" Distributors who are still stubbornly clinging to traditional concepts and refusing to change are like Nokia in its day. " When the first iPhone appeared, Nokia thought it was sturdy. When the first Android phone appeared, Nokia still thought it was durable. If the arrival of the first iPhone and Android phones was just a knife waved in front of Nokia, two years later, Nokia truly realized that no matter how "durable" it was, it couldn't withstand the despair of being beaten. In the face of wave after wave of new retail harvesting, distributors have shifted from initial panic to eventual numbness and adaptation. Their mindset that their offline business is "tough enough" is just like Nokia's back then. Digitalization of the FMCG Industry: The Core Link Is Forgotten Over the past year, New Distribution has visited many distributors and found that traditional distributors generally share a common trait: they are highly execution-oriented and universally hardworking. In industry parlance, they "get up earlier than chickens and sleep later than ghosts." But behind this excessive diligence, there is always a hint of anxiety, or to put it directly, the most intuitive feeling New Distribution gets is confusion after numbness. From the earliest hypermarket entries to the rise of B2C e-commerce, to the emergence of B2B e-commerce that openly threatened to eliminate distributors, and more recently the popularity of video e-commerce and community group buying, it seems all new retail revolutions always point their spears at distributors. So why have distributors, who have long played a crucial role in the supply chain by providing capital advances, warehousing, logistics distribution, market distribution, and services between upstream and downstream, become the target of public criticism? Some say that at the root, times have changed and the dividends are gone. Wrong. Only roles are achieved within an era; no role creates an era. Dividends come every year, but from different sources. Only opportunities that are seized can be judged as dividends. The essence is that whether for an industry or the entire distribution supply chain, the core link connecting downstream retail ports with upstream production sources is the channel. But now the entire chain is facing an awkward situation—upstream large merchants or brand procurement have already achieved digitalization, and some large downstream retail chains have also achieved digitalization, leaving the middlemen in the "sandwich" position awkwardly stuck in between. If the most core link in the entire distribution supply chain—the channel—has not achieved digitalization, then when we talk about digitalization of the entire FMCG industry, is it brand digitalization or store digitalization? In other words, why are distributors repeatedly pushed to the forefront of revolution? Because distributors are too fragile in the digitalization process. Their understanding remains at a very shallow level. Most distributor bosses think that implementing a salesperson's store visit tool or an accountant's bookkeeping tool constitutes digitalization. But if a distributor's sales process and warehousing and logistics processes are not digitalized, and the largest costs still remain on personnel, warehouses, vehicles, and inventory, then your so-called digitalization is merely marginal digitalization. Digitalization Implementation for Distributors: Great Potential Recently, while attending the "Ascend and Attack" FMCG Industry Digital Intelligence Forum hosted by Zhoupu Data, New Distribution interviewed Mr. Miao Jiangbo, founder of Zhoupu Data, to get his third-party perspective on the digital development of distributor businesses. Mr. Miao Jiangbo stated in the interview: " Distributors now face a new business environment. Upstream, they can no longer rely on a single brand to do good business as before. More often, they need to consider product portfolio logic, dynamically replace individual SKUs, and adjust product combinations in a timely manner; Downstream, channels are becoming more diverse and segmented. If you cannot manage customers by tier, cannot distinguish which are important profit contributors and focus on maintaining them, problems will also arise; Internally, with refined personnel management, originally family businesses where employees were all relatives, as the proportion of externally hired staff gradually increases, how to manage behavior is still a stage of exploration for most distributor bosses. " Founded in 2016, Zhoupu Data is a company dedicated to achieving business digitalization for distributors. Earlier this year, despite the downturn in the service industry, it completed a B-round financing of over 100 million yuan. When Zhoupu was first established, it had only a few people. Now it has grown to over a thousand. The core founding team is impressive, with all three members graduating from Tsinghua University. Founder Miao Jiangbo graduated from Tsinghua University and CMU, and before founding Zhoupu Data, he worked at Facebook and Microsoft for a long time. With such high education and prestigious backgrounds, why choose to devote themselves to the SaaS service industry for distributors? Mr. Miao Jiangbo believes: First, in the future, data intelligence will definitely make a big breakthrough. This does not refer to another breakthrough in original algorithms or principles, but rather data intelligence is moving toward a socialized, systematic commercial implementation process. In the digitalization process, starting from a segmented industry makes implementation more feasible because all customers and data are of the same type. If you deduce decision scenarios from a result, they are also consistent. If you don't start from a segmented industry, you will eventually turn data intelligence into a very superficial level of data visualization and toolization, which is insufficient to help businesspeople make decisions. The FMCG industry, from international to livelihood, and considering China's current urban-rural