6.3 billion yuan into Yonghui Supermarket, got 29.4% of the shares, sat on the throne of Yonghui Supermarket's largest shareholder, and Ye Guofu, the founder of MINISO, became the "king of retail" of Xinke.
It's very domineering leakage.
Some investors expressed their incomprehension and did not understand why they entered the supermarket industry at this time, and Ye Guofu immediately held a conference call:
"Yonghui's price is the lowest point now, and many people can't understand it, so I think this is the best opportunity."
To put it bluntly, it is:
On the track of retail, listen to me and follow me.
Ye Guofu also further elaborated on the reason for the acquisition, that is, he took a fancy to Fat Donglai's imagination space after the transformation of Yonghui Supermarket.
In the past, based on its own business pressure, Yonghui Supermarket turned to Fat Donglai for help with a strong desire to survive, and many of its stores have achieved great success after Fat Donglai helped the explosion.
And this has become the key motivation for Ye Guofu to bet on Yonghui Supermarket.
"In the past, Yonghui's attempts to build community stores, green label stores, membership stores, and super species failed because the direction was wrong; Now Fat Donglai's adjustment is effective. ”
Through offline experience and data confirmation, many practitioners have realized that Yonghui Supermarket, with the help of Fat Donglai, will be able to successfully transform, further meet customers' yearning for a better life, embark on the right track of China's retail, and become a world-class retail enterprise on a par with Sam's and Costco.
Yes, for Ye Guofu, in addition to the strategic intention, there is another layer of important significance, that is, in retail, the battle between its route and the Internet giants, more directly, is in the new retail confrontation advocated by Ma Yun, this time, Ye Guofu completely defeated Ma Yun and won a big victory.
Don't listen to Jack Ma's "flickering"
Around 2016, a person named "Guangzhou Afu" twice took the entire page headlines of well-known newspapers, just to shout to Ma Yun, the business godfather at that time-
Remember the promise made four years ago? If you admit defeat, Beijing Lao Wang's 100 million, I'll help you give!
Just these simple two sentences, with the signature of "Guangzhou Afu", are very eye-catching.
It turned out that in 2012, at a public event, Wang Jianlin and Ma Yun made a bet -
10 years later, if e-commerce accounts for 50% of China's retail market share, Wang Jianlin will give Ma Yun 100 million; If it doesn't arrive, Ma Yun will give Wang Jianlin 100 million.
The background of Wang Jianlin and Jack Ma's gambling game is the competition between online and offline in the retail market. Behind the "Guangzhou Afu" vest, it is Ye Guofu, the founder of MINISO and an entrepreneur rooted in the offline.
This can be seen as a large-scale marketing, but what is more important for Ye Guofu is to overturn Jack Ma's new retail concept.
In 2016, Jack Ma first proposed the concept of new retail at the Apsara Conference, which triggered a strong shock and follow-up in the market.
Ma Yun believes that there will be no online and offline distinction in the future, and traditional e-commerce will be replaced by new retail in the future. Subsequently, Hema was born as a "new species" in the retail industry, and at the same time, Alibaba bought RT-Mart for 22.4 billion, becoming the experimental field of Alibaba's new retail. Subsequently, Suning proposed "smart retail", JD.com proposed "unbounded retail", and continued to increase its holdings in Yonghui supermarket.
It seems that since Jack Ma's "new retail" was proposed, major Internet manufacturers have to go deep into the offline and use the so-called Internet thinking and Internet methodology to transform offline retail and affect the future development of the retail industry.
In the game, Ye Guofu clearly knows that this is not the way for Chinese retail.
For example, at the 2018 (17th) Annual Meeting of Chinese Business Leaders, Ye Guofu believes that retail is divided into the first half and the second half, the first half is called the channel is king, and the second half of retail is the king of products.
For example, in an interview, commenting on Ma Yun's new retail concept, Ye Guofu said that this is Ma Yun helping Ali pull business, and new retail is not online + offline as Ma Yun said.
and so on, it is obvious that in the eyes of Ye Guofu, the e-commerce giants represented by Ma Yun have not played a positive role in traditional retail.
The "King of Retail" was born
Ye Guofu personally proved with his actions that Ma Yun's new retail is not as expected, and I, Ye Guofu, are on the right path.
In the past few years, everyone has said that consumption is weak and the retail market is having a hard time. However, MINISO has soared all the way in performance, and the profits are also very considerable.
