The time was ripe, and Wang Xing made a decisive move.

Meituan Little Elephant Supermarket will open offline stores

Recently, Meituan and JD.com have had a war of words over the takeaway business, which has attracted a lot of netizens to eat melons.

When everyone also focused on the field of food delivery, Meituan quietly launched an offensive on another track, this time doing itOffline supermarkets。

Recently, there has been market news,Meituan Elephant Supermarket restarted its offline business。 In terms of store type, it was a benchmark at firstHema has a community store brand "Hema NB", and recently, a large store model similar to "Hema Fresh" has also been considered。 At present, the business is still in a high level of secrecy within Meituan.

Meituan's Little Elephant Supermarket was renamed from "Meituan Grocery Shopping", which mainly provides community residents with the fastest 30-minute delivery service.

When there is no news of doing offline supermarkets, Little Elephant Supermarket adoptsFront-loading modeIn simple terms, it's Community WeekA warehouse is set up near a location close to the consumer's place of residence, such as a border or city center, so that fast delivery can be realized, usually within 1 hours or less.

The front-end warehouse model is the secret weapon of Little Elephant Supermarket to be able to deliver orders to consumers instantly.

Now it seems that Meituan Elephant Supermarket is not satisfied with only doing online business, but also opening physical stores to benchmark Hema.

So, what is the form of the big store model of "Hema NB" and "Hema Fresh" learned by Little Elephant Supermarket?

First of all, "Hema NB", Hema NB is a hard discount store brand under Freshippo, which is mainly opened around the community to serve the daily shopping needs of surrounding residents. More importantly, it emphasizes "low prices every day, explosive models", and its own brands account for a certain proportion.

This means that if Little Elephant Supermarket wants to learn Hema NB, it needs to make surePrices are attractive, and costs are controlled while maintaining quality。

According to 36 Krypton learned from a former employee of Little Elephant Supermarket, Hema NB's own brand accounts for a high proportion and has stronger bargaining power in the supply chain, and its supply chain is actually not inferior to Hema stores, which is relatively speaking, which is the disadvantage of Little Elephant.

At present, Meituan is still in a state of vacillation for the Hema NB store model. According to an employee of Little Elephant Supermarket, the Hema NB customer base is too "heavy", and Little Elephant Supermarket hopes to stagger the customer base with it, and some of the stores with good locations in NB have better business, and those with bad locations are still losing money.

At present, Meituan plans to benchmark Hema Xiansheng first, focusing on high-end customer groups.

It is understood that Hema Xiansheng is the main store type of Hema and adopts the model of "warehouse and store integration", which breaks the form of separation of warehouses and stores in traditional retailThe warehouse and the store are combined into oneto realize warehousing, sales, distribution and other multi-functional integration.

In other words, consumers can either buy directly in the store, or place an order through an online platform and enjoy the service of home delivery or in-store pickup.

The reason why Meituan started with the high customer group is that the high customer group is relatively less price sensitive and pays more attention to quality and service, which provides Meituan with greater profit margins and brand premium opportunities.

On the contrary, although the sinking market is vast, the competition is also extremely fierce, and the profit margin is relatively low.

Meituan's entry into the mid-to-high-end market can avoid the red sea competition in some low-end markets and achieve differentiated development. When Meituan further consolidates and expands its influence in the high-customer market, it will be easier to attack the sinking market in the future.

So, can Little Elephant Supermarket successfully open the offline market?For now, there may be a lot of uncertainty. After all, this is not the first time that Meituan has tried to explore offline physical stores, as early as 7/0, Meituan launched the "Little Elephant Fresh" physical store, and as early as 0/0, Meituan opened a fresh retail test store "Zhangyu Fresh" in the Wangjing area of Beijing.

In 50 years, Zhangyu Fresh was upgraded to Little Elephant Fresh, located in Fangzhuang Times Life Plaza, Beijing, integrating fresh food, catering, e-commerce and instant delivery. At that time, "Little Elephant Fresh" also had the goal of opening 0 stores in 0 years and 0 stores in 0 years.

However, the expansion of baby elephant fresh food has been stymied.It opened 7 stores in Beijing, Wuxi, Changzhou and other cities, but eventually closed all of them.After that, Meituan adjusted its strategy and switched to the front-end warehouse model, launching Meituan Grocery in 2019, and at the same time, Little Elephant Fresh was also integrated into Meituan's grocery business.

