Center in Shanghai's Xujiahui business district opened.
The predecessor of TPY Center is the second phase of Pacific Digital Plaza, which used to be the business card of the National Computer City.
The decline and rebirth of Pacific Digital Plaza Phase II is the epitome of the rise and fall of the computer city.
Who killed Computer City?
Computer City, also known as Electronic City and Digital City, mainly sells 3C products.
Many people's first computer, first MP3, first digital camera, first printer were bought here.
In addition to sales, the computer city also provides after-sales service, which is equivalent to a "one-stop" electronic products market.
For today's people, the computer city is quite unfamiliar.
Twenty years ago, the computer city was the standard in major cities and a local landmark business center.
One of the representatives is Beijing's Hailong Electronic City.
Located in Zhongguancun, Beijing, Hailong Electronic City opened on December 18, 1999.
The lively scene of the opening of Hailong Building on December 18, 1999
At that time, computers were still a novelty.
As soon as Hailong Electronic City, which gathers all kinds of electronic products, opened, it attracted a large number of people and created a record of more than 50,000 visitors per day.
According to the data, from the opening to December 2006, in the seven years, Hailong Electronic City received more than 70 million customers, with an average annual passenger flow of more than 10 million.
The vice president of Microsoft came to Hailong, and after seeing the surging crowd, he sighed:
I believe it's the busiest store in the world.
Hairong Electronic City is very popular, and has also been designated as a "tourism designated unit" by the Beijing Municipal Tourism Bureau.
Huge customer flow, bringing rising sales.
At its peak, the annual sales of Hailong Electronic City were as high as 2 billion yuan.
The rent of the counter in the electronic city has also risen, and the rent of a counter costs 800,000 or 900,000 yuan.
In Shanghai, the second phase of Pacific Digital in Xujiahui was also in the limelight.
Pacific Digital Phase II
Opened in 2001, this computer city had more than 400 merchants in its heyday, and merchants could earn up to 800,000-900,000 yuan a month.
In addition, Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen, Huahai 3C in Nanjing, Huaqiang Electronic World in Shijiazhuang, and Huangtang Computer City in Huizhou are all computer cities that flourished.
Because of the agglomeration of computer cities, many cities have also given birth to electronic streets.
"There is Zhongguancun in the north and Zhujiang Road in the south", which refers to the electronic street gathered because of the computer city, and the electronic distribution market that arose because of the electronic street.
Nanjing Zhujiang Road alone has gathered more than 1,500 electronic enterprises, becoming a nationally renowned IT business center.
It was a boom.
It's all about the past.
Computer City, has declined.
Hailong Electronic City announced the closure of business
At the beginning of 2015, the second phase of Shanghai Pacific Digital Plaza announced its closure.
In April 2015, Shijiazhuang Huaqiang Electronic World closed.
In July 2016, Beijing Hailong Electronic City announced that it would cease operations.
……
Today, very few people go to the computer city to buy things anymore.
Who killed Computer City?
One is the decline of computer building.
Building a computer is a word that many people are unfamiliar with.
Today, most of the computers we buy are branded computers.
But 20 years ago, many people chose to build a computer.
The so-called PC building, also known as an assembly machine or DIY, is to select CPU, motherboard, memory, hard disk, chassis, graphics card, monitor and other accessories by yourself and assemble them into a computer.
Building a computer requires careful selection and comparison of hardware, which brings business to the computer city with everything.
Recommended PC building configuration and price in the computer city
The reason why I want to build a machine is because the price of the brand machine at that time was higher, and it was far less cost-effective than assembling it myself.
Normally, the price of building a PC is half lower than that of a brand machine with the same configuration.
With the increase in income and the popularization of computer prices, the price advantage of building PCs is no longer there, and it is slowly declining.
The business of the computer city was also deserted.
The second is the impact of e-commerce.
E-commerce sells 3C, which has a natural advantage: 3C products are basically standardized products.
As long as the price is right, the variety is rich, and the after-sales service is guaranteed, it can attract a large number of consumers.
In fact, the e-commerce platform has greatly impacted the computer city with its transparent and cheap price advantage.
Interestingly, Liu Qiangdong started a business in Zhongguancun in his early years.
In the early years, Jingdong was located in Zhongguancun
Looking back on his early entry into Zhongguancun in 1998, Liu Qiangdong sighed:
In 1998, we were faced with "giants" in the optical storage and storage industry such as Huitian Huaguang, and the transaction volume of these "giants" was at least tens of millions of yuan a year.
In 2001, Jingdong also grew into a "giant" and became the leading agent of optical and magnetic products in Zhongguancun.
Unexpectedly, 3 years later, JD.com entered e-commerce.
What's even more unexpected is that JD.com, which grew up in the computer city, changed the life of the computer city.
The third is to reap the consequences.
Today, some computer malls are still open.
If you go shopping and just walk to the entrance of the mall, there is a high probability that you will be surrounded by a group of people asking if you want to buy a computer.
