On October 24th, recently, Watsons officially announced its presence in the hungry platform, and the two sides reached a deep cross-platform cooperation. At present, Watson’s nearly 1600 stores are on the platform of hungry, covering 1,700 kinds of Watsons products such as beauty care, daily emergency, and toiletries, all of which can achieve 1 hour “lightning delivery.”
According to the “Electronic Business Daily”, in March of this year, Watsons and Hungry have been preparing for cooperation. In the middle and late July, some Watsons stores in Guangzhou began to pilot. After more than one month of exploration and operation, the transaction volume in September increased more than the previous month. 115%. It can be seen that entering the hungry delivery platform will bring new growth potential for Watsons.
According to public information, in 1989, Watsons officially entered the Chinese mainland market. Since 2005, Watson has opened the pace of rapid expansion. In 2016, Watsons added 446 new stores in the mainland, with a total of 2,929 stores. The growth rate of performance has shown negative growth for the first time. This slowdown has been going on for three years. From 2013 to 2016, Watson’s mainland China market growth rate fell from 23%, 14%, 9% to -3.82%. According to the interim financial report for 2017, as of June 30, 2017, Watson’s China revenue was approximately RMB 9.046 billion, a decrease of 6.2% year-on-year. Watsons was shrouded in the haze of declining performance and had to accelerate its transformation in order to save itself.
Regarding the decline in Watson’s performance in recent years, many analyses attributed it to the golden time of missing online development. According to public information, the online transaction scale of beauty products has increased from 38.4 billion yuan in 2011 to 176.7 billion yuan in 2015. It is expected that the scale will reach 10 times that of 2011 by 2018, and the penetration rate of online channels will reach 43.6%. Here, Watsons is still fascinated by increasing the number of stores to expand the scale effect.
Watsons also has insight into the lack of online layout. The new head of the company, Gao Hongda, has publicly stated to the media that Watsons will strengthen its online business development of the self-owned E-Commerce platform lettuce app in the Chinese mainland market, and hopes to reverse the store of the Watsons line through the positioning service of the lettuce app. drainage. Obviously, Watson’s choice and hungry cooperation to launch the “Lightning Send” service has also accelerated the consideration of online short-board.
In fact, this is not the first time that Watsons has attempted to explore the offline retail distribution of beauty products in a form of sale. As early as the end of 2015, it was engaged in offline distribution cooperation with Baidu takeaway in Beishangguang. However, this cooperation with Baidu Takeaway did not allow Watsons to achieve the expected results in sales. At the same time, Baidu take-out was also hungry because of the decline in performance, brain drain and other reasons.
Of course, the cooperation with Baidu’s takeaway is not smooth, and does not mean that Watson’s attempt failed. It is reported that Watsons and Hunger will start in-depth cooperation. In June 2018, Watsons and Hungry have docked the platform systems of both parties, and opened up online and offline integrated intelligent systems such as order push, logistics status and inventory data. . After the data is opened, it will effectively improve the efficiency of order picking and picking and packaging, and relying on the customer interconnection strategy, it will also broaden the online channels of Watsons. However, it remains to be seen whether such an attempt will bring about an improvement in Watson’s own performance.
After realizing that the traditional one-stop retail store could not meet the new consumer groups, Watsons took strategic changes to transform new retail and integrate online and offline development. This cooperation with Hunger is also an attempt during the transition period. However, the transformation of new retail is not simply to move the offline mode to the online, how to attract new consumers, how to do online interaction, how to transform online and offline, these need a professional team to operate. Wanting to drain the store through a convenient shopping experience, Watson’s obvious experience is not enough. Watsons still has a long way to go to get online and offline retail.