According to MINISO's 2023 financial report, the annual revenue for the year exceeded 13.8 billion, a year-on-year increase of nearly 40%, and the adjusted net profit was about 2.36 billion, a year-on-year increase of 110%.
This trend also continued into the first half of this year.
According to its 2024 semi-annual report, in the first half of this year, MINISO's revenue increased by 25% year-on-year to 7.76 billion yuan, with a gross profit margin of 43.7%, an increase of 4.1 percentage points over the same period last year and a record high. Under the non-standard, the adjusted net profit was 1.24 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 18%. In terms of new stores, the number of stores of MINISO Group exceeded 7,000, with a net increase of 502 stores within half a year, and the expansion trend is very rapid.
In terms of market capitalization, it has also soared, and since its listing on the Hong Kong stock market, the market value has doubled from HK$17 billion to about HK$40 billion currently.
In terms of the new retail wave brought by Alibaba, on the one hand, it is Ali itself, RT-Mart has closed stores one after another in recent years, and the loss in fiscal year 2024 is as high as 1.668 billion yuan. At the same time, with Alibaba's strategic focus on AI + e-commerce, the strategic weight of new retail has declined significantly.
On the other hand, it is a sharp change in the pattern of the supermarket industry.
In August 2015, JD.com invested 4.3 billion yuan in Yonghui Supermarket, holding 10% of the equity of Yonghui Supermarket, and the two sides hope to strengthen cooperation in the field of supply chain management and O2O through this way.
In the following years, JD.com increased its holdings in Yonghui Supermarket many times, and Tencent also invested heavily in Yonghui Supermarket.
In fact, after JD.com's shareholding, Yonghui Supermarket entered a period of rapid development, with performance and market value continuing to rise until it reached its peak in 2020, with annual revenue approaching the 100 billion mark, ranking firmly in the "first fresh stock" throne, covering more than 530 cities across the country, ranking second in the top 100 domestic supermarkets, second only to Wal-Mart, with unlimited scenery.
But then, like most supermarkets, Yonghui Supermarket has also faced great challenges in recent years. Since April this year, Fat Donglai has accepted the invitation to carry out adjustment and reform guidance for many domestic supermarket enterprises, and Yonghui Supermarket is one of them.
Before deciding to acquire the shares of Yonghui Supermarket, Ye Guofu had visited the Yonghui Supermarket stores supported by Fat Donglai many times, and he saw the huge potential of Yonghui Supermarket: Yonghui Supermarket under the guidance of the Fat Donglai model may be able to return to the peak of the retail industry and even lead China's retail to a new future.
In contrast, there is a clear conclusion about which is right and which is wrong.
Now, MINISO is "doing big things in a muffled voice" and swallowing Yonghui Supermarket, the head big brother of the retail industry; Ye Guofu, who firmly believes in the offline, has completed the transcendence of Ma Yun, the godfather of e-commerce, and by the way, he also helped Liu Qiangdong solve a lot of problems from the deep set of Yonghui.
It can be seen that the two dimensions of the current consumer market, namely optional consumption and mandatory consumption, are also the direction and guidance for MINISO Group to carry out its own structure construction and further strategic layout.
At the same time, Yonghui Supermarket, which features fresh retail, is based on the domestic market and creates a Chinese Sam in the Fat Donglai model, providing the whole people with the characteristic "must-choose" products to maintain their daily lives, and also making the offline layout of MINISO more perfect.
This innovative combination is expected to build a retail giant that integrates "mandatory + optional consumption" and covers "China + global market", and will also become a strong support for MINISO Group to cope with uncertainty and business risks through the economic cycle.
Ye Guofu has always been turning his ambitions into reality, and he is walking on the road of retail in a down-to-earth manner. LatePost once commented on him in an exclusive interview in 2022: "He is good at seeing big opportunities and mobilizing big resources, he knows his own shortcomings, and he also understands the limitations of the times." He has no inertia, and always leaves the past behind to build a new self, which requires courage. ”
Eight years have passed, and Ye Guofu has confirmed again and again that he not only has courage, but also pattern, responsibility, determination and courage, vision and patience.
Ma Yun withdrew from the rivers and lakes, the myth of new retail has long been dimmed, the popularity of e-commerce is declining, the momentum of offline flag hunting is surging, and the great era of Ye Guofu, the "king of retail" of Xinke, is coming.