99% of investors don't understand the lead position

At the end of June, the two representatives of the pre-position model, Ding Dong Buy food and daily fresh, have been listed, but from the data disclosed in the prospectus, there is still a long way to go before full profit.

In the first quarter of 2021, Ding Dong Maicai had a net loss of 1.38 billion yuan and a loss of 610 million yuan, and the net loss rate of Ding Dong Maicai and Daily Maixian were both above 35%.

The pre-warehouse model is a new model born in 2015, and different from the O2O business model with the Internet, the pre-warehouse is more like a logistics solution to reduce losses and transportation costs at first, but it is targeted at the needs of instant delivery and distribution to the home, thus stimulating greater energy.

Early strength players have daily fresh and U shopkeeper, but the latter fell in the expansion of the way, Ding dong buy food is a rising star. The front-loading model has been optimized by several companies to become what it is today.

The new model tests the vision of investors, especially in the wave of fresh electricity business closures from 2015 to 2017, the market has debated more than fresh electricity business. For a long time, the capital's opinions on several companies diverged widely, with hesitant investors worrying about the future and committed investors betting themselves on the risk.

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In the early stage of the birth of the pre-position model, Daily fresh and U manager are the most powerful two, Daily fresh in Beijing, U manager in Shanghai, with the strongest consumption power of the first-tier cities as the base, to explore the new business model.

At that time, the pre-position model was not mature, the founders were feeling the stones across the river stage, and investors were more difficult to have unique insights. They decided to invest, first of all, is optimistic about the fresh track, followed by the quality of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial teams.

Xu Zheng, the founder of Daily Youxian, has spent ten years in Lenovo and has experience in retail and product operation management with excellent performance. In 2012, Xu Zheng became a senior executive of Jiawo Group responsible for the fruit division, and he came with his partner for many years, Zeng Bin, Zeng Bin was a member of the 300 employees of Ali Head.

Xu Zheng and Zeng Bin are familiar with all aspects of fruit, they soon realized that the post-80, post-90 crowd is becoming the new consumer main body, which will be an important opportunity for fresh electricity suppliers, so in the second half of 2014, 33-year-old Xu Zheng led 18 employees in Wangjing an apartment to set up daily fresh.

At the beginning of 2015, Peng Zhijian of Tencent investment met Xu Zheng, at that time, the daily fresh has not done the pre-warehouse, but only through SF Express logistics to do the next day. Fresh electricity suppliers were faced with high cold chain costs, high operating costs (30~50 yuan/single), large losses (average loss rate of about 10%), low customer unit price and low pain points, Tencent investment founder Peng Zhijian has been cautious to wait and see, no investment.

Daily fresh for a period of time, found that the cost of SF's cold chain logistics is too high, and the loss is large, encountered the platform to do activity orders surge, but also often burst the warehouse, the user has been delayed to receive the goods, went to the industrial and commercial Bureau to complain. As a last resort, they plan to set up their own logistics.

The Daily Fresh team discovered a shift in people's consumption habits at that time: going to the store became home, and planning became instant. They decided to adopt the cold chain logistics model of "sorting center + community micro warehouse" to be closer to the user and do timely delivery. But execution costs money.

At this time, Peng Zhijian has some understanding of the daily Youxian team, and in the process of getting along with Xu Zheng, he was gradually moved by the vision and ability of the young entrepreneur, so Tencent invested in the Daily Youxian 10 million US dollars A round of financing, which can be said to be a complete bet.

In May 2015, Daily Fresh built the industry's first warehouse in Wangjing, serving the surrounding radius of three kilometers, opening up a new fresh model. Tencent, an investor, uses big data to locate warehouses for the daily best fresh and to help with localized operations.

Three months later, another pre-position mode of fresh electricity supplier U shopkeeper also obtained financing, the investor is Xu Xin. The two founders of the company, Wang Haihui and Zhu Pengcheng, were executives of the No. 1 store, responsible for the back-end supply chain and front-end business of the No. 1 store respectively. Yihaodian was once one of the earliest "online supermarkets" in China, and was later acquired by Walmart and included in Jingdong's territory. After the No. 1 store business was taken over by Walmart, Wang Haihui and Zhu Pengcheng moved the idea of entrepreneurship.

In June 2015, Xu Xin wanted to dig wish Pengcheng to do an executive in a invested enterprise of today's capital, but wish Pengcheng wanted to start a business, Xu Xin readily invested in him. Wish Pengcheng hope to take six to eight million dollars, Xu Xinyi waved to ten million dollars. This is similar to the situation when Xu Xin invested in Jingdong in 2006, Liu Qiangdong felt that $2 million was enough, Xu Xin felt that it was not enough, and gave $10 million.