Fresh e-commerce is an asset-heavy model. When Meituan opened its own physical fresh store, it did not have the corresponding conditions or comprehensive consideration, and failure was inevitable.

Now that Meituan has entered the game again, perhaps because it believes that the conditions are ripe and it needs to expand more business and market space.

Meituan, JD Seven Fresh and Hema competed, and the new retail melee restarted

This time, Meituan's offline business has entered the stage of intensive development.

不仅在战略层面的谋划，相关招聘岗位已经开启。有市场消息称，小象超市目前正在为线下业务招聘项目工程经理，计划首批先在北京、杭州、广州和深圳开设门店，并力争在今年5月份迎来首家店铺的开业。

When Meituan was still in the planning stage, JD.com had already landed and taken the lead in achieving some results.JD.com's offline business is "JD Seven Fresh", which is positioned as an online and offline integrated self-operated fresh supermarket. Since its establishment in 2017, JD Seven Fresh has been regarded as JD's version of "Hema Horse".

Jingdong Seven Fresh Supermarket has lost in the fierce market competition, and has successively closed stores in non-core areas such as Changsha and Xi'an in 2022 years, shrinking its layout in second-tier cities, and has maintained a small-scale state since then.

However, JD.com has not given up on exploring offline retail business. Until 6/0, Jingdong Group began to set up an "innovative retail department", announcing the integration of seven fresh, spelling and other businesses into independent business units, which means that JD re-layout the offline retail market, determined to rejuvenate seven fresh supermarkets through innovation and integration.

经过后续的调整，在商品结构、服务质量等方面都进行了全面升级，七鲜超市的客流量有了明显提升。去年10月，七鲜超市在上海开设了首家门店——上海荟聚店，并开始试营业。在试营业的前三天，上海荟聚店的日均客流量超过了1万人次。

While operating offline physical stores, Seven Fresh Supermarket began to explore the front-end warehouse model to benchmark Meituan's Little Elephant Supermarket。去年9月，“七鲜”在北京启动了首个前置仓的运营，并密集开展地推拉新活动抢用户。

Jingdong Seven Fresh front warehouse

At present, the business of JD Seven Fresh Supermarket is mainly focused on Beijing and Tianjin, and intends to accelerate the layout of warehouse stores. It is reported that Jingdong plans to add 30 warehouse stores in Tianjin in the first half of this year, and after this layout, the number of stores in Tianjin will reach at least 0.

今年3月份，京东APP首页生活服务专区的“京东买菜”入口已更名为“京东七鲜”。京东七鲜和美团买菜相互融合，显然可以进一步加快京东前置仓业务的发展。

According to this series of actions, it can be seen that JD.com plans to promote the development of front-end warehouse business and offline physical stores at the same time.

Looking at Freshippo, Freshippo's new retail business has been in a state of loss for a long time, until it began to turn around against the wind last year and successfully turned losses into profits。

At the end of last year, Yan Xiaolei, the newly appointed CEO of Freshippo, disclosed in a letter to all employees that Hema made an overall profit for 50 consecutive months last year, and achieved double-digit growth, with the number of customers increasing by more than 0%.

In terms of newly opened stores, Hema Fresh opened 50 new stores in 0 years, covering 0 cities, and the number of stores opened hit a new high in the past five years. With this wave of expansion, by the end of 0 years, the total number of Hema Fresh stores in the country has been close to 0, and its business coverage has also expanded to 0 cities.

An internal letter released by Yan Xiaolei, the new CEO of Freshippo

The success of Hema is not accidental, Yan Xiaolei revealed the secret of Hema in an internal letter - in the past nine months, Hema has carried out comprehensive and in-depth reforms around the three core strategies of "returning to user value, focusing on development direction, and promoting organizational construction".

On this basis,The development direction of Hema focuses on the two core business formats of Hema Fresh and Hema NB.

Then again, Hema has broken the tight spell of new retail that is difficult to make profits, and has tapped new growth possibilities, and Meituan will not let go of this cake.

Considering Meituan's Little Elephant Supermarket, the target is the above two core formats of Freshippo. It is conceivable that the two sides will have a fierce competition in new retail.