Pre-position includes

Since the end of 2019, Ding Dong Maicai has surpassed Daily Premium fresh in monthly revenue. During the Spring Festival, Ding Dong Maicai has added more than 40,000 new users every day, and the unit price of customers once reached 70 yuan, almost double before, and even the monthly revenue of February alone in 2020 exceeded 1.2 billion yuan. The monthly re-purchase rate has also continued to increase, surpassing 40% by August 2020.

Taking this opportunity, Ding Dong bought vegetables out of the Yangtze River Delta, has entered Beijing, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Hebei, Zhejiang, Anhui, Sichuan and other important cities and provinces, only in November 2020 within a month, nearly 10 new cities opened, the speed is amazing.

03

The pre-position model is still not fully profitable, and on the way to continue to optimize the model, Daily fresh and Ding Dong Buy food are moving towards a different future.

As the pre-warehouse fresh platform accounts for only 0.67% of fresh retail, the scale is too small, and the upstream supply chain lacks bargaining power, and the gross profit is lower. Today, the gross profit margin of the box fresh fresh with a higher customer price is more than 20%, the community group purchase with a lower customer price buys more food, and the gross profit margin of more than 50%, while the Dingdong Buy food and daily fresh gross profit margin of the middle price is only about 19%, and the daily fresh gross profit margin of the first quarter of this year even fell to 12% (Daily fresh may not count the platform discount into the marketing and sales costs, Instead, it is directly deducted when calculating gross profit, resulting in high unit price but low gross profit, and Dingdong mainly buys vegetables, and the tax is lower).

However, the biggest reason is the high performance cost caused by the pre-position mode. Performance costs mainly include the wages of outsourced riders and workers, storage rental and transportation costs of goods from the central warehouse to the front warehouse. The performance cost of community group purchase may be as little as 1 yuan, and the pre-position mode will require dozens of dollars. However, the high performance cost is not due to the early investment but to the later operating results.

In 2020, the number of pre-warehouse of Ding Dong Buy vegetables is 950, and the daily excellent fresh food is only 631, resulting in the overall performance cost of Ding Dong Buy vegetables is much higher than the daily excellent fresh food. However, according to the prospectus, the performance cost of each order in 2020 is about 20.4 yuan, and the daily excellent fresh is 19.6 yuan, which is not much different from the level.

The annual order volume of daily fresh is only more than 80 million, while Ding Dong Buy food is nearly 200 million, which is more than twice that of daily fresh. The improvement of the performance cost is significant, and the performance cost of workers' wages, advance warehouse rent and transportation costs can be diluted rapidly with the increase of the performance cost. The orders of a single warehouse are basically fixed in the users within a few kilometers around, so the re-purchase rate of users is the core of reducing the performance cost.

However, the unit price of Ding Dong food buyers is only 65.7 yuan, and the daily fresh is 94.6 yuan, deducting incentives, taxes and other payments, the income of each of the two companies is about 57 yuan and 76.3 yuan, a difference of nearly 20 yuan. This is also an important reason for Ding Dong to buy food losses are much higher than the daily good fresh.

Therefore, if the pre-position mode wants to achieve profit, there are two indicators that need to be optimized, namely, the re-purchase rate and the customer unit price.

Daily fresh and Ding dong buy food differentiation occurred.

At first, the two positioning will be slightly different, Ding dong buy vegetables to start, daily fresh to start with fruit, customer unit price is higher. In the future development, they each have a choice.

Daily Good fresh focuses on increasing the price of customers. In 2019, Daily Fresh began to transform and reduce its scale. That year, Daily Fresh laid more than 1,500 advance warehouses in 22 cities, and now only 631 advance warehouses are distributed in 16 cities. At the same time, Daily fresh also joined the cloud supermarket (next day) plate, increasing household appliances, 3C digital, watch accessories and other higher price categories.

Ding Dong buy food is focused on improving the re-purchase rate. Ding Dong Maicai started with only 12 warehouses in Shanghai, and the number has grown to more than 1,000 in June this year, covering 33 cities. Liang Changlin stressed the importance of re-purchase rate every time he was interviewed, and did not value the customer unit price. In his view, the customer unit price of about 60 yuan meets the actual consumption demand of most families.

At this stage, the two almost completely overlap in the category, but the future differentiation will intensify, and may achieve misplaced competition. Regardless of the choice, the front-loading mode still needs to burn money.