structure and population composition, the offline track of FMCG remains very important, with a huge volume and relatively low informatization. It involves supply chain optimization at more than one level. Therefore, this is an area where data intelligence can generate huge efficiency improvements based on digitalization. Additionally, why ultimately target distributor digitalization? In Miao Jiangbo's view, the "SaaS-ification" opportunity for distributors has three layers: First, after all this talk about enterprise digitalization, channel digitalization is still an "incremental market." Many people think that distributor digitalization is just switching from the original system to a new one. In fact, such desktop-centric systems mostly remain at a shallow level used by clerks and finance, or as a tool for bosses to check accounts monthly or annually. Current SaaS solutions encompass the entire business process. The depth of use differs, and the business support it brings is also different. Second, the SaaS industry itself is also facing the issue of SaaS digitalization. Originally, SaaS was just a process tool. Now, an intelligent component is gradually being added, using data methods to help distributor bosses make decision recommendations. Third, vertical industry SaaS inevitably faces the issue of upstream and downstream extension. Because the customer base of vertical industry SaaS is actually weaving a network, with both upstream and downstream, possibly many shared upstream and downstream entities. In such a woven SaaS network, the imagination space for extending upstream and downstream is enormous. Tools vs. Solutions The current business environment is changing rapidly. Comparing 10 years ago with 15 years ago, perhaps the environment hasn't changed much. But now, things are changing every year, every month, even every day, with new business models emerging endlessly. Therefore, bosses' management should keep pace with the times and not lag behind at all. From refined personnel process management to tiered management of downstream channels, to diversified brand portfolios, if you cannot use good digital thinking to operate and manage, you will become increasingly disconnected from this era. This is the biggest problem distributors face now. What distributors need now is a complete set of solutions, not just a marginal digitalization tool. A single product or simple tool is insufficient to meet the challenges brought by digital transformation. Distributors are shifting from single result management to overall operational process management. Through good process management, they achieve good results, or they can deduce the process from results and then influence or adjust the process. Therefore, as a leading comprehensive digital solution provider for the FMCG supply chain, Zhoupu Data has established a Customer Capability Growth Center, consisting of four centers: Education and Training, Case Study, Knowledge Dissemination, and Industry Exchange, hoping to address the root causes from thinking and methodology: 1. Education and Training Center Through extensive education and training, including courses on growth strategy and tactics, leadership and team building, digital operation and management, and general economics and management, combined with customized training like the "President Training Camp" based on market case studies, it aims to enhance the multi-dimensional capabilities of Chinese FMCG operators. 2. Case Study Center By establishing a professional-level distributor case library, collaborating with well-known university business schools and economic management experts, and through extensive customer visits, it extracts successful experiences from customers, explores how to do distribution well in the new era, and shares successful experiences on how to help stores with sales promotion. Ultimately, it hopes to build a vast distributor case library. 3. Knowledge Dissemination Center Through field visits to outstanding distributors nationwide, carefully selecting successful samples of operators, and with the support of authoritative domestic institutions, it hopes to regularly publish professional results such as "The Success Code of FMCG Distributors: From Cases to Methods" and the quarterly "Precision Sales" magazine. Through such publications and media, it shares the successful business wisdom of excellent distributors. 4. Industry Exchange Center By establishing the "Jixinghui" Distributor Club, leveraging high-end resources such as national leading professional lecturers, large and medium-sized enterprises, and university-level associations, it carries out targeted activities like enterprise management and market improvement training, practical case sharing, and excellent enterprise study tours and mutual visits. Together, they aim to create an "achievement and growth" platform for ascension, allowing distributor friends to have more offline exchange and learning opportunities. When core elements and target customers of distributors are changing rapidly, using past experience and thinking to respond to these changes is no longer sufficient. In the entire Chinese FMCG landscape, without business digitalization of the distributor link, the digitalization of the entire supply chain is impossible, let alone the improvement of overall industry efficiency. Channel digitalization, we hope to see the digitalization of core businesses in core links, not just marginal digitalization limited to an external service tool or a financial system. At the same time, we also hope that the digitalization reform will ultimately subtly bring some standards to the entire industry, leading other distributors to follow such standard actions, rather than just meeting an enterprise's operational needs. Similar to today's Toutiao system, which can efficiently distribute content and precisely match audience profiles, we also look forward to the FMCG industry reaching this stage, better achieving precise "goods-store matching." Review: Asher -END- Are you "watching" me?