These people are not merchants, but shopping guides, which can also be called scalpers.
The task of the shopping guide is to bring consumers to specific merchants by forceful pull or coaxing, and earn commissions returned by merchants.
Why do merchants in Computer City need to hire shopping guides?
This is because the customer flow of the computer city is not as good as before, and merchants can only rely on shopping guides to solicit customers.
This has two consequences:
First, in order to attract customers, shopping guides do everything they can, bringing consumers a very poor shopping experience.
The second is that the wool is out of the sheep, and the shopping guide increases the cost, resulting in the price of goods in the computer city being significantly higher than that of the e-commerce platform.
In order to make profits, many merchants in the computer city adopt methods such as stealing concepts, replacing old with new, confusing fake with real, and bundling sales.
These behaviors have harmed the interests of consumers, and more and more consumers have turned away from the computer city.
The banner of "Strict Investigation and Punishment of Commercial Fraud" at the entrance of Hailong Electronic City
There are fewer and fewer customers, and the merchants in the computer city are more dependent on shopping guides, and the means of "stealing customers" are becoming more and more ruthless.
Eventually, a vicious circle is formed.
The market supervision department and the management of the computer city have severely cracked down on commercial fraud, but the vicious circle is not broken, and the phenomenon of "stealing customers" is difficult to eliminate.
The industry has changed dramatically, competitors are impacting, and it is difficult to return to their own accumulation, and it is inevitable that the computer city will not be implemented.
Computer City is not only the business card of the city, but also the memory of a generation.
The decline is unbearable.
The computer city did not sit still, some upgraded and continued to stick to it, and some were reborn, transformed and upgraded.
Taking Pacific Digital Plaza Phase II as an example, the original site was demolished and rebuilt to create a new commercial center.
The second phase of the redeveloped Pacific Digital Plaza in 2024 is compared with 2015
In the view of the correct solution, whether it is sticking to it or transforming it, the computer city must follow two principles:
The first is to find the industrial coordinates.
Some people say that Hailong Electronic City has directly stimulated the development of the entire Zhongguancun IT industry chain, surrounding commerce, regional economy and science and technology park.
It is true that as the business card of Zhongguancun, the contribution of Hailong Electronic City to Zhongguancun and the IT industry cannot be erased.
However, it should be known that Hailong Electronic City is also a beneficiary of the development of Zhongguancun's IT industry.
From the perspective of the larger pattern, the computer city has found the coordinate of "distribution center" in the IT industry ecology and has been able to prosper.
In other words, the decline of the computer city is largely due to the replacement of coordinates by competitors such as e-commerce.
From this point of view, the computer city, which has been abandoned by the times and the industry, has no value to adhere to.
In the same way, the success of the transformation of the computer city also depends on whether it can find new coordinates in the new industry.
For example, Hailong Electronic City, the direction of transformation is to build an "intelligent hardware innovation center", hoping to find coordinates in the industrial ecology of innovation and entrepreneurship in Zhongguancun.
Another example is Nanjing's Zhujiang Road, which has evolved from an electronic technology street to Chuangye Street and then to the city's Silicon Alley, which is also at the same frequency as the development momentum conversion of the entire city of Nanjing.
Nanjing Zhujiang Road City Silicon Alley
Only when the computer city finds new coordinates and takes root in the industry can it "spit out new shoots when the dead leaves fall".
The second is to return to business common sense.
What are the basic common sense of business?
It's integrity.
In today's computer city, fraud is rampant, and you almost forget that you are based on integrity.
At the beginning of the opening of Hailong Electronic City, it played the slogan of "double warranty and first compensation".
This provision is earlier than the national computer three-guarantee policy.
In order to pay compensation in advance, Hailong Electronic City paid out of its own pocket to deal with customer complaints.
Hailong Electronic City in the early years
Statistics at that time showed that the complaint rate of Hailong Electronic City was less than 1%, and the customer satisfaction rate of complaint resolution reached 98%.
It is by virtue of integrity management that Hailong Electronic City has become the preferred store for consumers in the north to buy IT products.
Unfortunately, many of today's computer cities have lost this common sense.
In the view of the Correct Solution Bureau, no matter where the computer city transforms, the common sense of honest management cannot be lost.
In 2011, when the Pacific Digital City in Zhongguancun, Beijing, closed down, Liu Qiangdong wrote a paragraph on Weibo:
Write to the time of the closure of Pacific Digital City: I was chatting with some friends last night, and a classmate said congratulations on killing Pacific Digital City, shocked! In fact, it wasn't JD.com who fired your life, but yourselves! Ask yourself, how many things have you done to steal beams and change pillars? How many parallel fakes were sold? How many customers did you beat? It's karma!
Putting aside the grievances between Jingdong and the computer city, Liu Qiangdong's words really hit the nail on the head.
For the computer city, if you don't do it, you may not die, and if you do, you will die.